Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The most common approach to creating interactive narrative involves interactive experiences which take place within the constraints of a previously constructed story. In this paper we explore an alternative approach in which participants in a virtual world, e.g., a game, simulation or large online community improvise events. These events form the raw material for the subsequent creation of narrative sequences. Building on the theoretical concept of narrative voices – fictional personas that deliver information in narrative form – we suggest some new approaches to creating narratives from live events. We then present one such approach, embodied reporting agents, in which automated non-player characters inhabiting a virtual world report on ongoing events to editor agents. The editor agents, in turn, compile their information and pass it to presenter agents who ultimately narrate it to external viewers. We sketch how such ‘witness-narrators’ can be used to investigate creation of tension and drama in the interactive story world.

To create human-level stories, story generation systems need extensive common sense knowledge about the world and human psychology. We are exploring a two-step approach to compensate for this lack of world knowledge in a joint research project at ZGDV Darmstadt Digital Storytelling Lab: First, we employ a character-driven drama model to annotate a collection of film scenes, creating an extensible, ‘first-person-perspective’ story grammar to substitute the system’s lacking theory of mind. Second, we imbue the objects in a game world with knowledge how to achieve a dramatic effect on a protagonist within their specific environment. Combining these two sources of knowledge, we hope to create a system that is capable of generating individual educational game stories for role-playing characters in a large variety of game worlds.

In an increasingly fragmented world people’s need to keep and communicate a coherent life narrative is vital. The paper takes as its starting point material presented at Culture Lab’s Personal Narratives seminar in March 2005, as well as other popular forms of personal narrative and discusses their differing structures.

This paper presents the leitmotifs of current research on psychologically colored interactive narration. Virtual Characters, their stories and adventures are in focus, and not the story of the user. The concept of a Capricious Non-Player Character (C-NPC) is introduced as a new kind of agent appropriate for such stories. A C-NPC expects consideration and support, even towards its technological limitations. A narrative educational game is presented that functions as a testbed for the creation of C-NPCs. An overview of the technology employed for dialogue management is provided.

This paper describes the concept development and practical app- lication of tools for editing and reconfiguring video and sound to create stories using broadband application. The material developed is Gods in the Sky Choice , a fully working experimental pilot demonstrator produced as part of the NM2 (New Media for the New Millennium) Integrated Project (IP) of the European 6th Framework Programme Priority 2 (Information Society Technologies) Call 2: Cross-media content for leisure and entertainment <http://www. ist-nm2.org/>

Interactive storytelling is a new area of computing, that brings together computers, interaction and storytelling, with the goal of leading viewers to become active participants in computer supported narrative. Stories become dynamic and emerge in ways perhaps never before explored.

We present a system supporting the re-use and re-purposing of captured video media for an interactive storytelling performance by a human storyteller. The system’s components are based on a philosophy of non-verbal embodied interaction for both media capture and media re-use. The system uses non-verbal interaction sensors during media capture and an augmented reality tangible interface supporting spatial and motion communications affordances during storytelling. We discuss the requirements for an interactive storytelling tool – media retrieval, media re-purposing, and expressive media control – and show how our system design and implementation support these requirements for interactive storytelling. Interface evaluation shows that our system enables communication for storytelling, in particular non-verbal spatial communication. We conclude with a discussion of how our storytelling system is being further developed.

A measure of interactivity not only can quantify the construct of virtual storytelling systems and thus make it possible to find the precise relationship between interactivity and other variables, but also can help ensure the effective development process of virtual storytelling systems. This study proposes a multidimensional scale model to measure the interactivity of conceptually and technologically diverse virtual storytelling systems. Using a survey research method, users’ perceptions of interactivity of virtual storytelling systems were utilized for validating a scale model. This study suggests that multidimensionality should be incorporated into a scale model such as control, synchronicity, and communication. In particular, the findings of this study showed a possibility of sub-dimensions in the control dimension which is mechanical-oriented control and content-oriented control. The sub-dimensions can be explained as diverse features provided to the control dimension of interactivity.

By use of a dance game, and after much input and advice from thirteen year old design consultants, we teach Java programming in a way that will interest middle school girls – a critical age group for addressing gender inequity in programming.

This paper describes a virtual storytelling medium, called Interactive e-Hon , for helping children understand content from the Web or other electronic devices. It works by transforming electronic content into an easily understandable “storybook world.”In this world, easy-to-understand content is generated by creating 3D animations that include content and metaphors, and by using a child-parent model with dialogue expression and a question-answering style comprehensible to children.