Using ScriptEase

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Using ScriptEase Neverwinter Nights for
Educational Games
Research Sponsors
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Personnel

• Students and Staff
• Maria Cutumisu (Ph.D. student)
• Curtis Onuczko (M.Sc. Student)
• Jeff Siegel (M.Sc. Student)
• Kevin Waugh (Industrial Internship Student)
• Allan Schumacher (Industrial Internship Student)

• Faculty Members
• Mike Carbonaro (Education)
• Jonathan Schaeffer (CS)
• Duane Szafron (CS)

• Former Students
• James Redford M.Sc. (BioWare Corp.)
• Dominique Parker M.Sc. (Electronic Arts - Canada
  Inc.)

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Goal

• Show how Neverwinter Nights can be used by a
  non-programmer for use in an educational setting.

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Existing Educational Games

• Math Blaster, Reader Rabbit, The Magic School
  Bus, States and Traits
• Teach specific tasks
• Low production cost and quality
• Monotonous Repetition

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Commercial Games

• High production quality
• Visually impressive
• Difficult to use in an educational setting
• Distractions
• Most games dont align with curriculum objectives
• Potential games Civ 3, Role-playing games
• Possible alignment with curriculum objectives
• But difficult to use without costly adaptation

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Adapting Commercial Games

• Use existing game engines and content
• Create extra content and scenarios tailored to
  educational topic
• State-of-the-art CRPGs look promising
• Several have editors for content and scripting

• Neverwinter Nights
• Aurora Toolset
• Morrowind/Oblivion
• Elder Scrolls Construction Set
• Dungeon Siege
• DS Toolkit

These make it possible
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• BUT HARD!

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NWN Adaptations for Education
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Difficult to Adapt

• Difficult to adapt
• Easy to make objects and settings
• Hard to provide meaningful interaction between
  players and game objects
• Need scripts
• Educational adaptors are not programmers

What is the solution?
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Make scripting accessible and reusable across
games
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ScriptEase Educational Example Economics

• NWN can be used to explore economics models
• Create a setting with several shops
• Students interact with merchants, buying and
  selling items
• Learn how the pricing model works through
  interactive immersion

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ScriptEase Educational Example Economics

• Fixed price model
• Price of all items remain fixed
• Prices are identical across all merchants
• Markup model
• Item prices remain fixed
• Each merchant has a different buy/sell price for
  items
• Possible discovery of exploitation

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ScriptEase Educational Example Economics

• Exploitation
• Discount Bob sells a book for 32 gold or buys for
  16 gold
• Exclusive Sal is willing to buy the same book for
  40 gold and sell it for 48
• Students can make a profit by buying from Bob and
  selling to Sal
• Students learn that trading is a viable business

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Exploitation - Demo
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Educational Example Economics

• Supply and Demand model
• Item prices change as merchant supply fluctuates
• Prices increase as supply diminishes
• Prices decrease as supply increases
• Two variations
• Local Buy/selling from a merchant affects only
  this merchants prices
• Global Buying/selling adjusts prices for all
  merchants

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Global Supply Demand - Demo
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Building the Economics game

• An educator needs tools to create the game
• The Aurora toolset is easy to use for
  constructing areas, items, and NPCs
• However, scripting requires programming knowledge

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Sample Script for Economics
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Scripts Supply Demand

• Custom hand written scripts
• 11 Scripts
• 241 Lines of Code

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Scripting Solution ScriptEase

• Replaces manual scripting with higher level
  abstractions
• Game interactions are described as patterns
• Patterns can be customized and adapted for
  specific game scenarios
• Fully adapted patterns can generate scripting
  code

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ScriptEase - Movie
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Extensibility and Reuse

• ScriptEase allows educators to create their own
  patterns
• Educational pattern catalog can be developed over
  time

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Project Information
Over 13000 downloads of ScriptEase to date
http//www.cs.ualberta.ca/script