Capturing the Visitor Profile for a Personalized Mobile Museum Experience: an Indirect Approach

An increasing number of museums and cultural institutions around the world use personalized, mostly mobile, museum guides to enhance visitor experiences. However since a typical museum visit may last a few minutes and visitors might only visit once, the personalization processes need to be quick and efficient, ensuring the engagement of the visitor. In this paper we investigate the use of indirect profiling methods through a visitor quiz, in order to provide the visitor with specific museum content. Building on our experience of a first study aimed at the design, implementation and user testing of a short quiz version at the Acropolis Museum, a second parallel study was devised. This paper introduces this research, which collected and analyzed data from two environments: the Acropolis Museum and social media (i.e. Facebook). Key profiling issues are identified, results are presented, and guidelines towards a generalized approach for the profiling needs of cultural institutions are discussed

Narrative Generation in Entertainment: Using Artificial Intelligence Planning

From the field of artificial intelligence (AI) there is a growing stream of technology capable of being embedded in software that will reshape the way we interact with our environment in our everyday lives. This ‘AI software’ is often used to tackle more mundane tasks that are otherwise dangerous or meticulous for a human to accomplish. One particular area, explored in this paper, is for AI software to assist in supporting the enjoyable aspects of the lives of humans. Entertainment is one of these aspects, and often includes storytelling in some form no matter what the type of media, including television, films, video games, etc. This paper aims to explore the ability of AI software to automate the story-creation and story-telling process. This is part of the field of Automatic Narrative Generator (ANG), which aims to produce intuitive interfaces to support people (without any previous programming experience) to use tools to generate stories, based on their ideas of the kind of characters, intentions, events and spaces they want to be in the story. The paper includes details of such AI software created by the author that can be downloaded and used by the reader for this purpose. Applications of this kind of technology include the automatic generation of story lines for ‘soap operas’

Teenage Visitor Experience: Classification of Behavioral Dynamics in Museums

Teenagers' engagement in museums is much talked about but little research has been done to understand their behavior and inform design. Findings from co-design sessions with teenagers suggested they value games and stories when thinking about enjoyable museum tours. Informed by these findings and working with a natural history museum, we designed: a story-based tour (Turning Point) and a game-based tour (Haunted Encounters), informed by similar content. The two strategies were evaluated with 78 teenagers (15-19 years old) visiting the museum as part of an educational school trip. We assessed teenagers' personality in class; qualitative and quantitative data on their engagement, experience, and usability of the apps were collected at the museum. The triangulation of quantitative and qualitative data show personality traits mapping into different behaviors. We offer implications for the design of museum apps targeted to teenagers, a group known as difficult to reach

Player agency in interactive narrative: audience, actor & author

The question motivating this review paper is, how can computer-based interactive narrative be used as a constructivist learn- ing activity? The paper proposes that player agency can be used to link interactive narrative to learner agency in constructivist theory, and to classify approaches to interactive narrative. The traditional question driving research in interactive narrative is, ‘how can an in- teractive narrative deal with a high degree of player agency, while maintaining a coherent and well-formed narrative?’ This question derives from an Aristotelian approach to interactive narrative that, as the question shows, is inherently antagonistic to player agency. Within this approach, player agency must be restricted and manip- ulated to maintain the narrative. Two alternative approaches based on Brecht’s Epic Theatre and Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed are reviewed. If a Boalian approach to interactive narrative is taken the conflict between narrative and player agency dissolves. The question that emerges from this approach is quite different from the traditional question above, and presents a more useful approach to applying in- teractive narrative as a constructivist learning activity

Understanding consumers’ ethical decision-making process : assessment of antecedents and consequences of consumer’s explicit and implicit perception and behavior towards ethical consumption

