Interaction, narrative, and drama

Abstract

Interactive narratives have been used in a variety of applications, including video games, educational games, and training simulations. Maintaining engagement within such environments is an important problem, because it affects entertainment, motivation, and presence. Performance arts theorists have discussed and formalized many techniques that increase engagement and enhance dramatic content of art productions. While constructing a narrative manually, using these techniques, is acceptable for linear media, using this approach for interactive environments results in inflexible experiences due to the unpredictability of users' actions. Few researchers attempted to develop adaptive interactive narrative experiences. However, developing a quality interactive experience is largely an art process, and many of these adaptive techniques do not encode artistic principles. In this paper, I present a new interactive narrative architecture designed using a set of dramatic techniques that I formulated based on several years of training in film and theatre.

Self-refining games using player analytics

“…Smith et al [2011] describe a spectrum of different player models; in their taxonomy, our bootstrap model ( §4.1) is a Universal Synthetic Generative Action model, and our learned model ( §4.2) is a Universal Induced Generative Action model. Learned player-specific models have been used to build player-adaptive AI [Houlette 2003], and to generate customized levels [Zook et al 2012] and stories [El-Nasr 2007;Thue et al 2007]. …”

Tactical Agent Personality

“…In general, they use similar techniques based on the tracking of player actions and using them to adjust a vector of player archetypes. For example, in El Nasr's work [5], the vector of archetypes include relunctant hero, violent, coward, truth seeker, and self-interested.…”

“…And the player is one of the most important factors in creating intelligent game agents. Current methods [1][2][3][4][5] mainly involve classification tasks based on manually specified player archetypes. This requires much specialized expert knowledge to be incorporated and hence limits the generalization capabilities of these methods in different games.…”

“…A number of player modeling approaches [2][3][4][5] have been studied in the field of interactive storytelling whereby the game story is automatically adjusted online according to the play style. In general, they use similar techniques based on the tracking of player actions and using them to adjust a vector of player archetypes.…”

Looking at the Interactive Narrative Experience through the Eyes of the Participants

“…Many researchers have explored the design of interactive narratives integrating believable agents [1], drama managers [2], user modeling [3,4,5], and planning systems [6]. In our view, the design of a good interactive narrative requires the understanding of the participants and their experience.…”