Interactive Narrative Design beyond the Secret Art Status: A Method to Verify Design Conventions for Interactive Narrative

In recent years, game narrative has emerged as an area for novel game concepts and as a strategy to distinguish a particular title. However, innovation in this area comes primarily from indie companies and individual efforts by noted designers. There is a lack of trained specialists ready to produce interactive narrative experiences. Many existing practitioners are self-trained and often rely on intuition in their design practice. A key element missing from the effort towards a more sustained development and improved professional training is a set of design conventions that fulfill a role comparable to cinematic conventions like continuity editing or montage. Therefore, our research focuses on identifying, verifying and collecting such design strategies. We describe an empirical method to verify candidate design conventions through the evaluation of user reaction to A/B prototypes, which improves upon the trial-and-error process of old

Hybrid books for interactive digital storytelling : connecting story entities and emotions to smart environments

Nowadays, many people use e-books, having high expectations regarding their reading experience. In the case of digital storytelling, enhanced e-books can connect story entities and emotions to real-world elements. In this paper, we present the novel concept of a Hybrid Book, a generic Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) artifact that requires seamless collaboration between content and smart devices. To that end, we extract data from a story and broadcast these data in RDF as Linked Data. Smart devices can then receive and process these data in order to execute corresponding actions. By following open standards, a Hybrid Book can also be seen as an interoperable and sustainable IDN artifact. Furthermore, according to our user-based evaluation, a Hybrid Book makes it possible to provide human sensible feedback while flipping pages, enabling a more enjoyable reading experience. Finally, the participants positive willingness to pay makes it possible to generate more revenue for publishers

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

Lecture Notes on Interactive Storytelling

These lecture notes collect the material used in the advanced course 'Interactive Storytelling' organized biannually at the Department of Future Technologies, University of Turku, Finland. Its aim is to present the key concepts behind interactive digital storytelling (IDS) as well as to review proposed and existing IDS systems. The course focuses on the four partakers of IDS: the platform, the designer, the interactor, and the storyworld. When constructing a platform, the problem is to select an appropriate approach from tightly controlled to emergent storytelling. On this platform, the designer is then responsible for creating the content (e.g., characters, props, scenes and events) for the storyworld, which is then experienced and influenced by the interactor. The structure and relationships between these partakers is explained from a theoretical perspective as well as using existing IDS systems as examples.</p

Don’t forget to save! User experience principles for video game narrative authoring tools.

Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) are a natural evolution of traditional storytelling melded with technological improvements brought about by the rapidly increasing digital revolution. This has and continues to enhance the complexities and functionality of the stories that we can tell. Video game narratives, both old and new, are considered close relatives of IDN, and due to their enhanced interactivity and presentational methods, further complicate the creation process. Authoring tool software aims to alleviate the complexities of this by abstracting underlying data models into accessible user interfaces that creatives, even those with limited technical experience, can use to author their stories. Unfortunately, despite the vast array of authoring tools in this space, user experience is often overlooked even though it is arguably one of the most vital components. This has resulted in a focus on the audience within IDN research rather than the authors, and consequently our knowledge and understanding of the impacts of user experience design decisions in authoring tools are limited. This thesis tackles the modeling of complex video game narrative structures and investigates how user experience design decisions within IDN authoring tools may impact the authoring process. I first introduce my concept of Discoverable Narrative which establishes a vocabulary for the analysis, categorization, and comparison of aspects of video game narrative that are discovered, observed, or experienced by players — something that existing models struggle to detail. I also develop and present my Novella Narrative Model which provides support for video game narrative elements and makes several novel innovations that set it apart from existing narrative models. This thesis then builds upon these models by presenting two bespoke user studies that examine the user experience of the state-of-the-art in IDN authoring tool design, together building a listing of seven general Themes and five principles (Metaphor Testing, Fast Track Testing, Structure, Experimentation, Branching) that highlight evidenced behavioral trends of authors based on different user experience design factors within IDN authoring tools. This represents some of the first work in this space that investigates the relationships between the user experience design of IDN authoring tools and the impacts that they can have on authors. Additionally, a generalized multi-stage pipeline for the design and development of IDN authoring tools is introduced, informed by professional industry- standard design techniques, in an effort to both ensure quality user experience within my own work and to raise awareness of the importance of following proper design processes when creating authoring tools, also serving as a template for doing so

