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

‘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

Towards a crowdsourced solution for the authoring bottleneck in interactive narratives

Interactive Storytelling research has produced a wealth of technologies that can be employed to create personalised narrative experiences, in which the audience takes a participating rather than observing role. But so far this technology has not led to the production of large scale playable interactive story experiences that realise the ambitions of the field. One main reason for this state of affairs is the difficulty of authoring interactive stories, a task that requires describing a huge amount of story building blocks in a machine friendly fashion. This is not only technically and conceptually more challenging than traditional narrative authoring but also a scalability problem. This thesis examines the authoring bottleneck through a case study and a literature survey and advocates a solution based on crowdsourcing. Prior work has already shown that combining a large number of example stories collected from crowd workers with a system that merges these contributions into a single interactive story can be an effective way to reduce the authorial burden. As a refinement of such an approach, this thesis introduces the novel concept of Crowd Task Adaptation. It argues that in order to maximise the usefulness of the collected stories, a system should dynamically and intelligently analyse the corpus of collected stories and based on this analysis modify the tasks handed out to crowd workers. Two authoring systems, ENIGMA and CROSCAT, which show two radically different approaches of using the Crowd Task Adaptation paradigm have been implemented and are described in this thesis. While ENIGMA adapts tasks through a realtime dialog between crowd workers and the system that is based on what has been learned from previously collected stories, CROSCAT modifies the backstory given to crowd workers in order to optimise the distribution of branching points in the tree structure that combines all collected stories. Two experimental studies of crowdsourced authoring are also presented. They lead to guidelines on how to employ crowdsourced authoring effectively, but more importantly the results of one of the studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the Crowd Task Adaptation approach

