A Reusable Scripting Engine for Automating Cinematics and Cut-Scenes in Video Games

Storytelling can play a critical role in the success of modern video games. Unfortunately, it can often be quite difficult for storytellers to directly craft content for games, typically requiring them to work with programmers to implement story elements. This needlessly complicates the development process, straining scarce resources while potentially hampering creativity and story quality at the same time. As a result, supports and tools are necessary to enable storytellers to generate story content for games directly, with minimal programming or programmer assistance required, if any. This paper introduces a Reusable Scripting Engine to automate the generation of cinematics and cut-scenes in video games. This approach allows storytellers to provide their stories in a well-defined, structured format, which is then interpreted by our engine, along with supplemental graphic and audio content, to produce an animated presentation of the story in an automated fashion. This paper presents the design of our Reusable Scripting Engine, and discusses a prototype implementation of this design, as well as initial experiences with using this prototype system to date

Modding the Apocalypse: (Re)Making Videogames as Post-Structuralist Free Play

This dissertation is about seeing videogames, and videogame design, through the lens of Gregory Ulmer ™s electracy apparatus theory. Videogame modding is emphasized an electrate approach to intervening in existing media. Mods have the potential to make potent rhetorical arguments, but they are little-understood in the field of rhet-comp, and there are numerous obstacles to carving a space for them in academic curricula; nevertheless, they are an increasingly common form of participatory engagement that make use of a broad digital skillset. Modders fit into Gregory Ulmer ™s electracy apparatus as egents ”agents of change in the Internet age ”and their playful appropriation of objects from various archives resembles the electrate genre of MyStory (personal alternative-history). By positioning modding as electrate composition praxis, a new gateway for academic game study and production is opened, one where play is integral to the process of knowledge formation. Fallout 4 (2016) serves as an example of a moddable game whose rhetorical affordances can be adapted to craft MyStories and MEmorials

A Demonstration of ScriptEase Ambient and PC-Interactive Behavior Generation for Computer Role-Playing Games

ScriptEase is a visual tool that enables game designers to create complex interactive stories for computer role-playing games, without programming. In particular, ScriptEase automatically generates the scripting code for ambient and PC-interactive non-player character (NPC) behaviors from a set of behavior patterns. Without ScriptEase, a game designer would have to write scripting code manually to specify NPC behaviors. This demonstration describes the steps of generating complex and non-repetitive ambient and PC-interactive behavior scripts using generative behavior patterns with ScriptEase. We show how ambient behavior patterns are used to re-generate and improve the behaviors of all ambient NPCs in the Prelude module of the BioWare Corporation's Neverwinter Nights official campaign. We also demonstrate PC-interactive behaviors for a guard NPC in a custom Neverwinter Nights game module. With ScriptEase behavior patterns, game designers can easily and quickly populate a story with an engaging group of NPCs