Authoring for interactive storytelling: When, why, and do we actually need authoring tools?

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018. One of the most significant challenges facing narrative systems research is the authoring of interactive stories, and the processes and technologies to support it. In this workshop we host a discussion and present new work in this space from researchers in creative and technical domains from both the Hypertext and Interactive Storytelling communities and explore the question: When, why, and do we actually need authoring tools?

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

‘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

Facilitating the development of location-based experiences

Location-based experiences depend on the availability and reliability of wireless infrastructures such as GPS, Wi-Fi, or mobile phone networks; but these technologies are not universally available everywhere and anytime. Studies of deployed experiences have shown that the characteristics of wireless infrastructures, especially their limited coverage and accuracy, have a major impact on the performance of an experience. It is in the designers’ interest to be aware of technological restrictions to their work. Current state of the art authoring tools for location-based experiences implement one common overarching model: the idea of taking a map of the physical area in which the experience is to take place and then somehow placing virtual trigger zones on top of it. This model leaves no space for technological shortcomings and assumes a perfect registration between the real and the virtual. In order to increase the designers’ awareness of the technology, this thesis suggests revealing the wireless infrastructures at authoring time through appropriate tools and workflows. This is thought to aid the designers in better understanding the characteristics of the underlying technology and thereby enable them to deal with potential problems before their work is deployed to the public. This approach was studied in practice by working with two groups of professional artists who built two commercially commissioned location-based experiences, and evaluated using qualitative research methods. The first experience is a pervasive game for mobile phones called ‘Love City’ that relies on cellular positioning. The second experience is a pervasive game for cyclists called ‘Rider Spoke’ that relies on Wi-Fi positioning. The evaluation of these two experiences revealed the importance of an integrated suite of tools that spans indoors and outdoors, and which supports the designers in better understanding the location mechanism that they decided to work with. It was found that designers can successfully create their experiences to deal with patchy, coarse grained, and varying wireless networks as long as they are made aware of the characteristics

Facilitating the development of location-based experiences

Location-based experiences depend on the availability and reliability of wireless infrastructures such as GPS, Wi-Fi, or mobile phone networks; but these technologies are not universally available everywhere and anytime. Studies of deployed experiences have shown that the characteristics of wireless infrastructures, especially their limited coverage and accuracy, have a major impact on the performance of an experience. It is in the designers’ interest to be aware of technological restrictions to their work. Current state of the art authoring tools for location-based experiences implement one common overarching model: the idea of taking a map of the physical area in which the experience is to take place and then somehow placing virtual trigger zones on top of it. This model leaves no space for technological shortcomings and assumes a perfect registration between the real and the virtual. In order to increase the designers’ awareness of the technology, this thesis suggests revealing the wireless infrastructures at authoring time through appropriate tools and workflows. This is thought to aid the designers in better understanding the characteristics of the underlying technology and thereby enable them to deal with potential problems before their work is deployed to the public. This approach was studied in practice by working with two groups of professional artists who built two commercially commissioned location-based experiences, and evaluated using qualitative research methods. The first experience is a pervasive game for mobile phones called ‘Love City’ that relies on cellular positioning. The second experience is a pervasive game for cyclists called ‘Rider Spoke’ that relies on Wi-Fi positioning. The evaluation of these two experiences revealed the importance of an integrated suite of tools that spans indoors and outdoors, and which supports the designers in better understanding the location mechanism that they decided to work with. It was found that designers can successfully create their experiences to deal with patchy, coarse grained, and varying wireless networks as long as they are made aware of the characteristics

