Using a controlled natural language for specifying the narratives of serious games

Abstract

Creating serious games calls for a multidisciplinary design team, including game developers, subject-matter experts, pedagogical experts, and narrative designers. However, such multidisciplinary teams often experience communication and collaboration problems due to the different terminologies, backgrounds and concerns of the people involved. To overcome these problems, we propose the use of a Controlled Natural Language (CNL) in combination with a graphical notation for modeling game narratives. The use of a CNL provides an easy human-readable, yet flexible and expressive way to specify story-lines. In addition, a CNL provides the possibility for automatically processing story-lines and generating code. As such, incorporating CNL in the design process also contributes to shortening the development time.