Realism, Storytelling and User Experience in HMD-based eXtended Reality for Holocaust Museum

Due to the COVID-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions, the demand for remote museum visiting experiences has increased. Fortunately, technologies like Head Mounted Display (HMD)-based Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) have made HMD-based eXtended Reality Museum (HXRM) experiences possible. HXRMs can be one of or a combination of the following: an HMD-based AR museum for on-site experience, or an HMDbased VR museum and an HMD-based Augmented Virtuality (AV) museum for remote online access. HXRM is a new approach for museums to enhance user experience while increasing learning outcomes and accessibility. Though there has been some previous research for HXRM, gaps still exist in the interactive narrative and user experience of HXRM. Thus, this study proposes following three Research Questions (RQ): (1) What is the difference between the impact of NUI and GUI on user experience in the HMD-based AR museum? (2) What is the user experience difference between HMD VR and HMD AV as the medium for XR remotesite museums? (3) How is the user acceptance of HMD-based remote-site XR museums? Based the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and several user experience theories, the author proposed a user experience model for HXRM, an uncanny valley framework for realistic CG character, and an interactive narrative model. Then, in collaboration with National Holocaust Centre and Museum, The Extended Journey project was initiated. The project included an AR HoloLens application, The AR Journey, and a VR application, The Virtual Journey, that can be deployed on AR headsets like HoloLens and VR headsets like HTC Vive, respectively. The Extended Journey is an interactive narrative experience that presents the story of a fictional Jewish boy named Leo using virtual CG characters and environments, allowing the audience to participate in his story from the second-person-view. The audience can not only decide the direction of the storyline by helping Leo make choices, but they could also inspect the environments and objects within them to learn the stories behind them. Three experiments were then conducted using The Extended Journey, and a mixed approach of quantitative and qualitative methods were used for analysis. In experiment 1, a between-subjects design was conducted to answer RQ1, and the results showed that the influence of interaction mapping on presences and narrative engagement for an HMD-based AR museum experience is moderated by prior game experience. In experiments 2 and 3, a between-subjects design and a within-subjects design were performed together to answer RQ 2 and RQ 3. The results showed that HMD VR can produce better narrative immersion, presence, and enjoyment, while also increasing CG characters’ affinities compared to HMD AV in XR remote-site museums. The data analysis also showed narrative-based HXRM had high user acceptance, within which HMD VR demonstrated significantly higher user acceptance levels than HMD AV for remote-site HXRM. Experiments 2 and 3 verified all the hypotheses for the mechanism behind the extended TAM via regression analysis, confirming the influence of the four external factors of narrative engagement, presence, interactivity, and CG characters’ affinity. In addition, the analysis also revealed two other potential external factors with influence over the extended TAM: use environment and device ergonomics. Two independent variables, learning interest and prior game experience, were found to have an impact on these external factors. Finally, the author summarised the design guidelines for HXRM and provide an outlook on the limitations and potential future work of this study

NUESTRA MÚSICA. UNA EXPERIENCIA DE ALFABETIZACIÓN MEDIÁTICA E INFORMACIONAL RECOPILANDO DIVERSAS EXPRESIONES CULTURALES DE LA MÚSICA TRADICIONAL COSTARRICENSE

Este Trabajo Final de Investigación Aplicada propone el desarrollo de un sitio web que albergue una serie de cortometrajes audiovisuales sobre diversas manifestaciones que forman parte de la música tradicional costarricense, para facilitar el aprendizaje sobre este tema en las instituciones educativas del país. Nuestra música busca ser una plataforma de fácil acceso para estudiantes de colegios secundarios de Costa Rica y sus docentes, cuando requieran materiales relacionados con la música tradicional. La particularidad de este proyecto radica en que los materiales audiovisuales que componen la serie, serán realizados por estudiantes de secundaria que recibirán una capacitación en alfabetización mediática e informacional, en la cual aprenderán a hacer interpretación crítica de los contenidos que les ofrecen los medios de comunicación, y a proponer y construir contenidos que les representen.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Sistema de Estudios de Posgrado::Ciencias Sociales::Maestría Profesional en Comunicación: Diseño de lenguaje audiovisual y multimedi