Soziale und ökologische Anliegen erfahren bei allen Austauschprozessen eine immer höhere Relevanz. Auch beim Konsum achten immer mehr Menschen auf die ökologische und soziale Verträglichkeit der konsumierten Produkte und Marken und wollen mit ihren Konsumentscheidungen ein Zeichen gegen unethisches Handeln setzen. Dadurch bietet der Konsum heutzutage ein Mittel, mit dem Konsumenten ihre ethischen Vorstellungen vertreten und repräsentieren können. Während Konsumenten jedoch in einigen Handlungsbereichen bewusst entsprechend ihren ethischen Vorstellungen nach handeln, geraten in anderen Handlungsbereichen die selbigen ethischen Grundsätze in den Hintergrund und erfahren kaum oder teilweise keine Relevanz bei der Konsumentscheidung. Daher stellt sich die Frage, ob es den ethischen Konsumenten überhaupt gibt. Zahlreiche Unternehmen passen sich den ethischen Grundsätzen und Vorstellungen der Konsumenten an und versuchen Ihre Angebote an diese Vorstellungen auszurichten. Da scheinbar allein die ausgesprochenen ethischen Vorstellungen der Konsumenten kein ausreichendes Merkmal sind, um entsprechende Handlungen zu tätigen, ist ein ausgeprägteres Verständnis ethischer Konsumentscheidungen und ihrer Determinanten erforderlich. Diesem Ziel widmet sich die vorliegende Dissertation. Im ersten Modul, welches aus drei Forschungsartikeln besteht, werden zunächst Treiber und Folgen des ethischen Konsums identifiziert und Ihre Beziehung zueinander diskutiert. Hierbei werden insbesondere psychographische Merkmale der Konsumenten erörtert, sowie produkt-, marken- und kontextabhängige Faktoren adressiert. Zudem wird hier ein Bezug zwischen dem Luxuskonsum und dem ethischen Konsum hergestellt. Das zweite Modul besteht aus insgesamt zwei Forschungsbeiträgen und setzt sich mit der Förderung nachhaltigen Konsums auseinander. Hierbei wird insbesondere auf die Gestaltung von Kommunikationsmaßnahmen und Kanälen eingegangen, wobei das Offline- sowie das Online-Umfeld einbezogen wird. Letzteres in Form eines Online Shops für fair gehandelten Kaffee. Da Menschen Informationen über explizite und implizite Prozesse verarbeiten und Entscheidungen oftmals unbewusst getroffen werden, werden Methoden der neuroökonomischen Forschung in Modul 2 integriert, um eben diese unbewussten Prozesse zu erfassen und so die ganzheitliche Wirkung der Maßnahmen erfassen zu können. Die Ergebnisse der verschiedenen Forschungsartikel veranschaulichen die Vielfältigkeit der Faktoren, denen ethische Konsumhandlungen unterliegen. Sämtliche Treiber müssen, je nach Anwendungskontext, in die Erklärung des ethischen Konsumentenverhaltens einbezogen werden. Die Erkenntnisse liefern für kommerzielle sowie nicht-kommerzielle Unternehmen (Non-Profit-Organisationen) wertvolle praktische Implikationen, um ihre Zielgruppe besser zu verstehen und um ihre Produkte und Kommunikationsmaßnahmen effizient gestalten und wirksam umzusetzen zu können. Für zukünftige Forschungsrichtungen liefert die Dissertation mehrere potenzielle Ansätze. Besonders zu verfolgen sind jene, die eine ganzheitlichere Erklärung ethischen Konsums anstreben und mögliche Barrieren auf Seiten der Konsumenten adressieren. Hierbei kann die Einbindung modernen Methoden der Neuroökonomie einen erheblichen Beitrag zur Erklärung des Entscheidungsprozesses bieten

Narrative support for young game designers’ writing

Creating narrative-based computer games is a complex and challenging task. Narrative Threads is a suite of software tools designed to aid young people (aged 11-15) in creating their own narrative-based games as a writing development activity. A participatory design process highlighted the areas where additional support was required, and informed the iterative design of Narrative Threads. The tools are implemented as a plugin to a commercial game creation toolset, and constitute character and object design tools, a branching narrative diagramming tool and an augmented story map view. In this paper, we provide an overview of the design of the tools and describe an evaluation carried out with 14 children over a four-day workshop. The study examined tool usage patterns, and compared games created with Narrative Threads to those created using the standard toolset. The results suggest a number of ways in which dynamic external representations of story elements can support writing activities in narrative-based game creation. Young designers using Narrative Threads wrote more character dialogue, made stronger links between the conversations they wrote and wider game events, and designed more complex characters, compared to those using the standard toolset. In addition to showing how Narrative Threads can support young games designers, the results have broader implications for anyone looking to support storytelling and writing through game creation activities and tools