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Written with Michael Server, a 26-year veteran of the Lakeville, MN Police Dept. who now lectures on child abuse at St. Mary's University.
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--Recognize abuse
--Interview a child
--Protect yourself
--Avoid legal pitfalls
--Uncover the truth
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A multiple-choice dialogue scenario that branches in hundreds of ways.
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NEWLY-PATENTED AUTHORING TOOL CUTS COSTS OF
BRANCHING DIALOGUE ROLE-PLAY FOR GAMES, TRAINING
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA (February 12, 2008): Social Animals, Inc. announced today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued a utility patent to its founder, Geoffrey Brown, for an authoring tool that creates conversational role-playing courses at a low cost. The software dialogue engine allows writers to create complex multiple-choice "conversation trees" three to four times faster than traditional production methods, with no need for programming skills. These
interactive dialogue scenarios extend for several hundred branching pages, and can be created for five thousand dollars each (for a series, two thousand each).
While games based on the physical world (velocities, trajectories, etc.) have flourished, interpersonal games have lagged behind, especially for face-to-face dialogue-based scenarios. "The audience is much more demanding about interpersonal dialogue," says Brown. "People immediately notice if a character repeats himself, even if the wording is different." The result is that branching dialogue games that consistently make sense are very expensive to write, proof and debug. This newly patented software speeds up the writing process by using a combination of database architecture and psychological principles.
Social Animals, Inc., a Minneapolis-based training startup, has used the authoring tool to create customized games and courses for clients ranging from Clear Channel Radio (Chicago) to the Hennepin-Carver County Workforce Investment Board (Minnesota). The company also sells access to online role-playing courses via Amazon and Paypal on topics ranging from child abuse detection for teachers, to caregiver advocacy for nursing homes and client presentations for ad agency account executives. These courses, including a free demo of the child abuse detection scenario, are available at http://www.hownottotalk.com.
Now that its core software is protected by patent, Social Animals plans to lease it to pilot developers across a range of interactive fields. The company, which is also seeking angel investors and management expertise, has a website at http://www.socialanimals.com.
The Minneapolis-based company was founded in 2000 by Geoffrey Brown, a Yale graduate and veteran advertising and training writer. He was assisted by a dozen Minnesota and California programmers, photographers, designers, project managers and hosting engineers. The company is privately held.
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