The Story We Cannot See: On How a Retelling Relates to Its Afterstory

Generative comics: a character evolution approach for creating fictional comics

“…The notion of emergent narrative resulting from the interaction of autonomous agents was introduced by (Aylett 1999), and further explored, e.g. in (Louchart and Aylett 2004;Larsen, Bruni, and Schoenau-Fog 2019). To create more structured plots, a number of researchers introduced intermediate approaches where agents are guided in their actions.…”

Embedded Narratives in Procedurally Generated Environments

“…As environmental storytelling in general is less directly curated by the game designers there is more leverage for the player to generate his own narrative understanding. The narrative process even in an embedded narrative can very much be treated as an emergent narrative by the definitions in Larsen et al (2019). From the designers point of view, they merely create and present events to the player, but without an author there is no one but the player to curate those events into a coherent story.…”

“…This can be done in multiple ways like asking directly what they thought the plot was or more indirect ways like having them retell the narrative with a specific focalisation (Hoek et al, 2014). Larsen et al (2019) defines the term "Afterstory" which is the narrative that a specific receiver generates and are left with after the narrative experience is over.…”

“…The afterstory can vary greatly from person to person in a more emergent game or be more similar in a linear game, but there will always be subtle nuances, since the player's interpretation, reading, and feeling of narrativity will be different, even in a completely scripted sequence. (Larsen et al, 2019) To get the afterstory from the receiver a method also proposed by Larsen et al (2019) is retelling. The retelling is a new narrative that is created from the afterstory when the receiver retells the narrative they experienced, their afterstory.…”

“…This questionnaire also provides an insight into how the narrative understanding is for the player. We have however developed our own method for testing the player's narrative understanding based off the works of Larsen et al (2019) and Bruni and Baceviciute (2013) creating a method for comparing the AAD to the player's experience. This further enables us to not only compare the internal coherency for each individual player, but to compare the external consistency between players.…”