Narrative design of sadness in Heavy Rain

Aware of all the problems videogames have faced trying to elicit sadness from its players, we decided to analyse the videogame Heavy Rain in virtue of its capabilities to induce sadness in the players. The game was studied under two different perspectives: the character’s non-verbal expressivity and the audiovisual artistic properties of the game. We have found that for the narrative design of sad interactive sequences, the game followed a three-stepped model made of: attachment, rupture, and passivity

Planning formalisms and authoring in interactive storytelling

Interacting Storytelling systems integrate AI techniques such as planning with narrative representations to generate stories. In this paper, we discuss the use of planning formalisms in Interactive Storytelling from the perspective of story generation and authoring. We compare two different planning formalisms, Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning and Heuristic Search Planning (HSP). While HTN provide a strong basis for narrative coherence in the context of interactivity, HSP offer additional flexibility and the generation of stories and the mechanisms for generating comic situations

Robotic arts: Current practices, potentials, and implications

Given that the origin of the “robot” comes from efforts to create a worker to help people, there has been relatively little research on making a robot for non-work purposes. However, some researchers have explored robotic arts since Leonardo da Vinci. Many questions can be posed regarding the potentials of robotic arts: (1) Is there anything we can call machine-creativity? (2) Can robots improvise artworks on the fly? and (3) Can art robots pass the Turing test? To ponder these questions and see the current status quo of robotic arts, the present paper surveys the contributions of robotics in diverse forms of arts, including drawing, theater, music, and dance. The present paper describes selective projects in each genre, core procedure, possibilities and limitations within the aesthetic computing framework. Then, the paper discusses implications of these robotic arts in terms of both robot research and art research, followed by conclusions including answers to the questions posed at the outset