Interactive Digital Storytelling: Towards a Hybrid Conceptual Approach

1 Introduction In this contribution, Interactive Digital Storytelling is viewed as a hybrid form of game design and cinematic storytelling for the understanding and making of future learning and entertainment applications. The paper shall present formal design models that provide a conceptual bridge between both traditional linear narrative techniques as well as agent-based emergent conversations with virtual characters. In summary, a theoretical classification of thinking models for authors and interactive experiences for users will be presented. The conceptual work is based upon practical experiments within several research projects on edutainment, which employ conversations with virtual characters to convey information and to entertain. By building several prototypes, two different approaches where explored to combine plot-based interactive storytelling with character-based emergent conversations. Visual impressions of the examples are shown in Fig. 1 and will be explained in more detail in the full paper. In both examples, several virtual animated characters converse digitally with each other and with a user who mainly types text with the keyboard, optionally complemented by choice functionality and special hardware interfaces. The resulting conversations differ in their direction of approaching a middle ground between predefined narrative presentations and emergent conversations with a user, by combining emerging chatterbot dialogues with a story structure. The user experiences a semi-autonomous behaviour of interacting agents. This paper is not about the difference between stories and games. The motivation is on the potential of both to offer structures for learning and entertainment. Instead of trying to draw a distinct line between them, conceptual models for authors have to be defined, who are responsible to flesh out a suitable design within a variability of forms. Design elements include aspects of drama and filmmaking, dialogue design, as well as game design and game tuning. The actual challenge for the design of learning applications with conversational agents is the necessity that authors have to take on responsibility concerning the intended outcome and effect. In fact, they have to balance the bias between a pre-structured storyline (and possibly a timeline) which they may have strictly defined, and the agency that users shall experience through the design of the author. However, there is no one-dimensional borderline between both. In the following, the paper presents a model with several levels which shall help to form a more differentiated picture. 2 Conceptual Models for Storytelling and Agency In Fig. 2, a traditional modus operandi is sketched at four abstract levels. The distinction between levels may vary from project to project. The four levels were found to be suitable for the addition of interaction at each of the levels to form a classification of genres. On the top level of highest story abstraction, the overall dramatic outline is sketched. For example, there may be a hero’s journey in 3 acts, or a Propp model. Further, authors break down the story into scenes which are handled at the next level. Each scene will be defined by a scene script. Within a scene, dialogues and interactions between actors are defined, and lead to stage directions. If producing for an animated film, these directions are strictly mapped onto virtual actors by a skilled animator, who defines the way the virtual actors move and behave. When storytelling gets interactive, the user can influence the storytelling. In fact, in games as well as in constructivist scenarios for learning, users need to experience agency within a story. However, there are different levels at which to affect the outcome. In Fig. 3, the first author model (compare Fig. 2) has been extrapolated according to the need of introducing agency at each level. Opposed to the author, a participant is modelled who now may contribute to each level. The first implication for the author is that it’s not enough to just model a database of descriptions, but to add rules and models, which control an autonomous behaviour at each level in reaction to the participants. Then, it is possible to think of gradations of granted agency versus authored determination. Within Fig. 3 this is indicated by the sliders between control and autonomy at each level. The levels rather represent conceptual stages for authoring than elements of software architecture, though there are parallels to architectures of a number of existing systems of game and story engines. Semi-autonomy occurs on the edge between predefined factual information and rules for each level. The more rules on one level, the more agency can be experienced by potentially affecting the respective level. For example: It is imaginable that participants only experience agency on the lowest level, as a feeling of presence in a scenario. In this case, everything is predefined, but avatars would still react with nonverbal cues to the visitor and recognize her, comparable to a virtual cursor that shows a live status. At the conversation level, participants can for example have agency in an entertaining and informative chatbot dialogue with the characters. They may even not be able to affect anything in the story logic, but participate at dialogue level with speech acts. Agency at scene level would mean to have real choices about the outcome of a scene, for example, the story of the game would have to change according to user’s actions. On the top level, players would influence the whole story of the application, if the "agency slider" would be at a 100% to the right. For example, a simulation such as "The Sims" (Electronic Arts) can be put into the classification here. For factual knowledge transfer in a didactic lesson situation, the highest level could stay predefined, while the lower levels allow for conversational interaction, however constrained. If authors only provide a rule base with little pre-scripted structuring, they achieve a conceptual model more like an exploration or gaming experience depending completely on the action of the player. While arranging the bias at each level to various slider positions, several abstract genres of Interactive Digital Storytelling can be rebuilt in the model, which helps to specify exactly what kind of user experience an application shall provide. It is a conceptual model that can be used to classify story-related games, and it particularly supports authors coming from linear media, stepping into interactive storytelling. 3 Further Work In the full paper, I will also tackle related work while comparing with other theoretical models between games and stories, including references of the taxonomies of C. Lindley, M. Leblanc, J. Klabbers, B. Laurel, C. Pearce, and traditional classifications such as of R. Caillois. I will give more examples how existing products of Interactive Storytelling fit into the classification, and raise the question if new genres have to be defined particularly for Interactive Digital Storytelling. Literature Caillois, Roger: Man, Play and Games. (orig.: Les Jeux Et Les Hommes 1958) University of Illinois Press, Reprint (2001) Hunicke, Robin; LeBlanc, Marc; Zubek, Robert: MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research. In: Workshop Proceedings: Challenges in Game AI. 19th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence AAAI (2004) Klabbers, Jan H.G.: The gaming landscape: A taxonomy for classifying games and simulations. In Copier & Raessens (Eds.) Level up: Digital Games Research Conference. Utrecht University (2003) Lindley, Craig: Narrative, Game Play and Alternative Time Structures for Virtual Environments. In: Proc. TIDSE 2004, Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment, Darmstadt, Springer LNCS vol. 3105, 2004 Pearce, Celia: Emergent authorship: The next interactive revolution. In: Computers & Graphics 26, p. 21-29 (2002) Spierling, U.: Conceptual Models for Interactive Digital Storytelling in Knowledge Media Applications. In: Proc. TIDSE 2004, Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment, Darmstadt, Springer LNCS vol. 3105, 200

