Twisted Eulenspiegel: An Educational Approach To Role Playing In The Narrative Contexts

The theoretical framework of this study combines the concepts of role playing, storytelling and perspective taking in the creation of an interactive virtual environment, in order to assess and train the ability of students in primary and secondary level to take the point of view of the characters of a narrative. In order to develop this sense of "role" in an interactive virtual environment, we relied on the Vladimir Propp's work on morphology of fairy tale. With regard to the identification of literary material, we have focused attention on the cycle of stories of Till Eulenspiegel. The research path provides a virtual reconstruction of the world of Till, through interactive 3D animation that represents the scenario of the tales: a medieval town in which we developed an objective view, a vision of the entire district in Third Person Camera, and a subjective view, in First Person Camera, centered on the point of view of the character. Students will, therefore, deconstruct and reconstruct the original story, basing on the answers which they give to Till Eulenspiegel, becoming in turn deuteragonists or antagonists, villains or donors, helpers or false heroes.. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n20p111

Character-driven Narrative Engine. Storytelling System for building interactive narrative experiences

This paper discusses a design methodology for developing interactive storytelling projects based on character-driven stories. Shaped as a three-year research through design, it was applied in the educational context of Politecnico di Milano, School of Design, from 2015 to 2017. To open up the issue of the degree of interactiveness and agency that different media allow toward the story, we merged knowledge from cultural, media and game studies. Aiming at building brave, fresh interactive narratives for contemporary media (analogue, digital or hybrid), each year we experimented the implications of initiating the design activity from a different starting point: 1) archetypal characters, 2) thick and compelling storyworlds, and 3) real testimonies shaped as short stories and fragments of memories. We discuss the different tools and methods employed, and the reasons why behind their evolution through time. Then, we conclude with a critical analysis of the results obtained, looking at the consequences and potentialities of how this narrative process has been applied to the game design field

A Storytelling-Driven Framework for Cultural Heritage Dissemination

This paper aims at introducing a new dissemination framework for cultural heritage (CH) making possible affordable solutions for small and medium museums to cooperate/collaborate in the creation of exhibitions. The framework also makes possible new data-based communication strategies able to combine content belonging to different cultural archives and accessed through an ontology-based integration and discovery mechanism, and fosters new data sharing and distribution policies that preserve intellectual property rights. The proposed dissemination model redefines the concept of digital storytelling with the aim of increasing the participation of domain experts in the dissemination of CH. The framework is designed around a graph-based architecture for creating attractive and engaging multimedia narratives that will be transformed in real experiences personalized according to the user\u2019s profile, interests and context of use. Recommender and digital right management services are provided to authors and users for helping them in the creation, personalization and navigation of stories and for guaranteeing the adoption of suitable sharing and distribution policies

Emergent narrative - towards a narrative theory of virtual reality

The recent improvements and developments on Intelligent Agents (IA), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and 3D visualisation, coupled with an increasing desire to integrate interactivity within virtual spaces bring concerns in regard to the articulation of narratives in such environments

A transdisciplinary study of embodiment in HCI, AI and New Media.

The aim of this thesis is to report on a transdisciplinary approach, regarding the complexity of thinking about human embodiment in relation to machine embodiment. A practical dimension of this thesis is to elicit some principles for the design and evaluation of virtual embodiment. The transdisciplinary approach suggests, firstly, that a single discipline or reality is, on its own, not sufficient to explain the complexity and dynamism of the embodied interaction between the human and machine. Secondly, the thesis argues for thinking of transdisciplinary research as a process of individuation, becoming or transduction, that is, as a process of mediation between heterogeneous approaches rather than perceiving research as a stabilized cognitive schema designed to accumulate new outcomes to the already-there reality. Arguing for going beyond the individualized approaches to embodiment, this thesis analyzes three cases where the problems that appear in one case are resolved through the analysis of the following one. Consisting of three phases, this research moves from objective scientific ¿reality¿ to more phenomenological, subjective and complex realities. The first study employs a critical review of embodied conversational agents in human¿computer interaction (HCI) in a learning context using a comparative meta-analysis. Meta-analysis was applied because most of the studies for evaluating embodiment are experimental. A learning context was selected because the number of studies is suitable for meta-analysis and the findings could be generalized to other contexts. The analysis reveals that there is no ¿persona effect¿, that is, the expected positive effect of virtual embodiment on the participant¿s affective, perceptive and cognitive measures. On the contrary, it shows the reduction of virtual embodiment to image and a lack of consideration for the participant¿s embodiment and interaction, in addition to theoretical and methodological shortcomings. The second phase solves these problems by focusing on Mark Hansen¿s phenomenological account of embodiment in new media. The investigation shows that Hansen improves on the HCI account by focusing on the participant¿s dynamic interaction with new media. Nevertheless, his views of embodied perception and affection are underpinned by a subjective patriarchal account leading to object/subject and body/work polarizations. The final phase resolves this polarization by analyzing the controversial work of Alan Turing on intelligent machinery. The research provides a different reading of the Turing Machine based on Simondon¿s concept of individuation, repositioning its materiality from the abstract non-existent to the actual-virtual realm and investigating the reasons for its abstraction. It relates the emergence of multiple human¿machine encounters in Turing¿s work to the complex counter-becoming of what it describes as ¿the Turing Machine compound¿.Ministry of Higher Education in the Sultanate of Oma