Showing papers presented at "International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling in 2009"

Controlling Narrative Generation with Planning Trajectories: The Role of Constraints

Abstract: AI planning has featured in a number of Interactive Storytelling prototypes: since narratives can be naturally modelled as a sequence of actions it is possible to exploit state of the art planners in the task of narrative generation. However the characteristics of a "good" plan, such as optimality, aren't necessarily the same as those of a "good" narrative, where errors and convoluted sequences may offer more reader interest, so some narrative structuring is required. We have looked at injecting narrative control into plan generation through the use of PDDL3.0 state trajectory constraints which enable us to express narrative control information within the planning representation. As part of this we have developed an approach to planning with trajectory constraints. The approach decomposes the problem into a set of smaller subproblems using the temporal orderings described by the constraints and then solves them incrementally. In this paper we outline our method and present results that illustrate the potential of the approach.

Authoring Issues beyond Tools

Abstract: Authoring is still considered a bottleneck in successful Interactive Storytelling and Drama. The claim for intuitive authoring tools is high, especially for tools that allow storytellers and artists to define dynamic content that can be run with an AI-based story engine. We explored two concrete authoring processes in depth, using various Interactive Storytelling prototypes, and have provided feedback from the practical steps. The result is a presentation of general issues in authoring Interactive Storytelling, rather than of particular problems with a specific system that could be overcome by `simply' designing the right interface. Priorities for future developments are also outlined.

Digital Storytelling as a Whole-Class Learning Activity: Lessons from a Three-Years Project

Abstract: This paper introduces PoliCultura, a project created by Politecnico di Milano for the Italian schools, which has just completed three years of deployment Participating classes (with pupils aged between 4 and 18 years) are required to create their own multimedia story, using an authoring-delivery environment (1001stories) provided by Politecnico di Milano PoliCultura has offered us the opportunity to investigate the prolonged use of digital storytelling authoring tools as a whole-class educational activity in a wide number of real educational settings: approximately 7,620 pupils from 381 classes have been involved in this project since its birth in 2006 From the overall PoliCultura experience and from the wide amount of qualitative and quantitative data collected from participants though online surveys, focus groups, interviews and contextual inquiry activities, we have learned a number of lessons that we discuss in the paper

The Motivational Appeal of Interactive Storytelling: Towards a Dimensional Model of the User Experience

Abstract: A conceptual account to the quality of the user experience that interactive storytelling intends to facilitate is introduced. Building on socialscientific research from `old' entertainment media, the experiential qualities of curiosity, suspense, aesthetic pleasantness, self-enhancement, and optimal task engagement ("flow") are proposed as key elements of a theory of user experience in interactive storytelling. Perspectives for the evolution of the model, research and application are briefly discussed.

Directorial Control in a Decision-Theoretic Framework for Interactive Narrative

Abstract: Computer aided interactive narrative has received increasing attention in recent years. Automated directorial control that manages the development of the story in the face of user interaction is an important aspect of interactive narrative design. Most existing approaches lack an explicit model of the user. This limits the approaches' ability of predicting the user's experience, and hence undermines the effectiveness of the approaches. Thespian is a multi-agent framework for authoring and simulating interactive narratives with explicit models of the user. This work extends Thespian with the ability to provide proactive directorial control using the user model. In this paper, we present the algorithms in detail, followed by examples.

Narrative Development in Improvisational Theatre

Abstract: We have investigated the experience of improvisers as they perform to better understand how narrative is constructed by group performance in improvisational theatre Our study was conducted with improvisers who would perform improv "games" with each iteration video recorded Each individual participant was shown the video in a retrospective protocol collection, before reviewing it again in a group interview This process is meant to elicit information about how the cognition involved develops narrative during an improvisation performance This paper presents our initial findings related to narrative development in improvisational theatre with an ambition to use these and future analyses in creating improvisational intelligent agents These findings have demonstrated that the construction of narrative is crafted through the making and accepting of scene-advancing offers, which expert improvisers are more readily capable of performing

The Narrative-Communication Structure in Interactive Narrative Works

Abstract: Interactive work on new media platforms differs from familiar work on more traditional media, such as literature, theatre, cinema and television, in terms of their narrative-communication situation. Interactive works, unlike cinematic works, allow the viewer to participate to a different extent, involving a reciprocal communication process. In this paper I propose a bi-directional communication structure for interactive storytelling systems, based on narratology theory and communication film theory. I adapt existing narrative-communication models of conventional media, mainly those of Seymour Chatman and Vivian Sobchack, to suggest a detailed narrative-communication model for interactive storytelling systems, which would facilitate the formulation of a better definition of the various constituent elements of interactive storytelling communication, and the functions they fulfill.

