Player agency in interactive narrative: audience, actor & author

The question motivating this review paper is, how can computer-based interactive narrative be used as a constructivist learn- ing activity? The paper proposes that player agency can be used to link interactive narrative to learner agency in constructivist theory, and to classify approaches to interactive narrative. The traditional question driving research in interactive narrative is, ‘how can an in- teractive narrative deal with a high degree of player agency, while maintaining a coherent and well-formed narrative?’ This question derives from an Aristotelian approach to interactive narrative that, as the question shows, is inherently antagonistic to player agency. Within this approach, player agency must be restricted and manip- ulated to maintain the narrative. Two alternative approaches based on Brecht’s Epic Theatre and Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed are reviewed. If a Boalian approach to interactive narrative is taken the conflict between narrative and player agency dissolves. The question that emerges from this approach is quite different from the traditional question above, and presents a more useful approach to applying in- teractive narrative as a constructivist learning activity

Capturing the Visitor Profile for a Personalized Mobile Museum Experience: an Indirect Approach

An increasing number of museums and cultural institutions around the world use personalized, mostly mobile, museum guides to enhance visitor experiences. However since a typical museum visit may last a few minutes and visitors might only visit once, the personalization processes need to be quick and efficient, ensuring the engagement of the visitor. In this paper we investigate the use of indirect profiling methods through a visitor quiz, in order to provide the visitor with specific museum content. Building on our experience of a first study aimed at the design, implementation and user testing of a short quiz version at the Acropolis Museum, a second parallel study was devised. This paper introduces this research, which collected and analyzed data from two environments: the Acropolis Museum and social media (i.e. Facebook). Key profiling issues are identified, results are presented, and guidelines towards a generalized approach for the profiling needs of cultural institutions are discussed

Towards Intelligent Interactive Theatre: Drama Management as a way of Handling Performance

In this paper, we present a new modality for intelligent interactive narratives within the theatre domain. We discuss the possibilities of using an intelligent agent that serves as a drama manager and as an actor that plays a character within the live theatre experience. We pose a set of research challenges that arise from our analysis towards the implementation of such an agent, as well as potential methodologies as a starting point to bridge the gaps between current literature and the proposed modality.Comment: International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) 201

Innovative integrated architecture for educational games: Challenges and merits

Interactive Narrative in game environments acts as the main catalyst to provide a motivating learning experience. In previous work, we have described how the use of a dual narrative generation technique could help to resolve the conflict between allowing high player student agency and also the track of the learning process. In this paper, we define a novel architecture that assists the dual narrative generation technique to be employed effectively in an adaptive educational game environment. The architecture composes components that individually have shown effectiveness in educational games environments. These components are graph structured narrative, dynamically generated narrative, evolving agents and a student model. An adaptive educational game, AEINS, has been developed to investigate the synergy of the architecture components. AEINS aims to foster character education at 8-12 year old children through the use of various interactive moral dilemmas that attempt the different student\u27s cognitive levels. AEINS was evaluated through a study involved 20 participants who interacted with AEINS on an individual basis

Telling interactive stories: A practice-based investigation into new media interactive storytelling

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Telling Interactive Stories is a practice-based thesis, which theoretically and practically probes the field of digital fictional interactive storytelling. The submission takes the form of the interactive cinema installation Crossed Lines together with a written element of the thesis which interrogates historical, contextual, theoretical, technical and critical aspects of the field of interactive narrative using new media. Crossed Lines is an original fictional interactive AV piece, amalgamating multiform plots, a multi-screen viewing environment, an interactive interface and an interactive story navigation form. The installation tells the stories of nine characters in a way that the viewer can constantly explore and switch between all nine forms, using a telephone keypad and handset as an interface, and can simultaneously observe all characters’ presence between the nine remote locations. Several research methodologies are utilised to analyse and evaluate the installation. Quantitative methodologies include the use of user tracking systems where the computational output of the installation provides measurements and timings of user choices and behaviours. Qualitative methodologies include theoretical and visual analysis, and in depth analysis of user responses using interviews, questionnaires, video recordings and cuttingedge eye-tracking technologies

Giving voice to equitable collaboration in participatory design

An AHRC funded research project titled Experimenting with the Co-experience Environment (June 2005 – June 2006) culminated in a physical environment designed in resonance with a small group of participants. The participants emerged from different disciplines coming together as a group to share their expertise and contribute their knowledge to design. They engaged in storytelling, individual and co-thinking, creating and co-creating, sharing ideas that did not require justification, proposed designs even though most were not designers …and played. The research questioned how a physical environment designed specifically for co-experiencing might contribute to new knowledge in design? Through play and by working in action together the participants demonstrated the potential of a physical co-experience environment to function as a scaffold for inter-disciplinary design thinking,saying, doing and making (Ivey & Sanders 2006). Ultimately the research questioned how this outcome might influence our approach to engaging participants in design research and experimentation