Designing digital constructive visualization tools

The emergence of tools that support fast and easy creation of visualizations has made the benefits of Information Visualization (InfoVis) more accessible. The predominant design for visualization authoring tools often includes features such as automated mappings and visualization templates, which make tools effective and easy-to-use. These features, however, still impose barriers to non-experts (i.e., people with no formal training on visualization concepts). The paradigm of Constructive Visualization (ConstructiveVis) has shown potential to overcome some of these barriers, but it has only been investigated through the use of physical tokens that people manipulate to create representations of data. This dissertation investigates how the principles of ConstructiveVis can be applied in the design and implementation of digital constructive visualization tools. This thesis presents the results of several observational studies that uncover how tools that promote a constructive approach to visualization compare to more conventional ones. It also sheds light on what kind of benefits and limitations digital ConstructiveVis brings into non-experts' visualization design process. The investigations here presented lay the foundations for the design of better visualization tools that not only allow people to create effective visualizations but also promote critical reflection on design principles

Creating immersive, play-anywhere handheld augmented reality stories, through remote user testing

This thesis outlines new instances of Extended Reality (XR) stories as well as associated user studies with them, to create more immersive story experiences delivered at a user’s choice of location through a mobile phone. This extends prior work on Location Based Experiences (LBEs), which have typically been designed to offer a game or story at a pre-determined location. A play-anywhere experience offers potential to open up LBEs to a wider audience, as well as to those may prefer to take part individually or closer to home, such attitude shifts becoming increasingly more common. The current research adopted an in the wild approach combining practice, studies and theory, with most user data being collected remotely. Each story application developed is subsequently referred to as an app, with each app offering a bespoke story incorporating Augmented Reality (AR) features, to better bring users’ location inline with the narrative. Testing the apps across various locations matched their intended use, and resulted in new guidelines for both incorporating AR into such LBEs, as well as for conducting remote user studies. A final app offered a site-specific curated story, with all study participants taking part under similar conditions at the same location, the ability to observe them using the app providing additional insights. The story apps used available local map data alongside Handheld Augmented Reality (HAR), to overlay interactable virtual objects on top of the physical environment, and visible on the phone’s display. Guidelines from related methodologies were used to better allow for the variety of factors that might influence different users’ immersion and engagement. These included the implementation of the AR features, the story itself, real world activity, and personal preferences including onboarding requirements. The approach taken contributed a reverse methodology to a lot of related research, that would typically begin with laboratory testing before moving to public spaces. User studies with the five mobile apps contributed guidelines for such experiences, that could benefit both practitioners and researchers in related fields. In the later case, a need was identified to develop new research tools specifically suited to the subtleties of handheld play-anywhere LBEs, such issues explored within the apps tested. The guidelines identified for offering more effective XR LBEs were also implemented in the creation of a new open source Unity project, called Map Story Engine. This offers a tool to test new features, as well as providing a fully customisable template for practitioners to author their own play-anywhere HAR stories and games

Making scenarios more worthwhile: orienting to design story work

Increased complexity in contemporary design work has led designers to place greater dependence on the use of story and narrative. Though many consider story and narrative a fundamental part of design, use continues to present challenges and efficacy is poorly understood. With regards to use, challenges stem from a lack of support in directing strategic conversations towards getting the right stories and to getting stories right. With regards to efficacy, poor understanding stems from a lack of research and a corresponding lack of unifying theory. Scenario research represents the largest body of knowledge on the use and efficacy of story and narrative in design. Yet, scenarios are characteristically narrow in scope and their descriptions typically thin. Scenario research is in decline, and what theory exists is neither extensive nor extensible. Nevertheless, scenarios serve as a starting point for this research, with questions posed about how designers work with story and narrative, and how, in turn, story and narrative work for designers. To explore these questions epistemological, philosophical and theoretical positions are taken up and these underpin a Research into/through/for Design methodology. A series of self-reflective experiments lead to the creation of novel narrative resources and approaches, which empirical studies expose to a range of increasingly challenging settings. Findings from these studies show that narrative resources coupled with resource-based approaches provide targeted support for cognitively challenging aspects of story work. Furthermore, outcomes from a programme of critical analysis provide insights into how story, narrative and narrative resources work for designers. Contributions to knowledge are made in three areas: first, in the area of design practice in relation to narrative resources and approaches to story work; second, in the area of design theory in relation to realistic approaches to method innovation; and third, in the area of research practice in relation to aids to visual analysis