The overall aim of the European research project 80Days situated in the field of Technology-enhanced Learning is to combine adaptive learning, Storytelling and gaming technology in order to build intelligent, adaptive and exciting learning environments in the form of Storytelling-based digital educational games (DEGs). This paper presents the major results of the Serious Gaming group at TU Darmstadt achieved in the first development cycle of 80Days: Based on a short introduction in section 1 providing a brief overview of the 80Days approach and key challenges being addressed, section 2 introduces methods and concepts of an adaptive digital storytelling framework and indicates how this contributes to intelligent personalisation and adaptation in DEGs. Section 3 describes practical results in terms of a first technical platform of 80Days integrating an adaptive learning engine, story engine and game engine plus a content repository and StoryTec as authoring environment to create such Story-based DEGs. Section 4 summarizes the current status and main results of the 80Days approach achieved so far including first evaluation feedback, and points out further research and development activities.
80Days1 is a pathbreaking research initiative to explore new frontiers in Digital
Educational Games (DEGs), which combine effective learning with fun and pleasure.
The conceptual and technological basis of the highly interdisciplinary 80Days
approach enforcing cooperative research among cognitive scientists, psychologists,
computer scientists, game technology provider, designers or evaluation experts are
built by the results achieved within ELEKTRA2 [
The main questions tackled within the Fig. 1. Technology-enhanced Learning first project period of 80Days have been “What makes a good, Story-based learning game?” on a fundamental level and, more concrete “How to build such an exciting game?” as well as “How does a story continue at a certain moment during play?”. To answer these questions, the consortium investigated research in adaptive, interactive digital storytelling as well as learning and psychology including competence development.
From a Storytelling perspective, the major challenges we addressed so far concern
a) integration issues, both on a conceptual and technical level, b) the Narrative
Paradox describing the conflict between author and player control [
During the first project year of 80Days, an adaptive storytelling framework has been conceptualized addressing the RTD issues mentioned above. Central aspects include the analysis and use of appropriate story forms, structural story models (serving as the threads of stories) and the conceptualization of Narrative Game-based Learning objects (NGLOBs) as atomic story units to compose such Story-based DEGs.
With respect to macro adaptation and the question how a story continues at a specific moment during play, figure 2 presents the main classes of story forms for games and the pros and cons of its usage for sequencing and macro adaptation in DEGs. The simplest form represents the linear approach: The advantages are that the author has full control of the story and it is quite easy to implement that approach from a game developers perspective. Contrary, the major drawback is the lack of flexibility and possibilities for personalisation and adaptation in the sense of macro adaptivity and sequencing. Branching is a little more complex than the pure linear approach and more expensive in terms of content production, however, there is still full authorial control and a lack of flexibility for macro adaptation.
The non-linear approach is more flexible and provides some space for macro adaptation and sequencing of story units due to the variety of transitions per story unit. Nevertheless, there is a limited possibility to combine and re-use story units in different scenarios, story lines and contexts, for instance different user groups, game lengths or game modes in 80Days.
Within the modular approach, the set of story units might be understood as “a sea“
of story modules, which might be (in principle) freely connected and combined with
each other. This approach builds the basis for emergent narrative Storytelling systems
[
In sum, it is definitely not possible to determine which story form is most appropriate for adaptive, Story based DEGs. Contrary, from our perspective, the challenge is to combine the different forms and find some good balance among linear and modular concepts to provide enough flexibility for macro adaptation and sequencing on the one hand and simultaneously to “guarantee” some suspenseful story based on well-proven and elaborated story structures such as story models used in literature, theatre, TV/film or Story-driven adventure games.
From a top-down perspective, that combination of linear and modular concepts might
result in some guided, but still open and flexible story structure such as the Hero‘s
Journey [
In demonstrator 1 of the 80Days approach being prepared as “early demonstrator” after project month 15, the first part of the Hero‘s Journey (the departure) and a good portion of the middle part (the initiation), have been covered: A cinematic intro has been produced to cover the story start and first steps of the Hero‘s Journey, a tutorial (introducing geography as subject and explaining the gameplay) might be understood as first threshold.
