Petri Nets for Representing Story Plots in Serious Games
Cyril Brom, Tom ́ aÿ Holan, Adam Abonyi, Leo Galambo · 2010
This article describes a novel technique for representing plots of stories in computer games and for unfolding stories according to these plots. The technique is based on Petri Nets. Its main advantages are that 1) it copes well with branching stories, which 2) can evolve in parallel in 3) large virtual worlds. While the issue of branching stories has been already studied in literature, the latter two issues have not been sufficiently addressed yet. The technique has been evaluated on a prototype implementation, and subsequently used in two serious games Europe 2045 and Karo. Europe 2045 is an on-line multi-player strategy game aimed at education of high-school students in economics, politics, and media studies, which is presently evaluated at high-schools in the Czech Republic. Karo is a storytelling simulation that is intended to engage students in decision making concerning social relations, and work on it still continues. While Europe 2045 simulates Europe in a coarse-grained way, Karo features a detailed virtual world inhabited by virtual humans. Besides presenting the Petri Nets modifications used in the prototype and in both of the games, the article details several scenarios from the games, and on a general level, it discusses the strengths and weaknesses of implementation of Petri Nets in virtual storytelling applications.