Join Tokens: A Language Mechanism for Interactive Game Programming

In the video game software industry, scripting languages have been utilized to alleviate the complexity of game development. Many of the complexty resides in managing multiple concurrent activity of game characters, especially in action games. However, current scripting languages seems to lack support for interactions among multiple concurrent activities in a satedependent manner. To overcome the problem, we are proposing “join token” mechanism, in which states of game characters can be expressed as tokens and interactions can be described as handlers specifying multiple tokens. For evaluation purpose, we have developed a game scripting language “Mogemoge,” and have written several example games in that language. In this paper, we explain our join token mechanism, design and implementation of Mogemoge, and evaluation through an example demo game.