The IRIS Network of Excellence: Future Directions in Interactive Storytelling

Abstract: The IRIS Network of Excellence started its work in January 2009. In this paper we highlight some new research directions developing within the network: one is revisiting narrative formalisation through the use of Linear Logic and the other is challenging the conventional framework of basing Interactive Storytelling on computer graphics to explore the content-based recombination of video sequences.

Iterative Authoring Using Story Generation Feedback: Debugging or Co-creation?

Abstract: We explore the role that story generation feedback may play within the creative process of interactive story authoring. While such feedback is often used as `debugging' information, we explore here a `co-creation' view, in which the outcome of the story generator influences authorial intent. We illustrate an iterative authoring approach in which each iteration consists of idea generation, implementation and simulation. We find that the tension between authorial intent and the partially uncontrollable story generation outcome may be relieved by taking such a co-creation approach.

Suspense? Surprise! or How to Generate Stories with Surprise Endings by Exploiting the Disparity of Knowledge between a Story's Reader and Its Characters

Abstract: Surprise and suspense can be effectively combined to increase story interest, complementing each other. In particular, stories with surprise endings can make a strong impression on the readers. In this paper we present an extension of our previous efforts to generate a story with surprise endings maintaining the reader's suspense by adopting the notion of disparity of knowledge between the reader and the characters in the story.

From Tabletop RPG to Interactive Storytelling: Definition of a Story Manager for Videogames

Abstract: Adding narrative in computer game is complicated because it may restrict player interactivity. Our aim is to design a controller that dynamically built a plot, through the game execution, centred on player's actions. Tabletop Role-playing games manage to deal with this goal. This paper presents a study of role-playing games, their organization, and the models commonly used for narrative generation. It then deduces a proposition of components and data structures for interactive storytelling in videogames. A prototype of a social game has been developed as example.

What Would You Do in Their Shoes? Experiencing Different Perspectives in an Interactive Drama for Multiple Users

Abstract: Following the idea of improvisational theater, we built a multi-agent system where multiple users can experience an interactive drama from different perspectives. Depending on the roles that the users are given in advance, the situation is perceived in various ways and interaction possibilities are directed according to the assigned role. The computer-controlled agents' behavior needs to be highly reactive in order to allow for flexibility in the conversational flow of the structured interactive narrative. In this paper, we describe a system architecture that allows multi-user participation as well as distributed behavior planning for multiple agents.

Emohawk: Searching for a Good Emergent Narrative

Abstract: We report on the progress we have achieved in development of Emohawk, a 3D virtual reality application with an emergent narrative for teaching high-school students and undergraduates the basics of virtual characters control, emotion modelling, and narrative generation. Besides, we present a new methodology, used in Emohawk, for purposeful authoring of emergent narratives of Facade's complexity. The methodology is based on massive automatic search for stories that are appealing to the audience whilst forbidding the unappealing ones during the design phase.

Multiple Coordinated Mobile Narratives as a Catalyst for Face-to-Face Group Conversation

Abstract: Museum visits can be more useful to small groups if they can be the centerpiece of a social experience as well as an educational one One of the most rewarding aspects of a visit, especially those involving families, is the unmediated group discussion that can ensue during a shared cultural experience However, if current methods were to be applied to stimulate such discussions, their intrusive nature would be more likely detrimental than assistive We present a non-intrusive method based on dramatic narrative presentations and automatic group behavior perception that we believe stimulates a group to engage in conversation as a natural part of making sense of partial narratives that require some mutual integration

Exploring Narrative Presentation for Large Multimodal Lifelog Collections through Card Sorting

Abstract: Using lifelogging tools, personal digital artifacts are collected continuously and passively throughout each day. The wealth of information such an archive contains on our life history provides novel opportunities for the creation of digital life narratives. However, the complexity, volume and multimodal nature of such collections create barriers to achieving this. Nine participants engaged in a card-sorting activity designed to explore practices of content reduction and presentation for narrative composition. We found the visual modalities to be most fluent in communicating experience with other modalities serving to support them and that the users employed the salient themes of the story to organise, arrange and facilitate filtering of the content.

