Abstract
Game design is not emotion engineering. The French structuralism's methodology, story-oriented, allows the creation of a minimal structure, fractal, to be developed as IF or a game. Here, in detail, is the making-of two serious game projects. In “Instory,” the narrative is created bottom-up, ruled by the space, an epitome for other cultural heritage works; “PlatoMundi” was prepared top-down, departing from the “Myth of Er,” taking the users through a virtual quest for Justice. At the centre of this structure lies the bifurcation – a place able to support choice or decision proposals. 2D evolves into 3D space-time worlds, and new geographies already invading games. Immersion is fuelled by gadgets and AI to trick the 5 senses. New brain maps alter the relationships between body and mind, and haptic props mismatch AR, MR, and VR places and shapes. DGBL merges with CBTS, useful, but still unreliable. Games cataloguing become sophisticated taxonomies, still without gold standards to tell a good game, or a good story, from a bad one.
TopBackground
My research has been developed in the fields of Literature, Software Programming, Cyber Arts, Artificial Intelligence and lately Cognitive Sciences.
Below are depicted two serious game projects: InStory, coordinated by Nuno Correia, for which I contributed making an interactive narrative; and PlatoMundi, prepared and coordinated by myself with the sponsorship of Rick Blunt. The latter, fashioned from scratch, was presented twice as a European project (2009, 2010), unsuccessfully.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Warping: When there is no perfect coincidence of shapes and places between the real and virtual objects (mismatch), decreasing the manipulation performance during the interaction.
Immersion: The perception of being physically present in a non-physical world, in any virtual reality. This ‘perception’ is fashioned by surrounding the VR system user with images, sounds or other senses stimuli that provide an engrossing total environment. In literary terms equals the position of the «Omnipresent narrator».
Game Bible: A game document or “bible” should cover everything about the game including a full walk-through of all levels with maps and imaging, to an in-depth description of how the game plays. Should register all the steps of the project (work-in-progress) and allow any newcomer to understand or give continuity to the tasks.
Narrative: To rehabilitate the term, currently used to exhaustion and associated with lying: the Narrative is composed of the story – the facts to be told, the events as they occur in chronological order – and discourse/plot – the way the elements are organized and presented to the user/reader.
CBTS: This stands for computer-based training systems.
DGBL: This stands for digital game-based learning.