Video game development, which once required a corporation with lots of money, can now be done by anybody, provided he or she possesses the dedication and skills needed to turn dreams into reality. Here in the triangle, game development has become a cottage industry, with more than 30 gaming-related companies calling the area home. These companies include industry giants like Epic Games and Ubisoft’s Red Storm Entertainment, as well as smaller start-ups like Hazardous Software, Radioactive Software and Joystick Labs. The triangle has become the top place to develop interactive entertainment on the East Coast, due to low tax rates, the presence of numerous already-established technology companies and numerous other reasons.

Another important advantage to making games here is that Raleigh is home to N.C. State, which produces highly trained game creation talent on a yearly basis. Every year, multiple students from NCSU graduate and enter the games industry, a fact that is partly impacted by the school’s excellent reputation in the field. In a recent Gamepro study, State was ranked among the top 15 schools for game development in the nation, a fact the staff and students of the Digital Games Research Center, NCSU’s focal point for gaming research and teaching, are very proud of.

The DGRC is composed of students and professors from various disciplines who have come together to accomplish a shared goal. Their mission—to take gaming and game development technologies to the next level, in both the entertainment and serious gaming spaces. The two largest research groups within the DGRC are the Liquid Narrative and Intellimedia groups, each of which is currently working on multiple projects.

The Liquid Narrative group is led by R. Michael Young, an associate professor of computer science. According to Young, the group’s mission is to enable computers to tell more compelling stories.

“We’re building computational models of stories,” Young said. “We look at how people understand stories, and then turn those models around to generate stories people can interact with.”

To hear Young tell it, it almost sounds simple, but the process of accurately modeling all of the intricacies of storytelling is a complicated one requiring a wide range of expertise.

“Our work is multidisciplinary,” said Young. “It draws on many fields, including narrative theory, linguistics, cognitive theory, cinematography, etc. We borrow from these disciplines to build computer models of how a narrative works.”

In order to achieve their goals, the DGRC includes professors from many departments, including computer science, education, design, engineering and humanities and social sciences. But each student within the Liquid Narrative Group is also responsible for a different aspect of the storytelling process.

Stephan Ware and Matthew Fendt, both Ph.D. students in computer science, work under Young in the Liquid Narrative group, and have a unique take on why the work they do is so challenging.

“We use a specific family of algorithms to develop stories,” Ware said. “The trouble is that these algorithms were not originally intended to write stories. Their output is very effective and fast, but not particularly interesting. Our research is on how to put the interesting back in.”

“And it’s hard to formalize what makes a story interesting,” Fendt said. “So we’re taking work from narratology and integrating it.”

Although Ware and Fendt agree on the aspects of a good story, each works on a different aspect of the actual project. Ware’s research is on conflict.

“Narratologists agree that conflict is a key component of story,” Ware said.

Fendt on the other hand is tasked with creating believable characters through a process called “Intention revision,” which involves characters whose plans change over the course of a story.

Charles Bevan, another Ph.D. student in computer science within the Liquid Narrative group, is researching yet another important aspect of the storytelling process. It is called “planned visualization,” and involves computer programs called “planners.”  Planners are the final product of Ware and Fendt’s work, and each one dictates a set of steps for a story to follow to get from beginning to end. The problem is that these steps are written in computer code that the average person cannot comprehend.

“I’m trying to make it human readable,” Bevan said, “to show lists and Java codes so average, non-programmers can understand. Stephan [Ware]’s concept planner? I’m working on ways to visualize the plans that come out.”

In total, the Liquid Narrative group is comprised of between eight and nine graduate students at any time, a few post-docs and Young, and their ongoing mission is to fundamentally change the way people view narrative in video games.

But whereas the Liquid Narrative group’s research into story is particularly well-suited for games intended to entertain their audiences, the Intellimedia group is focused on the field of serious games, or in other words, games to facilitate learning and productivity in a number of real-world fields.

According to their website, Intellimedia’s students and professors are “dedicated to bringing about dramatic improvements in human-computer interaction and communication.” Their projects involve computer-aided learning in a classroom setting, and include a science-teaching tool called Crystal Island and an English writing tool called Narrative Theater.

The Crystal Island project has yielded two games so far, both of which are aimed toward science students. The games are called Crystal Island: Uncharted Discovery and Crystal Island: Outbreak, and are designed for science students in the fifth and eighth grades respectively.

“Crystal Island is a game-based learning environment,” said Jonathan Rowe, a graduate student in computer science who has worked on both versions of the game. “Students interact with a rich, immersive game environment which is provided by underlying game engines that we create.”

The subject matter for both games is comparable to what the students would be learning through conventional methods.

“In the 8th grade version,” Rowe said, “students try to solve a science mystery that is based around microbiology—the same content they would get in their classes.”

The goal of Crystal Island is simple: to make learning more effective and fun.

“Compared to PowerPoint or a work sheet, Crystal Island is a pretty big improvement in terms of being engaging,” Rowe said.

But science isn’t the only subject Intellimedia’s games are designed to make more engaging. They are also hard at work on another project, “Narrative Theater,” which is aimed at 6th grade writers. Alok Baikadi, a graduate student in computer science, is one of the leads on the project.

“Narrative Theater is a creativity support tool to help young writers becomes more creative,” Baikadi said, “by letting them see their stories visualized in another way, hopefully sparking revision and idea generation.”

Both the Narrative Theater and Crystal Island projects are designed in conjunction with teachers and students from local schools, so the team can receive feedback from the people who will actually be using their products someday. 

“We get feedback on content and whether or not the students view themselves as better writers,” Baikadi said. “We also do analysis on whether the writers become more creative as a result.”

In fact, it was access to resources like these that made Baikadi’s decision to come to State for grad school an easy one.

“[State] has one of the better departments in the country, and is one of the few places where you can do this kind of work,” Baikadi said. “Plus there’s a nice community here, with game developers in the area as well as research professors and area schools.”

Jim Thomas, a post-doctoral research fellow working in the DGRC, is also a strong proponent of the department. He even expressed disappointment about NCSU’s top-15 status.

“It’s a total rip off,” Thomas said. “We’re number one!”

After a few moments, Thomas went on to explain.

“It’s great to be on a national stage, which brings more awareness of all the great things we have going on here,” Thomas said.

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Graduate students in the Digital Games Research Center collaborate on ideas and brainstorm for their projects. Photo by Sarah Tudor.