Serious Games to Teach Ethics

In this paper, we are focusing on digital serious games (edugames) and how they can be utilized in teaching in the ethics and citizenship domain. Our aim is to combine narrative techniques with intelligent tutoring techniques in a single model that adopts and based on educational theories and classroom educational strategies. The model has been used to implement an adaptive educational interactive narrative system (AEINS). AEINS is an inquiry based edugame to support teaching ethics. The AEINS version presented in this paper targets students between the age of 8 and 11. The idea is centered around presenting and involving students in different moral dilemmas (called teaching moments) within which the Socratic Method is the used pedagogy in the teaching process. AEINS monitors and analyzes the students actions in order to provide an individualized story-path and an individualized learning process. The student is an active participant in the educational process and is able to interact with the edugame as a first person player. We claim that such interaction can help in developing new or deeper thoughts about different moral situations. Our aim is to contribute to the design of serious games and help raise awareness of ethics and citizenship in children

‘IMPLICIT CREATION’ – NON-PROGRAMMER CONCEPTUAL MODELS FOR AUTHORING IN INTERACTIVE DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) constitutes a research field that emerged from several areas of art, creation and computer science. It inquires technologies and possible artefacts that allow ‘highly-interactive’ experiences of digital worlds with compelling stories. However, the situation for story creators approaching ‘highly-interactive’ storytelling is complex. There is a gap between the available technology, which requires programming and prior knowledge in Artificial Intelligence, and established models of storytelling, which are too linear to have the potential to be highly interactive. This thesis reports on research that lays the ground for bridging this gap, leading to novel creation philosophies in future work. A design research process has been pursued, which centred on the suggestion of conceptual models, explaining a) process structures of interdisciplinary development, b) interactive story structures including the user of the interactive story system, and c) the positioning of human authors within semi-automated creative processes. By means of ‘implicit creation’, storytelling and modelling of simulated worlds are reconciled. The conceptual models are informed by exhaustive literature review in established neighbouring disciplines. These are a) creative principles in different storytelling domains, such as screenwriting, video game writing, role playing and improvisational theatre, b) narratological studies of story grammars and structures, and c) principles of designing interactive systems, in the areas of basic HCI design and models, discourse analysis in conversational systems, as well as game- and simulation design. In a case study of artefact building, the initial models have been put into practice, evaluated and extended. These artefacts are a) a conceived authoring tool (‘Scenejo’) for the creation of digital conversational stories, and b) the development of a serious game (‘The Killer Phrase Game’) as an application development. The study demonstrates how starting out from linear storytelling, iterative steps of ‘implicit creation’ can lead to more variability and interactivity in the designed interactive story. In the concrete case, the steps included abstraction of dialogues into conditional actions, and creating a dynamic world model of the conversation. This process and artefact can be used as a model illustrating non-programmer approaches to ‘implicit creation’ in a learning process. Research demonstrates that the field of Interactive Digital Storytelling still has to be further advanced until general creative principles can be fully established, which is a long-term endeavour, dependent upon environmental factors. It also requires further technological developments. The gap is not yet closed, but it can be better explained. The research results build groundwork for education of prospective authors. Concluding the thesis, IDS-specific creative principles have been proposed for evaluation in future work

Signifying the West: Colonialist Design in Age of Empires III: The WarChiefs

"Forward," the highlighted Tomahawk and Rider units respond as they move across the mapped territory of a hill to a treasure guarded by two bears they must now kill. The WarChiefs, an expansion of the Age of Empires III Real Time Strategy (RTS) game for the PC, uses both Western and Native representations in game mechanics, sound, image, text, and narrative. This paper compares Indigenous and Western perspectives of interactivity, narrative, and space and time in a close reading of single-player campaign Fire and Shadow. In doing so, this paper asks: How does The WarChiefs, and thus the RTS genre, signify colonialist design aesthetic

Attributes of narrative game aesthetics for perceived cultural learning

Previous researches are mostly concerned on non-holistic game aesthetics for learning in various interactive media platforms. There is lack of studies on attributes of narrative games aesthetics which may contribute to perceived cultural learning. Therefore, this study aims to propose a conceptual model of narrative game aesthetics for perceived cultural learning. Three specific objectives were formulated: (i) to determine game aesthetics that contribute to perceived cultural learning in narrative games, (ii) to develop a narrative game based on the determined game aesthetics, and (iii) to produce empirical evidence on the contribution of game aesthetics towards perceived cultural learning. The research methodology comprises of three main phases: conceptual model development, prototype development, and user evaluation. For the first phase, the conceptual model was developed based on previous literature and reviewed by six experts. In the second phase, prototype development was then developed according to the conceptual model. Finally, user evaluation was employed using quasi experiment which involved 43 participants. Data analysis is conducted using descriptive analysis, correlation analysis, and observation. Findings indicate that six out of 10 attributes namely image and graphic; layout; shape and form; texture; voice; and music, are significantly correlated to perceived cultural learning. The observation results also indicate that these attributes can amplify game experience for perceived cultural learning. In a nutshell, this study has identified attributes of narrative game aesthetics for perceived cultural learning. It further provides empirical evidence on contributions of these attributes of narrative game aesthetics to perceived cultural learning. The outcome of this study will provide guidelines for narrative game designers and developers whom interested to inculcate cultural learning in their game