Story and Simulations for Serious Games Tales from the Trenches [Paperback]

How to create a simulation where participants have a sense of freedom and personal control while still maintaining the structure necessary for an effective story is a difficult task indeed. This book examines how to create an engaging, effective story (necessary to teach participants), while relating practical considerations of building a simulation. It also looks at stories as classic ways of teaching and gathering knowledge and considers other theories of interactive narrative design such as synthetic story creation and management and participant-generated story experiences. It also discusses enabling technologies in artificial intelligence, synthetic characters design and development, speech recognition technology, 3D modelling, and the future of story-driven games. Story Driven Simulations reviews the existing efforts in this field as well as focusing on the recent efforts of Paramount Pictures and The Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California, where this expert author team created successful simulations for the U.S. Army, Department of Defense, as well as other educational simulations.INTRODUCTION:(Dramatic example of the benefits of story driven simulations from the recent work Paramount has done for the United States Army); PART ONE: STORIES;1. The Value of Stories
(What is a story, how is it different from an events list and what benefits does it bring to simulations);2.Back-story and Free-play
(The current story-game model);3. Poetry and Hollywood(Classic story structures from Aristotle to Darryl F. Zanick); 4. War Stories and Parables (Stories and their use in learning); 5.Tacit Knowledge and Expectations (The theory behind story-based learning); PART TWO: CHARACTERS; 6. Characters (The importance of characters in stories and their value to simulations);7. Creating Multi-Dimensional Characters (Techniques for making sure characters have dimension, including the use of character bibles, and l¨