Nick Montfort

Curveship's automatic narrative style

Curveship, a Python framework for developing interactive fiction (IF) with narrative style, is described. The system simulates a world with locations, characters, and objects, providing the typical facilities of an IF development system. To these it adds the ability to generate text and to change the telling of events and description of items using high-level narrative parameters, so that, for instance, different actors can be focalized and events can be told out of order. By assigning a character to be narrator or moving the narrator in time, the system can determine grammatical specifics and render the text in a new narrative style. Curveship offers those interested in narrative systems a way to experiment with changes in the narrative discourse; for interactive fiction authors and those who wish to use of the system as a component of their own, it is a way to create powerful new types of narrative experiences. The templates used for language generation in Curveship, the string-with-slots representation, shows that there is a compromise between highly flexible but extremely difficult-to-author abstract syntax representations and simple strings, which are easy to write but extremely inflexible. The development of the system has suggested ways to refine narrative theory, offering new understandings of how narrative distance can be understood as being composed of lower-level changes in narrative and how the order of events is better represented as an ordered tree than a simple sequence.

Textual tinkerability: encouraging storytelling behaviors to foster emergent literacy

This paper presents textual tinkerability, a new concept for fostering early literacy skills during parent-child reading. Textual tinkerability maps storytelling gestures to changes in animation and text to assist reading exploration and demonstration of the link between text, spoken word, and concept. TinkRBooks are flexible tablet-based storybooks that allow readers to actively explore concepts in text using textual tinkerability. When reading TinkRBooks, both parents and children can alter text (character attributes and parts of speech) by manipulating story elements (props and characters) as they read. We demonstrate how textual tinkerability encourages more dialog, print referencing and dialogic questioning between parent-child dyads in shared reading as compared to paper books. In addition, our study reports observations of storytelling performance behaviors that foster playful and socially intimate shared reading behaviors that are closely mapped to the teaching and learning of emergent literacy skills.

nARratives of augmented worlds

This paper presents an examination of augmented reality (AR) as a rising form of interactive narrative that combines computer-generated elements with reality, fictional with non-fictional objects, in the same immersive experience. Based on contemporary theory in narratology, we propose to view this blending of reality worlds as a metalepsis, a transgression of reality and fiction boundaries, and argue that authors could benefit from using existing conventions of narration to emphasize the transgressed boundaries, as is done in other media. Our contribution is three-fold, first we analyze the inherent connection between narrative, immersion, interactivity, fictionality and AR using narrative theory, and second we comparatively survey actual works in AR narratives from the past 15 years based on these elements from the theory. Lastly, we postulate a future for AR narratives through the perspective of the advancing technologies of both interactive narratives and AR.

Random and Raster: Display Technologies and the Development of Videogames

Videogame developers have utilized many types of display technology, from oscilloscopes to Teletypes to high-definition LCD displays. Two significant early display technologies, raster scan and random scan CRTs, played a significant part in the history and evolution of videogames. A study of these technologies shows how the choice of one or the other, and the need to port games between the two, influenced game design and prompted developers to innovate.

Guest Editorial: Computational Narrative and Games

The eleven articles in this special issue focus on the use of computational modeling in developing the narratives for video programs and online games. Narratives are perceived tob e central to cultures, to the ways people communicate, and, many have argued, to cognition itself. The articles in this issue explore these issues and reports on technologies and computer applications that support narative programming.

A reading of skeleton seas of mare incognitum : an interactive fiction expedition in curveship

Skeletons of Mare Incognitum (The Unkown Sea) is an interactive fiction (IF) work developed by Fox Harrell. This work was written using Curveship [1, 2], a platform for implementing works of IF that offers a range of affordances for narrative variation such as flashbacks, temporal movement of the narrator, and changes in voice.