‘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

Autopoiesis through agency in virtual reality nonfiction

Documentary filmmakers are gradually embracing immersive media to create novel Virtual Reality Nonfiction (VRNF) content. Over the past twenty years initial experimentation in this new medium has brought forward numerous linearly structured 360° documentaries that maintain a close link to traditional documentary modes. More recently, we have observed a shift from the relatively passive 360° cinema towards more open-world, non-linear, game-like interactive experiences that challenge traditional definitions of the documentary genre. Volumetric world-building techniques provide nonfiction creators with additional tools that afford ‘viewer-users’ spatial and interactive agency, leading to a heightened autopoietic realisation of the storyworld. VRNF creators have the potential to allow their viewer-users enhanced control over framing, temporal ordering of the plot and spatial unfolding of the diegetic world, thus inviting them to become actual co-creators of a deeply personal and personalized experience. This article addresses how VRNF may go beyond the mere ‘documentation’ of people, places or past events that existed in a pre-filmic reality and provide viewer-users through augmented agency a unique present-tense autopoietic experience that pushes the boundaries of traditional 2D documentary.<br/

Videopelit ja pukutaide - analogisten pukusuunnittelumetodien digitalisointi

This thesis explores ways of integrating a costume professional to the character art team in the game industry. The research suggests, that integrating costume knowledge into the character design pipeline increases the storytelling value of the characters and provides tools for the narrative. The exploration of integrating a costume professional into game character creation as a process is still rare and little information of costume in games and experiences in transferring an analogue character building skillset into a digital one can be found, therefore this research was generated to provide knowledge on the subject. The research's main emphasis is on immersion-driven AAA-games that employ 3D-graphics and human characters and are either photorealistic or represent stylized realism. Technology for depicting reality is advancing and digital industries have become aware of the extensive skills required to depict increasingly realistic worlds. Also, tools for character art are beginning to lean on actual costume construction: the pattern based cloth simulation software entitled Marvelous Designer has become the industry standard for character clothing. The material of this thesis is based on the author's experience as an intern and Costume Artist at the game company Remedy Entertainment and on data collection in the form of participant observation, conversational interviews, archival searches and assorted documents as an internal employee of the company. Therefore, an ethnographical research that applies to qualitative, descriptive, nonmathematical and naturalistic research methods is utilized in this thesis. The result of this research is a costume production pipeline for integrating a costume professional into the game character design process. It is formed by comparing costuming processes of game and film industries to explore the similarities and differences in methods to analyze the most effective combination of these two. The final pipeline introduces the costume professional’s position during the different stages of the character design process. Furthermore, the thesis categorizes aspects essential for a costume designer to internalize in order to become a functional part of the Character Art team and the skills and knowledge required to support the character design in a production. This research identifies the need for costume knowledge in realistic AAA-games. When employing a costume professional into a game production, this thesis offers tools and vocabulary for collaboration. Costume designers are Character Artists, but with different tools and skill set and costume design can be seen as a live form of character art.Tämä opinnäytetyö käsittelee pukusuunnittelua peliteollisuudessa ja pukusuunnittelijan tarvetta hahmosuunnitteluprosessissa. Tutkimuksen materiaali perustuu kirjoittajan omaan kokemukseen harjoittelijana ja pukusuunnittelijana (Costume Artist) Remedy Entertainment -peliyhtiön hahmosuunnittelutiimissä. Työ esittelee eri peliyhtiöiden hahmotiimien käyttämiä pukusuunnittelumetodeja ja arvioi, miten pukusuunnittelun tiedostaminen erillisenä osana hahmosuunnitteluprosessia ja puvun kerronnallisten elementtien tunnistaminen ja hyödyntäminen tukee uskottavan pelihahmon luomista realistisissa peleissä. Tutkimuksen lähtökohtana on ajatus, että pukusuunnittelun integroiminen hahmosuunnitteluprosessiin syventää hahmoa ja kuluttajan pelikokemusta ja näin ollen nostaa pelin arvoa tuotteena. Tutkimuksen tuloksena syntyi uusi pukusuunnittelun tuotantolinja (Costume production pipeline) peliteollisuuden käyttöön. Se esittelee pukusuunnittelijan asemoitumisen pelituotannon hahmosuunnitteluprosessiin. Teknologinen kehitys mahdollistaa yhä realistisempien digitaalisten todellisuuksien luomisen, jonka seurauksena peliteollisuus työllistää enenevässä määrin myös perinteisten alojen erityisosaajia, kuten arkkitehtejä sekä elokuva-alan valosuunnittelijoita. Myös digitaalisen hahmonluonnin työvälineet nojaavat jo tosielämän vaatetuotantoon: vaatesimulaatio-ohjelma Marvelous Designer perustuu vaatteiden kaavoihin ja on laajalti käytössä pelihahmojen suunnittelussa. Pelit, joita tutkimus tarkastelee, ovat AAA-pelejä, jotka hyödyntävät 3D-grafiikkaa ja ihmishahmoja ja jotka ovat joko photorealistisia tai edustavat tyyliteltyä realismia. Tutkimuksen materiaali on koostettu keskustelullisista, strukturoimattomista haastatteluista, kirjoittajan työpäiväkirjasta, yhtiön edellisten pelien arkistomateriaaleista, sekä yhtiön sisäisistä ohjeistuksista. Tutkimus esittelee keinoja, joilla fyysisen ihmisvartalon kanssa työskentelemään kouluttautunut pukusuunnittelija voi integroitua digitaaliseen hahmonluontiprosessiin ja osoittaa, että pukusuunnittelijat ovat analogisilla metodeilla työskenteleviä hahmosuunnittelijoita. Hahmosuunnittelun etu suhteessa esitystaiteen pukusuunnitteluun on vapaus näyttelijän fyysisen ruumiin sekä fysiikan lakien tuottamista rajoitteista. Vaatesuunnittelu keskittyy vaatteeseen ja pukusuunnittelu fyysisen ihmisruumiin ja vaatteen synnyttämään kombinaatioon ja interaktioon, mutta hahmosuunnittelu tarjoaa pukusuunnittelullisesti rajoittamattoman vapauden hahmotulkintaan