The Third Woman

Abstract: The Third Woman is an interactive mobile film-game, performance, and installation, which gradually reveals the layers of a contemporary film drama on mobile phones and screens.

Conceiving Interactive Story Events

Abstract: A story is considered to be a sequence of events. So-called linear storytelling means that authors tell these events in a designed order. The sources for events can be actions of agents or other circumstances. In Interactive Storytelling, authors need to conceive events in a different, indirect way. This concept is outlined and illustrated with examples from authoring. The goal is to find a general structure for the conception of interactive story events.

DEEP SPACE: High Resolution VR Platform for Multi-user Interactive Narratives

Abstract: DEEP SPACE is a large-scale platform for interactive, stereoscopic and high resolution content. The spatial and the system design of DEEP SPACE are facing constraints of CAVETM-like systems in respect to multi-user interactive storytelling. To be used as research platform and as public exhibition space for many people, DEEP SPACE is capable to process interactive, stereoscopic applications on two projection walls with a size of 16 by 9 meters and a resolution of four times 1080p (4K) each. The processed applications are ranging from Virtual Reality (VR)-environments to 3D-movies to computationally intensive 2D-productions. In this paper, we are describing DEEP SPACE as an experimental VR platform for multi-user interactive storytelling. We are focusing on the system design relevant for the platform, including the integration of the Apple iPod Touch technology as VR control, and a special case study that is demonstrating the research efforts in the field of multi-user interactive storytelling. The described case study, entitled "Papyrate's Island", provides a prototypical scenario of how physical drawings may impact on digital narratives. In this special case, DEEP SPACE helps us to explore the hypothesis that drawing, a primordial human creative skill, gives us access to entirely new creative possibilities in the domain of interactive storytelling.

Supporting Storytelling in a Programming Environment for Middle School Children

Abstract: Storytelling Alice and Looking Glass are programming environments that are designed to motivate middle school students, particularly girls, to learn basic computer programming. Rather than presenting programming as an end in and of itself, both systems present computer programming as a means to the end of creating animated stories. In this talk, I will share some lessons learned about how to support middle school students in finding and realizing their story ideas.

Virtual Heritage Tours: Developing Interactive Narrative-Based Environments for Historical Sites

Abstract: In the last decade there has been a noticeable growth in the use of virtual reality (VR) technologies for reconstructing cultural heritage sites However, many of these virtual reconstructions evidence little of sites' social histories Narrating the Past is a research project that aims to re-address this issue by investigating methods for embedding social histories within cultural heritage sites and by creating narrative based virtual environments (VEs) within them The project aims to enhance the visitor's knowledge and understanding by developing a navigable 3D story space, in which participants are immersed This has the potential to create a malleable virtual environment allowing the visitor to configure their own narrative paths

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Short Stories in Short Game Play

Abstract: What are the minimal requirements to tell a story by means of some digital game? What are minimal short stories worth to be told? How to establish the minimal preliminaries of interactive storytelling? What do we expect of computerized counterparts that are worth to be mentioned in a story humans experience when playing a digital game? The authors have designed, implemented and experimentally used some particularly simple game in which the personalities of digitalized agents---the good, the bad and the ugly---substantially contribute to stories that may be worth being reported.

The Evolution of Story Spaces of Digital Games beyond the Limits of Linearity and Monotonicity

Abstract: The in-depth description of game playing experience needs a suitable terminology which, in turn, shall reflect appropriate concepts. The introduced story space concept is compliant with a variety of recent research endeavors and allows for a lucid representation of phenomena which are crucial to the understanding of ways in which stories may be perceived when playing a digital game. The particular story space evolves over time---the story expands. The process of story unfolding may have a variety of fundamental properties such as, e.g., linearity or monotonicity. The controlled abandonment of linearity and monotonicity, e.g., may be used as a technique of dramaturgical design.