Further, different micro missions (~story units or quests/ level in a typical game)
refer to the dramaturgic function of the road of trials, which represents the modular
part of the story model. This means, (in theory) the players can decide the order of
micro missions on their own, whereby, (in practice) not all sequences (=learning
paths) do make sense. For instance, based on CbKST (Competence-based Knowledge
Space Theory) and underlying skill structures [
The rest of the story model, especially the climax of the story, where the transfer of the moral of the story (“Save the earth!” in the DEG on geography in demonstrator 1 of the 80Days approach) should take place and the third part of the story, the return to the ordinary world, will be tackled within the next project period for the preparation of a second demonstrator version.
From a bottom-up perspective, the question is what makes an atomic story unit combining storytelling, learning and gaming methodologies and how to combine those units in a reasonable sequence.
For that, in a first step we extended our existing model for story objects and conceptualised narrative, game-based learning objects and annotated the story objects of ICML with a triple FD x FL x FG of dramaturgic, learning and gaming functions: A dramaturgy function FD has been introduced in order to indicate which dramaturgic steps (of an underlying story model such as the Hero’s Journey) are fulfilled (by which degree) by a NGLOB; the related skills are covered by a learning function FL and the game modes (referring to different user and player groups) by a gameplay function FG. Further, weight factors wD, wL and wG have been defined to indicate the degree of appropriateness of particular NGLOBs to fulfil a specific dramaturgic function (a concrete step of the Hero’s Journey, e.g. to transport the moral of a story), learning function (e.g. to provide map skills in the subject of geography via specific methodic-didactic concepts and interaction templates) or gameplay function (e.g. to provide as much as possible information for studious gamers or to make a learning situation as exciting as possible to match the needs and expectations of experienced gamers familiar with action games and a high amount of interactivity).
These concepts have been fully implemented in the ICML format and have been taken into account within the development of the first releases of the Story Engine and Story Editor.
Concerning intelligent personalization, adaptation and the re-use of content for different user scenarios and contexts, we have elaborated a set of game modes, which represent different speed versions of the game as well as story pacing mechanisms.
Within a login screen at game start, the users are asked to provide some information about their age, gender, game experience and sensation seeking tendency. Based on that assessed criteria an estimation of the users’ preference to different game modes is undertaken and the user is assigned to one of the user groups related to the game modes “relaxed version”, “driven version” and “fast version”. The different game modes are characterized by different speed versions of the game: For instance, within the relaxed version we provide explorative flying without any time pressure; within the driven version there is some time pressure and a virtual character called “Feon” motivates the player to hurry up at certain moments; the fast version provides a distinct time limit, exciting background music, etc.
From an authoring perspective, the challenging task is to set the story units (i.e. learning and gameplay situations and NGLOBs) in relation to the game modes and to define how a flexible, adaptive NGLOB should be characterized (constitution and behavior during gameplay) for the different game modes respectively player groups.
From a run-time perspective, the story engine first checks which game mode should be applied and then starts to apply all NGLOBs related to those game modes.
The implementation of the framework is based on the results and considerations of
theoretical research as described in section 2 as well as in [
A repository of different objects and information builds the basis of the functions of the three major engines involved in the 80Days framework – the Game Engine (GE), the Story Engine (SE) and the adaptive Learning Engine (LE). These objects are provided in different forms, for example as database tables or as files in the file system. Elements of the repository are the assets used in the game, e.g. UI files or 3D objects. Other central parts are the story, encoded in the ICML format, as well as the Context Database, which provides static information about story and gameplay and which manages dynamic information about the development of the story over time during different playing sessions.
