Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The goal of this research is to lay the foundations for a formal theory of drama, that abstracts from the procedural and interactive aspects involved in the generation of dramatic content. Based on the structural accounts provided from traditional drama analysis, the theory proposed in this paper exploits an agent-based perspective on characters to provide a goal-based characterization of dramatic qualities.

We have performed a quantitative study in order to find out the emotional spectrum of Virtual Storytelling in comparison with movies, taking into consideration the Russell’s emotional circumplex model. Via internet forums we gathered videogames that people considered to be capable of eliciting each of the seven basic emotions, distributed around the circumplex. From the 200 videogames collected, we chose 14, following the principle of the two most cited for each of the seven emotions. These videogames were then tested with 33 subjects. These results were compared with Gross & Levenson (1995) study on movies. We found that these videogames were capable of successfully eliciting emotions such as Surprise, Anger, Disgust and Fear. There is also evidence that Happiness could be elicited. It was not possible to verify the existence of Tranquility. The most problematic was Sadness, except when interactivity was absent and emotion propelled through cutscenes.

This paper describes how conversational expressive agents can be used in the context of Interactive Drama. This integration requires some automatic tagging of the generated text, according to the current dramatic situation. Experimental results of the implemented prototype are presented.

In interactive fiction or drama the author’s role in manipulating the user into dramatic situations is as important in the construction of the user’s sense of ”agency,” as concerns about the her freedom and choice.

This work proposes an integrated model – the environment expression model – which supports storytelling through three channels: cinematography, illumination and music. Stories are modeled as a set of points of interest which can be characters, dialogues or sceneries. At each instant, audience’s focus is drawn to the highest priority point of interest. Expression channels reflect the type and emotional state of this point of interest. A study, using a cartoon-like application, was also conducted to evaluate the model. Results were inconclusive regarding influence on story interpretation but, succeeded in showing preference for stories told with environment expression.

What is the future of interactive entertainment? Can we tap deeper emotions? Can we go beyond game-like experiences to create powerful interactive literary narratives? Are these even meaningful questions? In this paper I will address one possible way to make these questions meaningful, and one possible path to their answer.

This paper examines the causes and consequences of the narrative paradox phenomenon widely observed in VR. We present an alternative approach to virtual and interactive storytelling in the form of the emergent narrative concept, together with an implementation of a subset of these ideas in the FearNot! demonstrator.

This paper presents a visual editor which supports authors to define the narrative macrostructure of non-linear interactive dramas. This authoring tool was used to represent Propp’s narrative macrostructure of Russian fairy tales in non-linear plot graphs. Moreover, Propp’s thorough characterization of basic narrative constituents by explanations, discussions and examples of their different realizations in his corpus is utilized to construct an automatic classification model. A semi-automatic classification supports (i) authors to associate new scenes with basic narrative constituents and (ii) players to control the narrative flow in the story engine. For the latter task, the selection of an appropriate plot element and behavioral pattern within the dialog model in response to player interactions is controlled by similarities between stimuli and known realizations of basic narrative constituents or behavioral patterns. This approach tackles the main challenge of interactive drama — to balance interactivity and storyness .

Techniques and rules, that promise a particularly effective way to tell stories, have been developed over hundreds of years. Hereby, from a technical point of view, various storymodels or story patterns might be derived from these approaches to create and tell new stories. Within the first phase of the INSCAPE project, several of these models origined in different genres such as film, theatre or fairy tales have been analysed with respect to its possible usage as templates within authoring environments for interative storytelling applications.

In this contribution we demonstrate how metadata for storytelling is represented using Semantic Web technologies. Three examples introduce the use of ontologies for the modelling of a database for story elements, for narratie structures, and for the domain of a game.