Pedagogical Challenges in Social Physics Authoring.

Authoring interactive narrative content for AI engines can be a difficult task, and as our work on collaborative social-physics based projects like VESPACE and Vox Populi: The Ustradian Games has revealed, there exist numerous key difficulties in training content authors. Despite the prevalence of these setbacks over years of training new authors, no comprehensive survey, analysis, or codification of pedagogical challenges has heretofore been completed. In order to formalize this knowledge, we have conducted an analysis of experiential results from previous workshops and collaborations as well as from written participant feedback and reflections. Our primary research objective has been to analyze these pedagogical challenges and their origins, including conflicting paradigms, unfamiliarity with computer science concepts, difficulty visualizing and managing authored content, and unresponsive feedback loops. Lastly, we introduce a design and prototype of a tutorial game which will train users in the authoring of content for the Ensemble social physics engine. The game's design is a response to the challenges revealed in our analysis and will be one of open-ended freedom of play, leveraging the playful experimentation of the engine and guiding players to an intuitive understanding of the engine's underlying mechanisms as they create and explore.