Developing Natural Language Enabled Games in SCXML

Abstract

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a standard in the pipeline – called SCXML – that may turn out to be very suitable for the design and implementation of games, in particular games featuring (possibly multimodal) natural language dialogue. We see three main reasons why SCXML may be a good fit for the game industry: 1) SCXML is all about statecharts – a powerful extension of finite-state machines – and we argue that statecharts has the right kind of expressivity for game design and de-velopment, 2) SCXML is an XML dialect (soon to be) endorsed by the W3C, and will thus become a part of a web infrastructure comprising speech technology and telephony, as well as other useful technologies for building games of certain genres, and 3) SCXML is designed for extensibility and it appears that it would be fairly straightforward – and very worthwhile – to build a game oriented extension (“profile”) around the SCXML core. The paper also presents an experimental implementation of SCXML, accessible from a user-friendly web-interface.