Peter Gorniak, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is probably the first person who used NWN as a research platform. He originally conceived it as Situated Speech Understanding (you can read his thesis proposal here) but eventually turned it into Affordance-Based Concept [ABC] (you can read his thesis here). Some of his other writing (involving NWN) can be found here, and here. More information about “Understanding Situated Speech in Computer Games” can be found here, which has a video on how he converted NWN into a speech parser - where he instructed NPC to perform certain actions by speech.
The Bioware Wednesday newsletter profiled Peter Gorniak back in 2005:
Peter: I realized that the game [Neverwinter Nights] provided a great environment in which to study some aspects of human behaviour and a large base of already active players happy to provide data. By that time, I had already poked around with NeverEdit, so I knew that at least reading all the file formats would be possible. I proposed it, and proceeded to start decoding the client-server protocol byte by byte because I need to record everything that goes on in the game. That took some time and it’s still not always perfect, but I get a pretty good transcript of the whole session.
For the next iteration of Bioware games, I really hope you build in some remote logging functionality. I asked BioWare for cooperation so that I wouldn’t have to spend all this time decoding their protocol, but sadly didn’t get a response back then. Otherwise, I use the game pretty much as is, with some restrictions enforced by in-game scripting (for example, in the study I’m currently running one player is not allowed to speak normally).
One other thing that I’ve done is implemented a way to externally drive NPCs within the game. It’s a real hack, but it works surprisingly well (and again, I’m not using this functionality in the study I’m running.) Essentially, I remotely write a database file to the NWN database directory that can be read via the DB commands in NWScript.
The to-be-controlled character has an immense script attached to its heartbeat - so big that the official toolset fails to compile it, but Torlack’s compiler running within neveredit on Mac OS X does just fine. It reads a set of NWScript commands from the database as text, converts their arguments into the correct types, and calls the function as specified. It can even do nested function calls and such. In combination with decoding the client/server protocol, this allows me to have a character that can see everything in the game and can be told to do anything in the game, but has its brain outside of the game.
The Dream-Build-Play contest is certainly a trend indicator. Instead of the “in-house development” model, forward-looking game companies are beginning to encourage outside talents. Game making contests has been around for some time, HiddenAgenda.com, for example, has been running an annual game making contest (prize money: $25 000!) since 2003. [In case you are interested, past winners and their winning "stealth educational" games can be found here.] Other company-specific contests also not unheard of (e.g. Bioware held its first public game modding contest using NWN in 2005).
So Microsoft’s Dream-Build-Play contest is certainly not new. But hey, the prize money is good. XNA is, of course, Microsoft’s certified XBox360 development tool (available for $99 to students). [More information about XNA, can be found on the official site at Microsoft Developers' Network (MSDN), or the Wikipedia site for XNA.] You can also develop with Torque (by GarageGames.com), but you may risk losing out on certain XNA specific capabilities…
If you have been tinkering with XNA or Torque, the following is good news indeed. In the not so distant future we will probably see even more specialized categories: such as educational games, healthcare games… Will there ever be a Halo modding competition?
Microsoft also kicked off the Dream-Build-Play game development contest. Redmond is offering the winner a $10,000 grand prize and the opportunity to be published on Xbox Live Arcade. Dream-Build-Play is open to any user of XNA Game Studio Express, including the GarageGames Torque X platform. The contest ends July 2, 2007, and winners will be announced August 13 at Microsoft Gamefest 2007 in Seattle.
“This is an incentive, especially for amateur developers. Professional developers are lucky to have any idle time,” Cai noted. “However, this is in line Microsoft’s initiative to encourage user participation.”
On June 2, 2005, the 4th International Symposium for Information Design was held at the Stuttgart Media University. It’s theme? Digital Game Based Learning. The full proceeding of the symposium can be downloaded here [link to PDF].
“Digital games are a significant element in the digital media and information society. They influence the development of media technologies as well as interface design, online social interaction and new evaluation approaches. The game industry develops not only products for leisure, but also for work and learning, with many dimensions in the area of social life, knowledge acquisition and application, gaining of soft skills and of other experiences.
Digital games attract researchers from different science fields e.g. sociology, cultural studies, educational theory, psychology, computer science, etc. The Fourth Symposium for Information Design focused on the question of how game based learning environments can motivate and stimulate learners in different situations, and improve learning. It presented didactical and pedagogical issues, as well as actual examples and concrete applications.”
This is a joint project with the European community, ”Special Interest Group for Game-based Learning in Universities and lifElong Learning” (SIG-GLUE).
