Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
When playing the game, you frequently fall victim to a murderer, virtually.
What follows is your chance to revise the story by virtually traveling backwards
in time. In the virtual past, players have opportunities to change conditions such
that the constraints of being murdered in the virtual present are no longer valid.
The part of the storyboard highlighted by the underlying box indicates the key
idea of the game which occurs frequently when playing.
Fig. 2.
Cutout of some storyboard for exploratory learning by playing a digital game
The sample storyboard on display in figure 2 is adapted from [16]. As in
the example before, the nodes are composite and may be refined by sub-graph
replacements. Designers may also decide to consider some node as atomic, i.e.,
not being subject to further refinement. In the example above, one might decide
that 'game play' does not need any further specification.
There are branching points and loops. The first branching point indicates
alternative offers, whereas the second one explicates some parallelism of actions.
Interested readers are invited to consult [15] for the basics of the present
storyboarding approach and [6], [12], [16], [18], and [21], for instance, for varying
application studies. The graph-theoretic background of the formalisms has been
developed in much detail in [4] and [13] using the concept of pin graphs according
to [10]. Hierarchically structured graphs define families of potential expansions
which may be seen as formal languages of graphs. Involved results about the
complexity of those languages [19] are not seen as negative. In contrast, they
characterize the enormous expressiveness of the approach.
This paper does not aim at a comprehensive introduction into storyboarding.
Instead, chunks of storyboards are used to wrap, so to speak, certain memes of
game play, of didactics, of interaction design, and the like as proposed in [12].
For illustration, one may see the highlighted chunk of the storyboard of figure 1
as the representation of some meme of game design and game playing.
So, are digitally represented storyboards and constituents of storyboards meme
media? Maybe they are. But in contrast to IntelligentPad, to IntelligentBox (see
[30] for both), and to the contemporary Webble technology [22], they are much less
operational. Those storyboards allow for direct manipulation [27], but are still far
from direct execution [9].
