16,644 research outputs found
Using Out-of-Character Reasoning to Combine Storytelling and Education in a Serious Game
To reconcile storytelling and educational meta-goals in the context of a serious game, we propose to make use of out-of-character reasoning in virtual agents. We will implement these agents in a serious game of our design, which will focus on social interaction in conflict scenarios with the meta-goal of improving social awareness of users. The agents will use out-of-character reasoning to manage conflicts by assuming different in-character personalities or by planning to take specific actions based on interaction with the users. In-character reasoning is responsible for the storytelling concerns of character believability and consistency. These are not endangered by out-of-character reasoning, as it takes in-character information into account when making decisions
Planning Technologies for Interactive Storytelling
Since AI planning was first proposed for the task of narrative generation in interactive storytelling (IS), it has emerged as the dominant approach in this field. This chapter traces the use of planning technologies in this area, considers the core issues involved in the application of planning technologies in IS, and identifies some of the remaining challenges
Affect and believability in game characters:a review of the use of affective computing in games
Virtual agents are important in many digital environments. Designing a character that highly engages users in terms of interaction is an intricate task constrained by many requirements. One aspect that has gained more attention recently is the effective dimension of the agent. Several studies have addressed the possibility of developing an affect-aware system for a better user experience. Particularly in games, including emotional and social features in NPCs adds depth to the characters, enriches interaction possibilities, and combined with the basic level of competence, creates a more appealing game. Design requirements for emotionally intelligent NPCs differ from general autonomous agents with the main goal being a stronger player-agent relationship as opposed to problem solving and goal assessment. Nevertheless, deploying an affective module into NPCs adds to the complexity of the architecture and constraints. In addition, using such composite NPC in games seems beyond current technology, despite some brave attempts. However, a MARPO-type modular architecture would seem a useful starting point for adding emotions
Which game narratives do adolescents of different gameplay and sociodemographic backgrounds prefer? a mixed-methods analysis
OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to investigate which narrative elements of digital game narratives are preferred by the general adolescent population, and to examine associations with gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and gameplay frequency. Further, the study aims to discuss how results can be translated to serious digital games.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: Adolescents were recruited through school to complete a survey on narrative preferences in digital games. The survey included questions on sociodemographic information, frequency of gameplay, and an open-ended question on what could be an appealing narrative for them. Data were analyzed in a mixed-methods approach, using thematic analysis and chi-square analyses to determine narrative preferences and the associations between game narrative elements and player characteristics (gender, SES, and frequency of gameplay).
RESULTS: The sample consisted of 446 adolescents (12-15 years old) who described 30 narrative subthemes. Preferences included human characters as protagonists; nonhuman characters only as antagonists; realistic settings, such as public places or cities; and a strong conflict surrounding crime, catastrophe, or war. Girls more often than boys defined characters by their age, included avatars, located the narrative in private places, developed profession-related skills, and included a positive atmosphere. Adolescents of nonacademic education more often than adolescents of academic education defined characters by criminal actions. Infrequent players more often included human characters defined by their age than frequent players. After performing a Bonferroni correction, narrative preferences for several gender differences remained.
CONCLUSION: Different narrative elements related to subgroups of adolescents by gender, SES, and frequency of gameplay. Customization of narratives in serious digital health games should be warranted for boys and girls; yet, further research is needed to specify how to address girls in particular
TropeTwist: Trope-based Narrative Structure Generation
Games are complex, multi-faceted systems that share common elements and
underlying narratives, such as the conflict between a hero and a big bad enemy
or pursuing some goal that requires overcoming challenges. However, identifying
and describing these elements together is non-trivial as they might differ in
certain properties and how players might encounter the narratives. Likewise,
generating narratives also pose difficulties when encoding, interpreting,
analyzing, and evaluating them. To address this, we present TropeTwist, a
trope-based system that can describe narrative structures in games in a more
abstract and generic level, allowing the definition of games' narrative
structures and their generation using interconnected tropes, called narrative
graphs. To demonstrate the system, we represent the narrative structure of
three different games. We use MAP-Elites to generate and evaluate novel
quality-diverse narrative graphs encoded as graph grammars, using these three
hand-made narrative structures as targets. Both hand-made and generated
narrative graphs are evaluated based on their coherence and interestingness,
which are improved through evolution.Comment: submitted, 9 page
English subject leader development material : summer term 2008 : the framework for secondary English
Capturing the Visitor Profile for a Personalized Mobile Museum Experience: an Indirect Approach
An increasing number of museums and cultural institutions
around the world use personalized, mostly mobile, museum
guides to enhance visitor experiences. However since a typical
museum visit may last a few minutes and visitors might only visit
once, the personalization processes need to be quick and efficient,
ensuring the engagement of the visitor. In this paper we
investigate the use of indirect profiling methods through a visitor
quiz, in order to provide the visitor with specific museum content.
Building on our experience of a first study aimed at the design,
implementation and user testing of a short quiz version at the
Acropolis Museum, a second parallel study was devised. This
paper introduces this research, which collected and analyzed data
from two environments: the Acropolis Museum and social media
(i.e. Facebook). Key profiling issues are identified, results are
presented, and guidelines towards a generalized approach for the
profiling needs of cultural institutions are discussed
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
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