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

Emergent Narratives in Hyrule: A Narrative Analysis of The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild

For many, Nintendo’s 2017 The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild (BotW) is the definitive way to experience an open-world video game. Bringing the classic hero beloved by fans for decades to a massive, fully explorable, hyper-realistic version of Hyrule Kingdom was a dream come true for lifelong fans of the franchise. In analyzing the narrative of the Nintendo Switch’s flagship title, we find the reason for its success: BotW allows for an individualized emergent narrative by allowing the player to control the narrative with their choices, justifying their own actions because their actions are the story. Kriegel & Aylett describe emergent narratives as, “A narrative that is dynamically created through the interactions of autonomous intelligent virtual agents and the user.” Hannesson et al. further conceptualize emergent narratives in gaming, “Under some circumstances the player might start experiencing events or “stories” that don’t tie directly into the storyline of the game, but rather are events that you feel are unique stories happening to you just because you chose to act in a certain way (and might not happen again). This paper will explore how emergent narratives and player choices influence individual experiences playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I closely examine my personal playthrough of BotW and the game’s core features, seen through vignettes of my gameplay experience. Through the lens of emergent narrative, we can better understand how narrative functions in this open-world, player-controlled context. This study explores four contributing factors to this narrative function: First, the game equips the player to find the narrative through choice by setting a tone of self-discovery. Second, BotW uses environmental storytelling to incentivize exploration. Third, problem-solving gives the player control and individuality in narrative formation. Finally, personality and past experiences influence choices, producing an individual narrative. By examining these contributors, we can see why BotW succeeds at building a rewarding narrative experience

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

Using emergent narrative

Narrativity in videogames is a complex subject. Most titles prefer delivering traditional narratives that resemble ones from films and books while other titles provide some choice to the player and have distinct endings. Yet, most of them fail at providing dynamic narratives. Unlike other media, in video games the player can interact with the world and the characters in real time. This theoretically provides a system that should be able to accept the player’s input and use it to build a coherent and interesting narrative. Is it possible to build a game with these ideals? and if it is possible, what is the current state of the technology? The main task will be researching, reading and organizing papers. Understanding what the researchers are saying will provide enough knowledge to create a solid work. Case studies will also be done to increase the comprehension of the subject. The final result offers theoretical knowledge about Interactive and Emergent narrative and their procedures as well as in Game Design. At the end there is a “Decalogue” with the most important insights of the work

Student participation in serious games design

Serious games can be defined simply as games with an educational intent. These games are regularly positioned within a curriculum as simple teaching agents and often lack meaningful participation from learners in their development. In 1992, Roger Hart proposed a model for the roles children play in participatory projects with adults. ‘Hart’s Ladder’ presents eight levels of children’s participation moving from tokenistic manipulation of children at the base of this ladder to ‘citizenship’ at the top where children can initiate and share activities with adults. This research contributes to knowledge on methods of integrating serious games into formal educational settings by investigating how children, as participants, can work with their educators, as facilitators, to create serious games for use by their peers. Exploratory field studies have worked with secondary school children (11-16 years) to evaluate the hypothesis that higher levels of participation of children in making serious games will produce more effective educational artefacts. Educational artefacts are context specific to each study but encompass the product and accreditation of the process by participants, facilitators and all stakeholders involved

A Serious Games Development Environment

Un ambiente per lo sviluppo di Serious Game

A Creative Exploration of the Use of Intelligent Agents in Spatial Narrative Structures

This thesis is an interdisciplinary study of authoring tools for creating spatial narrative structures– exposing the relationship between artists, the tools they use, and the experiences they create. It is a research-creation enterprise resulting in the creation of a new authoring tool. A prototype collaborative tool for authoring spatial narratives used at the Land|Slide: Possible Futures public art exhibit in Markham, Ontario 2013 is described. Using narrative analysis of biographical information a cultural context for authoring and experiencing spatial narrative structures is discussed. The biographical information of artists using digital technologies is posited as a context framing for usability design heuristics. The intersection of intelligent agents and spatial narrative structures provide a future scenario by which to assess the suitability of the approach outlined in this study

‘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

Temporal convergence in shared networked narratives: the case of Blast Theory's Day of the Figurines

types: Article© 2009 ISASTDay of the Figurines, developed by Blast Theory in collaboration with the Mixed Reality Laboratory at Nottingham University, is a massively multiplayer board game for up to a thousand participants. Players can interact remotely with other participants via SMS through their mobile phones from anywhere in the world. Following an analysis of this games complex use of time, the authors introduce a framework structured around five layers of time, from authorial to perceived time, that will facilitate the management and investigation of networked narratives shared by mobile communities over prolonged periods of time

Enhance Learning in a Virtual Professional Environment via 3D Cases

The purpose of this research is toinvestigate the affordances and constraints ofdeveloping 3D teaching vignettes for effectivecase-based learning. It is built on the paradigm ofcase-based learning, which enhances higher-orderthinking abilities. Sparse research explores bothstudents’ engagement and learning outcomes viathree-dimensional (3D) teaching vignettes or 3D cases.In this study, a quasi-experimental study confirmsthe authors’ earlier finding that learnersoverwhelmingly prefer 3D to text-based case studies.A paired samples t-test shows students demonstratesignificant cognitive gains when studying a newdomain subject via a 3D case study. In this paper,the authors describe a design-based research processof developing 3D case studies that capitalizes theaffordances of 3D technologies. An in-depthdiscussion of important issues such as limitations andlessons learned is also included to explore thepragmatics of using 3D technologies to promotelearning