in this second Life photograph avatars alpha auer and mosmax hax explore a pose stand that allows users to program poses and run two scripts. one script cycles through the poses, and the other one makes the pose stand invisible/visible.

 

have very little programming experience, but they have the best intuitions for how the game should play. Thus, studios want tools that allow designers, if not actually to program behavior, at least to fine-tune the parameters behind it.

the Role of scripting Languages

second life PhotograPh courtesy of alPha auer and mosmax hax

Many game studios rely on scripting languages to enable gameplay programmers and designers to program parts of their games. These languages allow developers to easily specify how an object or character is supposed to behave, without having to worry about how to integrate this behavior into the game itself. Scripting languages are particularly important for massively multiplayer games where any piece of code must interact with multiple sub-systems, from the application layer to the networking layer to the database.

User-created content is another

reason for games to support scripting. Open-ended virtual worlds such as Second Life have made player scripting a common topic of conversation. Even before that, games had a long tradition of player-developed mods. Given tools—either official or third party—to modify the data files that came with the game, players have been able to create completely new experiences. Generally, modding has been seen as a way to extend the lifespan of older games. In some cases, however, it can create completely new games: the commercially successful Counter-Strike was a player modification of the game HalfLife and relied heavily on scripting features present in its parent game.

Scripting languages allow players to modify game behavior without access to the code base. Just as important, they provide a sandbox that—unlike a traditional programming language— limits the types of behavior the player

can introduce. If the game has a multiplayer component, the game developers do not want players creating scripts to give themselves an undue advantage. Overly powerful scripting languages have facilitated many of the bots— automated players performing repetitive tasks—that currently populate massively multiplayer games. Sandboxing can even be useful in-house. By limiting the types of behaviors that their designers can create, the studios can reduce the number of bugs that they can introduce—bugs that cost valuable time to find and eliminate.

 

the need for Game-specific scripting Languages The foremost criterion for a scripting language is that it should make gameplay development fast and efficient. Often game objects—rocks, plants, or even intelligent characters—share many common attributes. Game script-