Exploring (the poetics of) strange (and fractal) hypertexts

The ACM Hypertext conference has a rich history of challenging the node-link hegemony of the web. At Hypertext 2011 Pisarski [12] suggested that to refocus on nodes in hypertext might unlock a new poetics, and at Hypertext 2001 Bernstein [3] lamented the lack of strange hypertexts: playful tools that experiment with hypertext structure and form. As part of the emerging Strange Hypertexts community project we have been exploring a number of exotic hypertext tools, and in this paper we set out an early experiment with media and creative writing undergraduates to see what effect one particular form – Fractal Narratives, a hypertext where readers drill down into text in a reoccurring pattern – would have on their writing. In this particular trial, we found that most students did not engage in the structure from a storytelling point of view, although they did find value from a planning point of view. Participants conceptually saw the value in non-linear storytelling but few exploited the fractal structure to actually do this. Participant feedback leads us to conclude that while new poetics do emerge from strange hypertexts, this should be viewed as an ongoing process that can be reinforced and encouraged by designing tools that highlight and support those emerging poetics in a series of feedback loops, and by providing writing contexts where they can be highlighted and collaboratively explore

Exploring digital comics as an edutainment tool: An overview

This paper aims t oexplore the growing potential of digital comics and graphic novels as an edutainment tool.Initially, the evolvement of comics medium along with academic and commercial initiatives in designing comicware systems arebriefly discussed. Prominent to this study, the methods and impact of utilizing this visual media with embedded instructional content and student-generated comics in classroom setting are rationallyoutlined.By recognizing the emerging technologies available for supporting and accelerating educational comic development, this article addresses the diverse research challenges and opportunities of innovating effective strategies to enhance comics integrated learning across disciplines

The IRIS Network of Excellence:: Integrating Research in Interactive Storytelling

Abstract. Interactive Storytelling is a major endeavour to develop new media which could offer a radically new user experience, with a potential to revolutionise digital entertainment. European research in Interactive Storytelling has played a leading role in the development of the field, and this creates a unique opportunity to strengthen its position even further by structuring collaboration between some of its main actors. IRIS (Integrating Research in Interactive Storytelling) aims at creating a virtual centre of excellence that will be able to progress the understanding of fundamental aspects of Interactive Storytelling and the development of corresponding technologies

A Study on Virtual Reality Storytelling by Story Authoring Tool Algorithm

The objective of this study was to examine the storytelling principles of virtual reality contents, which are recently grabbing much attention, and the patterns of their generation rules and, based on the results, to analyze the elements and structure of a storytelling method suitable for virtual reality contents. In virtual reality environment, a story is usually being generated between choices made by a user who behaves autonomously under simulated environmental factors and the environmental constraints. This corresponds to a mutually complementary role of representation and simulation, which has been hotly discussed in the field of interactive storytelling. This study was conducted based on the assumption that such a mutually complementary realization is ideal for virtual reality storytelling. A simulation-based story authoring tool is a good example that shows this mutual complementation, in that it develops a story through various algorithms which involves the interaction of agents which occur within the strata of a virtual environment. Therefore, it can be a methodology for virtual reality storytelling. The structures and elements of narratives used in virtual reality storytelling which achieve balance of representation and simulation are much similar to an algorithm strategy of a simulation-based story authoring tool. The virtual reality contents released up to now can be classified into four categories based on the two axes of representation and simulation. The study focused on contents which are layered in higher strata of both representation and simulation. In the perspective of representation strata, these contents are actively using such elements as goal, event, action, perception, internal element, outcome, and setting element, which are constituents of ‘Fabula model’, to generate time relations and cause-effect relations. And in the perspective of simulation strata, the use of the ‘Late commitment’ strategy allowed users to understand the meanings of their actions taken during the process of experimenting with various dynamic principles within the environment