Combining gameplay and narrative techniques to enhance the user experience of viewing galleries

Owing to high production costs, the reuse of film and television broadcast content in spin-off merchandise is often necessary. Games and DVDs are popular spin-off products, and when aimed at children in particular, they often include viewing galleries in which a user can browse scenes from the original broadcast. This is a highly economic form of literal content reuse, since it minimizes authoring additional resources. There is also the potential to improve the experience of users as they interact with content in viewing galleries. Ways to do so become apparent by examining the principles of both narrative and gameplay which underpin the original broadcasts and their spin-offs. Scene-Driver is a narrative-driven game architecture that enables the user, via a domino-like interface, to select and order content. This mechanism creates an engaging means for a user to interact with existing broadcast content. Three versions of the Scene-Driver approach to content reuse have been developed, each using content from a children’s animated television series called Tiny Planets. Four studies to evaluate the Scene-Driver game have been done, all with positive results

Toward media collection-based storytelling

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 113-118).Life is filled with stories. Modern technologies enable us to document and share life events with various kinds of media, such as photos, videos, etc. But people still find it time-consuming to select and arrange media fragments to create coherent and engaging narratives. This thesis proposes a novel storytelling system called Storied Navigation, which lets users assemble a sequence of video clips based on their roles in telling a story, rather than solely by explicit start and end times. Storied Navigation uses textual annotations expressed in unconstrained natural language, using parsing and Commonsense reasoning to deduce possible connections between the narrative intent of the storyteller, and descriptions of events and characters in the video. It helps users increase their familiarity with a documentary video corpus. It helps them develop story threads by prompting them with recommendations of alternatives as well as possible continuations for each selected video clip. We view it as a promising first step towards transforming today's fragmented media production experience into an enjoyable, integrated storytelling activity.Edward Yu-Te Chen.S.M