Looking at the Interactive Narrative Experience through the Eyes of the Participants.

The topic of interactive narrative has been under research for many years. While there has been much research exploring the development of new algorithms that enable and enhance interactive narratives, there has been little research focusing on the question of how players understand and internalize their interactive narrative experiences. This paper addresses this problem through conducting a phenomenological study on participants playing Façade; we specifically chose a phenomenological methodology due to its emphasis on the participants‟ lived experience from the participants‟ viewpoint. We chose Façade, because it is the only accessible example of an experience that revolves around social relationships, conflict, and drama as its core mechanics. In this paper, we discuss sixteen themes that resulted from the analysis of the data gathered through the study. In addition, we reflect on these themes discussing their relationship to participants‟ backgrounds, and project implications on the design of future interactive narratives

Das interaktive Drama Facade - ein neues Medium? : Versuch einer partiellen primären intermedialen Analyse von Facade

Ziel dieser Bachelorarbeit ist es, das interaktive Drama Façade auf einen Neuigkeitswert im Medienbereich zu überprüfen. Aufgrund der ungewöhnlichen Charakteristika des Mediums Façade erschien eine entsprechende Fragestellung aktuell und notwendig. Für deren Beantwortung wird zunächst durch Analyse von Façade eine heuristische Differenzthese erstellt, die in der folgenden primären intermedialen Reflexion als Vergleichskriterium für die Medien Computerspiel und Theater dient. Da nur diese beiden Medien für den Vergleich herangezogen werden, werden die zusammengefassten Ergebnisse der Differenzverifikation am Ende der Arbeit als ein partielles Ergebnis gewertet

B.: Evaluating a Conversation-Centered Interactive drama

There is a growing interest in developing technologies for creating interactive dramas [13, 22]. Evaluating them, however, remains an open research problem. In this paper, we present a method for evaluating the technical and design approaches employed in a conversation-centered interactive drama. This method correlates players ’ subjective experience during conversational breakdowns, captured using retrospective protocols, with the corresponding AI processing in the input language understanding and dialog management subsystems. The methodology is employed to analyze conversation breakdowns in the interactive drama Façade. We find that the narrative cues offered by an interactive drama, coupled with believable character performance, can allow players to interpretively bridge system limitations and avoid experiencing a conversation breakdown. Further, we find that, contrary to standard practice for task-oriented conversation systems, using shallowly understood information as part of the system output hampers the player experience in an interactive drama