Procedural Content Generation in Educational Game Authoring Tools.

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Bibliographic Details
Title:	Procedural Content Generation in Educational Game Authoring Tools.
Authors:	Mehm, Florian¹ Florian.Mehm@httc.de, Hendrich, Alexander² Alexander.Hendrich@googlemail.com, Kauth, Daniel² DanielKauth@gmx.de, Göbel, Stefan² Stefan.Goebel@kom.tu-darmstadt.de, Steinmetz, Ralf² Ralf.Steinmetz@kom.tu-darmstadt.de
Source:	Proceedings of the European Conference on Games Based Learning. 2014, Vol. 1, p380-388. 9p.
Subject Terms:	Educational games, Computer assisted instruction authoring software, Algorithms, Distance education research, Video game development
Abstract:	Many genres of digital educational games require vast amounts of content, including several categories of content such as graphical assets, task pools, or story elements. Contemporary games have taken up the practice of procedural content generation, in which algorithms are partly or fully employed to create content from a set of constraints. This practice facilitates the creation of content, lowering production times and costs and increasing the range of possible gameplay experiences. Authoring tools for games are employed for similar benefits: by creating a tool that allows authors to quickly design and produce games without detailed technical knowledge, the game development process is made more accessible and streamlined. In the work presented here, we analyze the possibilities to allow content generation in authoring tools. The major challenges in this lie in the ways in which authors are presented with the procedural generators. The focus here lies on finding a middle ground between an interesting and useful range of possible outputs and a low complexity for the author. Our approach to procedural content generation in authoring tools relies on a game model that is used to model educational games. This model has been successfully realized in the authoring tool StoryTec for digital educational games. We extended this model to not only allow authoring but also generation of content in a similarly simple way. A survey of the different categories of content and associated content generation methods is included. An overview of the resulting architecture demonstrates how content generation can be introduced both in the authoring tool and the game's runtime environment and which game concepts are realizable in this way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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Database:	Education Research Complete

Description
Abstract:	Many genres of digital educational games require vast amounts of content, including several categories of content such as graphical assets, task pools, or story elements. Contemporary games have taken up the practice of procedural content generation, in which algorithms are partly or fully employed to create content from a set of constraints. This practice facilitates the creation of content, lowering production times and costs and increasing the range of possible gameplay experiences. Authoring tools for games are employed for similar benefits: by creating a tool that allows authors to quickly design and produce games without detailed technical knowledge, the game development process is made more accessible and streamlined. In the work presented here, we analyze the possibilities to allow content generation in authoring tools. The major challenges in this lie in the ways in which authors are presented with the procedural generators. The focus here lies on finding a middle ground between an interesting and useful range of possible outputs and a low complexity for the author. Our approach to procedural content generation in authoring tools relies on a game model that is used to model educational games. This model has been successfully realized in the authoring tool StoryTec for digital educational games. We extended this model to not only allow authoring but also generation of content in a similarly simple way. A survey of the different categories of content and associated content generation methods is included. An overview of the resulting architecture demonstrates how content generation can be introduced both in the authoring tool and the game's runtime environment and which game concepts are realizable in this way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
ISSN:	20490992