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Abstract: "This article discusses the application of an Alexandrian pattern language to the design of interactive systems. It grew out of an University course titled A Pattern Approach to Action Game Design, which was offered as an elective in the Creative Technologies program at Auckland University of Technology, NZ, in 2011. We sketch out the idea of design patterns and describe our experiences with the process of using them for designing oldschool action games, that is, finding patterns, making a language, using it for creating several game designs and realizing one of these designs collaboratively. We discuss the concept of the course and present our pattern language and the game we made. While the language is arguably more like a patchy pattern collection, the various game designs quite loose and the realized game unfinished, the process was challenging and intense, and offered students a new perspective on design. In the spirit of design patterns, we only did what the task at hand required, not artificial exercises. We attempted to connect theory and practice in a natural, direct way as we presented, discussed and used everything we did in order to continue our journey. Our course was not aimed at fixed or frozen products, but on a process that is constantly in flux through collaboration by people who interact and share a common pattern language, use, test, revise and refine it while moving on."

Abstract: "As computational capability continues to increase, the tools available to designers of digital games have become more robust, allowing high fidelity graphics and sound to become common, and resulting in a market saturated with kinetic-based games. However, consumers and educators are eschewing such games for more complex and immersive stories, the creation of which has proven a difficult mountain for designers to climb. A central reason is that story-immersive games rely on dialogue between the player character (PC) and nonplayer characters (NPCs), the writing and coding of which is time consuming and inefficient. This paper documents the author's experiences with complex, branching dialogue systems, and examines the possibility of system automation through natural language processing (NLP)."