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International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling

ICIDS 2015: Interactive Storytelling pp 14–26Cite as

Open Design Challenges for Interactive Emergent Narrative

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9445))

Abstract

We introduce a research framework for the design of interactive experiences in the domain of emergent narrative, an application area of computational narrative in which stories emerge bottom-up from the behavior of autonomous characters in a simulated storyworld. Prior work in this area has largely concerned the development and tuning of the simulations themselves from which interesting stories may reliably emerge, but this approach will not necessarily improve system performance at its most crucial level—the actual interactive experience. Looking to completed experiences, namely simulation games like Dwarf Fortress and The Sims, we identify a series of shortcomings that yield four design challenges at the level of interaction: modular content, compositional representational strategies, story recognition, and story support. In this paper, we motivate and discuss each of these design challenges and, for each, summarize prior work and propose new approaches that future work might take.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We have adapted this term from that of an analogous task in computer vision, object recognition, in which discrete objects are identified in image data [37].

  2. 2.

    What the most useful notion of storiness is will likely vary by system and application.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Expressive Intelligence Studio, Center for Games and Playable Media, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

    James Owen Ryan, Michael Mateas & Noah Wardrip-Fruin

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  1. James Owen Ryan
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  2. Michael Mateas
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  3. Noah Wardrip-Fruin
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Correspondence to James Owen Ryan .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Henrik Schoenau-Fog

  2. Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Luis Emilio Bruni

  3. Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, United Kingdom

    Sandy Louchart

  4. Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Sarune Baceviciute

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Ryan, J.O., Mateas, M., Wardrip-Fruin, N. (2015). Open Design Challenges for Interactive Emergent Narrative. In: Schoenau-Fog, H., Bruni, L., Louchart, S., Baceviciute, S. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9445. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27036-4_2

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