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

‘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

Directed Emergent Drama

A fully interactive drama, where the player interacts with intelligent Non- Player Characters (NPCs), can revolutionise entertainment, gaming, education, and therapy. Creating such a genuinely interactive drama that is entertaining and gives players a sense of coherency as active participants in the unfolding drama has seen a substantial research effort. Authors have the power to shape dramatised stories for theatre or television at will. Conversely, the authors' ability to shape interactive drama is limited because the drama emerges from players' and NPCs actions during game-play, which significantly limits authoring control. A coherent drama has a recognisable dramatic structure. One philosophy is to use planning algorithms and narrative structures to reduce required authoring. However, planning algorithms are intractable for the large state-spaces intrinsic to interactive dramas, and they have not reduced the authoring problem sufficiently. A more straightforward and computationally feasible method is emergent interactive drama from players' and NPCs' actions. The main difficulty with this approach is maintaining a drama structure and theme, such as a mystery theme or a training scenario, that the player experiences while interacting with the game world. Therefore, it is necessary to impose some form of structure to guide or direct the unfolding drama. The solution introduced in this thesis is to distribute the computation among autonomous actors that are guided by goals and drama structures which a centralised autonomous director agent distributes among the actors, which comprises the following four main elements: a) autonomous rational actor agents that know they are acting and can negotiate dialogues between them to remain realistic while simultaneously progressing the drama, without the player knowing, b) Bayesian network to model the actors reasoning, including beliefs about other actors' mental states c) an autonomous director agent uses "schemas", conceptual structures based on motifs, to guide the actors

Learning Activities with Semantic. Hypermedia in Higher Education

The increasing use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in diverse professional and personal contexts calls for new knowledge, and a set of abilities, competences and attitudes, for an active and participative citizenship. In this context it is acknowledged that universities have an important role innovating in the educational use of digital media to promote an inclusive digital literacy. The educational potential of digital technologies and resources has been recognized by both researchers and practitioners. Multiple pedagogical models and research approaches have already contributed to put in evidence the importance of adapting instructional and learning practices and processes to concrete contexts and educational goals. Still, academic and scientific communities believe further investments in ICT research is needed in higher education. This study focuses on educational models that may contribute to support digital technology uses, where these can have cognitive and educational relevance when compared to analogical technologies. A teaching and learning model, centered in the active role of the students in the exploration, production, presentation and discussion of interactive multimedia materials, was developed and applied using the internet and exploring emergent semantic hypermedia formats. The research approach focused on the definition of design principles for developing class activities that were applied in three different iterations in undergraduate courses from two institutions, namely the University of Texas at Austin, USA and the University of Lisbon, Portugal. The analysis of this study made possible to evaluate the potential and efficacy of the model proposed and the authoring tool chosen in the support of metacognitive skills and attitudes related to information structuring and management, storytelling and communication, using computers and the internet

Platform for decoupling experience managers and environments

Experience Management employs Artificial Intelligence technologies to enhance people's interactive application experiences by dynamically modifying the environment during the experience. In game-related research, there is a prevailing trend where each experience manager is tightly integrated with the specific environment it can manipulate. This integration poses a challenge in comparing different managers within a single environment or a single manager across multiple environments. In this dissertation, I propose a solution to address this issue by introducing EM-Glue, an intermediary software platform that decouples experience managers from the environments they can modify. Prior to presenting the solution, I provide a comprehensive problem description and conduct a literature review to explore the current state of the field. Subsequently, I outline the platform's structural design, including a communication protocol facilitating interaction between managers and environments, as well as the regular communication process. Additionally, I develop a use case to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solution. This involves employing an environment and two experience managers: the Camelot Wrapper, a software I constructed to extend the interactive visualization engine Camelot and connect it to the platform, PaSSAGE, an existing experience manager adapted for use with the platform, and a random experience manager. The evaluation results demonstrate the platform's ability to decouple experience managers from environments, enabling future work to compare experience managers across multiple environments

‘Chronovist’ conceptualisation method: exploring new approaches to structuring narrative in interactive immersive audio/visual media.

This research investigates whether the application of the initially literary concepts of Bakhtin’s ‘chronotope’ and ‘utterance’ to the field of interactive narrative audio-visual media can lead to the development of new approaches to structuring narratives. By extending Bakhtin’s concepts to the analysis of interactive immersive audio-visual media I analyse interactive immersive cinema as a first-person experience of a chronotope. Further, I propose to approach chronotope as a real physical space or environment and I supplement the concept of chronotope with an architectural concept of Benedikt’s isovist, expanding its definition from ‘location-specific patterns of visibility’ to a general term for calculating the distribution of a certain spatial or temporal attribute from a vantage point throughout the space. The result is a new conceptualisation tool, which I call ‘the dynamic isovist of a chronotope’, or a ‘chronovist’. The research discusses the implications of this tool for interactive immersive cinema authorship and shows how it can lead to new narrative paradigms (models). It maps the practical uses of such approaches for interactive authors, as well as for authors migrating to interactive i mmersive cinema from conventional (non-interactive) filmmaking, and suggests how existing interactive works by other artists can be ‘remixed’ using the chronovist approach. Using one of my feature films, ‘Dog’s Paradise’, which was completed while undertaking this research, I analyse narrative devices used in the film that were developed using the chronovist approach and suggest how the film could be further developed as an interactive cinema piece. The research also suggests how this conceptualisation tool can be extended to other ‘genres’ of interactive art and what its implications might be for future researchers and interactive authors

Pivot 2021: Dismantling/Reassembling

Pivot is a series of virtual conferences organized by the Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Design Research Society (DRS). Pivot’s first edition, PIVOT 2020: Designing a world of many centers, was hosted by the Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking at Tulane University. The 2021 edition was hosted by OCAD University (Toronto, Canada)