Authoring and Re-Authoring Processes for Educational Adventure Games
Key: MGS12-2
Author: Florian Mehm, Stefan Göbel, Ralf Steinmetz
Date: October 2012
Kind: In proceedings
Publisher: Academic Conferences Limited
Book title: Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Games Based Learning
Keywords: Authoring Tool, Digital Educational Game, Adventure Game
Abstract: Educational Adventure Games attempt to combine positive features of the adventure game genre such as captivating story lines, interesting puzzles and character interactions with educational content. While this approach is promising, analyses of the production processes of typical educational adventure games show that the required interaction between technicians and domain experts introduces delays and higher costs. In order to alleviate this problem, authoring tools unifying these actual processes and practices can be created. This paper describes the application of the Serious Game authoring tool StoryTec to educational adventure games and the insights gained during re-authoring of an existing commercial educational adventure game. The main contribution of this paper is the demonstration of the elaborated authoring concept by re-authoring an existing educational adventure game, showing the resulting increase in adaptability, extensibility, maintainability as well as the provided level of user support for the groups involved in the creation of such a game. This includes the mapping of previously less structured game content into the structures provided by StoryTec and the application of interaction templates to create the original gameplay found in the game. Thereby, this allows not only extensions to existing games, but to create new educational adventure games with similar designs at lower costs and higher impact at the same time. A focus-group evaluation of the authoring tool carried out with game designers and developers partly involved in the original development of the re-authored game shows the interest in and the feasibility of such an approach.
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