The IRIS Network of Excellence:: Integrating Research in Interactive Storytelling

Abstract. Interactive Storytelling is a major endeavour to develop new media which could offer a radically new user experience, with a potential to revolutionise digital entertainment. European research in Interactive Storytelling has played a leading role in the development of the field, and this creates a unique opportunity to strengthen its position even further by structuring collaboration between some of its main actors. IRIS (Integrating Research in Interactive Storytelling) aims at creating a virtual centre of excellence that will be able to progress the understanding of fundamental aspects of Interactive Storytelling and the development of corresponding technologies

‘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

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

Simplifying Authoring of Adaptive Hypermedia Structures in an eLearning Context

Full version unavailable due to 3rd party copyright restrictions.In an eLearning context, Adaptive Hypermedia Systems have been developed to improve learning success by increasing learner satisfaction, learning speed, and educational effectiveness. However, creating adaptive eLearning content and structures is still a time consuming and complicated task, in particular if individual lecturers are the intended authors. The way of thinking that is needed to create adaptive structures as well as the workflows is one that lecturers are unaccustomed to. The aim of this research project is to develop a concept that helps authors create adaptive eLearning content and structures, which focuses on its applicability for lecturers as intended authors. The research is targeted at the sequencing of content, which is one of the main aspects of adaptive eLearning. To achieve this aim the problem has been viewed from the author’s side. First, in terms of complexity of thoughts and threads, explanations about content structures have been found in storytelling theory. It also provides insights into how authors work, how story worlds are created, story lines intertwined, and how they are all merged together into one content. This helps us understand how non technical authors create content that is understandable and interesting for recipients. Second, the linear structure of learning content has been investigated to extract all the information that can be used for sequencing purposes. This investigation led to an approach that combines existing models to ease the authoring process for adaptive learning content by relating linear content from different authors and therefore defining interdependencies that delinearise the content structure. The technical feasibility of the authoring methods for adaptive learning content has been proven by the implementation of the essential parts in a research prototype and by authoring content from real life lectures with the prototype’s editor. The content and its adaptive structure obtained by using the concept of this research have been tested with the prototype’s player and monitor. Additionally, authoring aspects of the concept have been shown along with practical examples and workflows. Lastly, the interviewees who took part in expert interviews have agreed that the concept significantly reduces authoring complexity and potentially increases the amount of lecturers that are able to create adaptive content. The concept represents the common and traditional authoring process for linear content to a large extent. Compared to existing approaches the additional work needed is limited, and authors do not need to delve into adaptive structures or other authors’ content structures and didactic approaches

Co-constructed narratives in online, collaborative mathematics problem-solving

Workshop paper presented at the international conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2005).Our approach to the study of the narrative aspects of learning mathematical problem-solving extends the conception of narrative as the central artefact of interest, to include the process of collaborative dialog and emergent narratives. This perspective favours the conception of the dialogical aspects of interaction as shared achievements of co-participants and central meaning-making procedures. On the other hand, our qualitative analysis of transcripts of collaborative problem-solving interactions online revealed striking resemblances with the narrative form. Based on these observations we attempt to establish a link between the narrative and dialogical perspectives and explore relevant implications for the design of the Virtual Math Teams collaborative learning environment

Confronting a Paradox: A New Perspective of the Impact of Uncertainty in Suspense

Suspense is a key narrative issue in terms of emotional gratifications. Reactions in response to this type of entertainment are positively related to enjoyment, having a significant impact on the audience's immersion and suspension of disbelief. Related to computational modeling of this feature, some automatic storytelling systems include limited implementations of suspense management system in their core. In this way, the interest of this subject in the area of creativity has resorted to different definitions from fields as narratology and the film industry, as much as several proposals of its constituent features. Among their characteristics, uncertainty is one of the most discussed in terms of impact and need: while many authors affirm that uncertainty is essential to evoke suspense, others limit or reject its influence. Furthermore, the paradox of suspense reflects the problem of including uncertainty as a component required in suspense creation systems. Due to this need to contrast the effects of the uncertainty in order to compute a general model for automatic storytelling systems, we conducted an experiment measuring suspense experienced by a group of subjects that read a story. While a group of them were told the ending of the story in advance, the members of the other group experimented the same story in chronological order. Both the subjects' reported suspense and their physiological responses are gathered and analyzed. Results provide evidence to conclude that uncertainty affects the emotional response of readers, but independently and in a different form than suspense does. It will help to propose a model in which uncertainty is processed separately as management of the amount of knowledge about the outcome available to the spectator, which acts as a control signal to modulate the input features, but not directly in suspense computing

‘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

Toward media collection-based storytelling

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 113-118).Life is filled with stories. Modern technologies enable us to document and share life events with various kinds of media, such as photos, videos, etc. But people still find it time-consuming to select and arrange media fragments to create coherent and engaging narratives. This thesis proposes a novel storytelling system called Storied Navigation, which lets users assemble a sequence of video clips based on their roles in telling a story, rather than solely by explicit start and end times. Storied Navigation uses textual annotations expressed in unconstrained natural language, using parsing and Commonsense reasoning to deduce possible connections between the narrative intent of the storyteller, and descriptions of events and characters in the video. It helps users increase their familiarity with a documentary video corpus. It helps them develop story threads by prompting them with recommendations of alternatives as well as possible continuations for each selected video clip. We view it as a promising first step towards transforming today's fragmented media production experience into an enjoyable, integrated storytelling activity.Edward Yu-Te Chen.S.M