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

INDCOR white paper 1: A shared vocabulary for IDN (Interactive Digital Narratives)

COST Action 18230 INDCOR (Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representations) is an interdisciplinary network of researchers and practitioners intended to further the use of interactive digital narratives (IDN1) to represent highly complex topics. IDN possess crucial advantages in this regard, but more knowledge is needed to realize these advantages in broad usage by media producers and the general public. The lack of a shared vocabulary is a crucial obstacle on the path to a generalized, accessible body of IDN knowledge. This white paper frames the situation from the perspective of INDCOR and describes the creation of an online encyclopedia as a means to overcome this issue. Two similar and successful projects (The Living Handbook of Narratology and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) serve as examples for this effort, showing how community-authored encyclopedias can provide high-quality content. The authors introduce a taxonomy based on an overarching analytical framework (SPP model) as the foundational element of the encyclopedia, and detail editorial procedures for the project, including a peer-review process, designed to assure high academic quality and relevance of encyclopedia entries. Also, a sample entry provides guidance for authors

DIGITAL CONTENTS FOR ENHANCING THE COMMUNICATION OF MUSEUM EXHIBITION: THE PERVIVAL PROJECT

Abstract. The PERVIVAL project aims at developing an interactive system with the preliminary function of explaining a complex museum collection in a simple and immediate way and allowing the visitor to better understand the museum collection he is about to see. In particular, the interactive system aims at enhancing the understanding of the collections of funeral furnishings of Egyptians, which are characterized by a multiplicity of objects of rich symbolism and connected to each other through complex funeral rituals. The idea is to explain the religious creed of ancient Egyptians through the objects placed in the tomb, having in this way a double benefit: enlightening the rituals and placing the objects back in their primary function. In this way, the knowledge of the visitor is not only enlarged through the description of something that is described on papyruses or inscriptions (hence, not comprehensible) but also the proper function of every single object will be explained through the connection among them, as a function of amulets or goods necessary to travel through the World of the Dead. The connection between the different objects allows a much greater understanding of the exposed collection that would be perceived in this way not as a set of single isolated pieces, but as a harmonious set of complementary elements between they represent a specific historical-cultural context.</p

Digital Contents for Enhancing the Communication of Museum Exhibition: The Pervival Project

The PERVIVAL project aims at developing an interactive system with the preliminary function of explaining a complex museum collection in a simple and immediate way and allowing the visitor to better understand the museum collection he is about to see. In particular, the interactive system aims at enhancing the understanding of the collections of funeral furnishings of Egyptians, which are characterized by a multiplicity of objects of rich symbolism and connected to each other through complex funeral rituals. The idea is to explain the religious creed of ancient Egyptians through the objects placed in the tomb, having in this way a double benefit: enlightening the rituals and placing the objects back in their primary function. In this way, the knowledge of the visitor is not only enlarged through the description of something that is described on papyruses or inscriptions (hence, not comprehensible) but also the proper function of every single object will be explained through the connection among them, as a function of amulets or goods necessary to travel through the World of the Dead. The connection between the different objects allows a much greater understanding of the exposed collection that would be perceived in this way not as a set of single isolated pieces, but as a harmonious set of complementary elements between they represent a specific historical-cultural context

'Stitched up' in the 'Conversengine': using expressive processing and multimodal languages to create a character-driven interactive digital narrative

My practice-based research, which this thesis supports, explores the question: How can a convincing interactive character, with apparent psychological depth, be modelled in a playable digital narrative that adapts to reader choice? To this end I am building my own platform, the 'Conversengine', for authoring and, in future, publishing and playing text-driven interactive narratives that rely on enactment rather than narration. Currently, the platform consists of the 'Convowriter', the authoring tool, which I am using to develop 'Stitched Up', an interactive psychological thriller. Using the concept of the black box from second-order cybernetics with possible worlds and theory of mind from narratology, I show how combining these theories, mapping one onto another, provides a framework for not only thinking about the character-driven interactive narrative, but also a methodology for authoring one, in both natural language and computer code, and designing its richly responsive visual interface. This incorporates a unique emotional data visualisation system ('emoviz') to dynamically represent interactive fictional characters. This system is built upon the Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance Emotional State Model (Russell and Mehrabian, 1977) and informed by existing psychological research into colour, shape and motion. I contend that abstract visualisations, coupled with the characters' text-based thoughts and/or speech, can eloquently express convincing mental and emotional behaviour. This provides the feedback in my cybernetic 'steering-a-course' game engine, which, whilst maintaining narrative coherence, allows the reader-player to steer their own course through the narrative. Creating an interactive narrative of this kind, which simulates psychological rather than physical action, requires a different approach to game writing, development and design. In part two of this thesis, I explore how the distinction between story and narrative discourse has practical implications for the creation of interactive digital narratives. I discuss how using existing game engines and tools can be limiting, and how this led to building my own interactive narrative engine with its own expressive domain-specific language. I show how the combined features of the 'Conversengine' offer a new way of representing complex interactive characters with psychological depth

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

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