The main engine the user interacts with is the GE, developed by Testaluna s.r.l. based
on the open source Nebula 2 engine and the Managalore framework. The GE handles
gameplay mechanics such as steering a UFO, displays the results of interaction and
abstracts the information about the gameplay into discrete events called game
evidence (as described in [
Game evidence is divulged to both the Story Engine as well as the Learning
Engine. The latter is a further development of the Adaptive Learning Engine
introduced into the ELEKTRA project by the Knowledge and Data Engineering
Group at Trinity College Dublin. For detailed information, see [
The Story Engine is responsible for managing the flow of the story, which can either be on a high level (handling only macro-adaptivity, i.e. the sequencing of large story units) or a fine-grained level (e.g. by managing individual speech acts) for more control. Controlled by the story as described in the corresponding ICML file, the Story Engine reacts to game evidence by evaluating the executable story graph and committing the results to the Game Engine, resulting for example in a change of scenes.
Figure 5 shows a more detailed overview of the interrelation between the Game, Story and Learning Engines. Since the Game and Story Engine are compiled into the same executable and the Story Engine communication components are realized as Managalore-derived classes, the two engines communicate via function calls. The communication between LE and SE is handled via a network protocol since the LE is supplied as a Java application which can run (as “service”) on remote computers.
With respect to the overall aim of cost-effective production of learning games, TUD set a RTD focus on the conceptualisation and development not only of a Story Editor, but a comprehensive Rapid Prototyping authoring environment entitled “StoryTec” to compose 80Days like learning games.
Hereby, similar to the previous INSCAPE project, the principal aim is to enable authors, especially non-programmers, to create individual stories and to bring in interactive elements without programming skills: Different editors are provided enabling non-programmers to compose interactive scenarios or to define rules and conditions which are considered within the unfolding process during run-time in order to determine how a story/educational game continues at a specific moment.
Compared to the previous approach of ELEKTRA, StoryTec improves the maintenance and the direct control of the author. While the framework is more restricted than other solutions with full programming languages, the threshold for non-programmers is intended to be much lower, at the same time providing the user (=author, e.g. a geography teacher) a design space to create and explore/test ideas in.
The graphical user interface (see figure 6) has been designed by TUD in cooperation with httc e.V. as institute for applied science and technology transfer, with direct contact to industry in the field of serious games and DEGs. Based on the different identified potential author groups (game designer, pedagogues and content providers, teachers or technicians/game programmers), the GUI design guidelines are following a mixture between underlying methods and concepts of MS Office products (assuming that e.g. teachers are familiar with that kind of tools) and Adobe’s Creative Suite (providing designers a familiar look and feel).
A comprehensive description of StoryTec and its support for authors (with less or
no programming skills) to create interactive, Story-based DEGs is provided in [
On the theoretical side, the main results achieved so far include an adaptive storytelling framework providing a) NGLOBs as atomic story units to compose Storybased DEGs, b) a structural model combining linear and modular story forms (a modified version of the Hero’s Journey in the case of 80Days) serving as “thread” and c) story pacing mechanisms to personalise and control Story-based DEGs during play taking into account context, player skills and behaviour, game modes etc. in order to decide how a story continues ( sequencing, macro adaptation).
On the practical side, a major portion of the theoretical concepts have been integrated into the early demonstrator version of the 80Days approach: The Story Engine provides interfaces to a Learning Engine and Game Engine; StoryTec as authoring environment enables authors to create and compose “80Days-like” DEGs.
First evaluation studies for the early demonstrator and the DEG on geography confirm the relevance of 80Days’ research activities on intelligent personalisation and adaptation as well as efficient authoring and underline the need to make the DEGs more flexible, pleasurable and adaptive considering the overall context and serving the needs and characteristics of users and their skills and background.
Further RTD activities at TUD will be investigated into the conceptual and technological enhancement of intelligent personalisation and adaptation (optimisation of the Story Engine and underlying mechanisms to control Story-based DEGs) as well as authoring (efficient production; re-use of NGLOBs in different scenarios and contexts plus authoring support for non-programmers to create interactive scenarios). Further, an emphasis will be set on evaluation studies, both to get indicators about the user experience during play (soft factors like motivation, fun, suspense) and usability of the authoring environment StoryTec.
The research and development introduced in this work is funded by the European Commission under the seventh framework programme in the ICT research priority, contract number 215918 (80Days, www.eightydays.eu).