CREATe 2012-2016: Impact on society, industry and policy through research excellence and knowledge exchange

On the eve of the CREATe Festival May 2016, the Centre published this legacy report (edited by Kerry Patterson &amp; Sukhpreet Singh with contributions from consortium researchers)

Language Models as Emotional Classifiers for Textual Conversations

Emotions play a critical role in our everyday lives by altering how we perceive, process and respond to our environment. Affective computing aims to instill in computers the ability to detect and act on the emotions of human actors. A core aspect of any affective computing system is the classification of a user's emotion. In this study we present a novel methodology for classifying emotion in a conversation. At the backbone of our proposed methodology is a pre-trained Language Model (LM), which is supplemented by a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) that propagates information over the predicate-argument structure identified in an utterance. We apply our proposed methodology on the IEMOCAP and Friends data sets, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the former and a higher accuracy on certain emotional labels on the latter. Furthermore, we examine the role context plays in our methodology by altering how much of the preceding conversation the model has access to when making a classification

Co-creating Videogames

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Co-creativity has become a significant cultural and economic phenomenon. Media consumers have become media producers. This book offers a rich description and analysis of the emerging participatory, co-creative relationships within the videogames industry. Banks discusses the challenges of incorporating these co-creative relationships into the development process. Drawing on a decade of research within the industry, the book gives us valuable insight into the continually changing and growing world of video games

Co-creating Videogames

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Co-creativity has become a significant cultural and economic phenomenon. Media consumers have become media producers. This book offers a rich description and analysis of the emerging participatory, co-creative relationships within the videogames industry. Banks discusses the challenges of incorporating these co-creative relationships into the development process. Drawing on a decade of research within the industry, the book gives us valuable insight into the continually changing and growing world of video games