Exaggerated Claims for Interactive Stories

Abstract: As advertising becomes more crucial to video games' success, developers risk promoting their products beyond the features that they can actually include. For features of interactive storytelling, the effects of making such exaggerations are not well known, as reports from industry have been anecdotal at best. In this paper, we explore the effects of making exaggerated claims for interactive stories, in the context of the theory of advertising. Results from a human user study show that female players find linear and branching stories to be significantly less enjoyable when they are advertised with exaggerated claims.

Pedagogical Dramas and Transformational Play: Realizing Narrative through Videogames Design

Abstract: Whereas traditionally stories involve an author, a performer, and an audience, much of the power of videogames as media for advancing narrative springs from their affordance for the player to occupy more than one role--and sometimes all three--simultaneously In the narratively-rich videogames that we design, players have the opportunity to perform actions, experience consequences, and reflect on the underlying social values that these situations were designed to engage Here, our focus is on the use of these games to engage children in experiencing ideological struggles associated with realizing social commitments Toward this end, we will present our theoretical argument for the power of games as a contemporary story medium, grounding this discussion in the demonstration of three game design projects and their implementations

Introducing Multiple Interaction Devices to Interactive Storytelling: Experiences from Practice

Abstract: Introducing multiple interaction devices into an interactive story provides certain advantages to the system: it fosters collaboration in multi-user settings, increases user involvement, and addresses more perception channels and user senses. It is a challenging task for designers to introduce multiple interaction devices into an interactive storytelling (IS) system. In this paper we report on our experiences with the design and evaluation of an IS system, called ORIENT. The system was created for multi-user settings; it embeds various interaction devices, such as mobile phones, a dance pad, a Wiimote, and RFID tags. We report on user feedback and derive design challenges that should be considered when creating interaction devices for IS systems.

Adaptivity in Game-Based Learning: A New Perspective on Story

Abstract: Game-based learning as a novel form of e-learning still has issues in fundamental questions, the lack of a general model for adaptivity being one of them. Since adaptive techniques in traditional e-learning applications bear close similarity to certain interactive storytelling approaches, we propose a new notion of story as the joining element of arbitraty learning paths.

Designing Storytelling Games That Encourage Narrative Play

Abstract: Storytelling games are a form of competitive storytelling framed in the context of gameplay. However, most existing storytelling games emphasize competitive gameplay and winning at the expense of competitive narrative play; they tend to be storytelling games rather than storytelling games. This paper explores issues related to the design of storytelling games that are won through narrative play and proposes a number of design rules for this. These design rules not only help in the design of storytelling games with a stronger element of narrative play, they also have implications for the design of computational storytelling systems.

To Be or Not to Be: Towards Stateless Interactive Drama

Abstract: In this paper we investigate a new way to represent the narrative structure in interactive drama models. It consists in explicitly defining generic links between actions, rather than relying on states, as it is the case for other interactive narrative approaches. This new approach is especially promising in terms of authoring.

Workshop on Authoring Methods and Conception in Interactive Storytelling

Abstract: The ICIDS 2009 post-conference workshop on authoring methods and conception takes up open issues that were identified at previous conference workshops on authoring. The emphasis is on the abstraction processes that are involved when interactive story ideas are adapted to certain IS systems.

Comparing Effects of Different Cinematic Visualization Strategies on Viewer Comprehension

Abstract: Computational storytelling systems have mainly focused on the construction and evaluation of textual discourse for communicating stories. Few intelligent camera systems have been built in 3D environments for effective visual communication of stories. The evaluation of effectiveness of these systems, if any, has focused mainly on the run-time performance of the camera placement algorithms. The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic cognitive-based evaluation methodology to compare effects of different cinematic visualization strategies on viewer comprehension of stories. In particular, an evaluation of automatically generated visualizations from Darshak, a cinematic planning system, against different hand-generated visualization strategies is presented. The methodology used in the empirical evaluation is based on QUEST, a cognitive framework for question-answering in the context of stories, that provides validated predictors for measuring story coherence in readers. Data collected from viewers, who watch the same story renedered with three different visualization strategies, is compared with QUEST's predictor metrics. Initial data analysis establishes significant effect on choice of visualization strategy on story comprehension. It further shows a significant effect of visualization strategy selected by Darshak on viewers' measured story coherence.