Nicolas Szilas

A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL OF AN INTELLIGENT NARRATOR FOR INTERACTIVE NARRATIVES

One goal of interactive narrative and drama is to create an experience while utilizing the computer where the user is one main character in the story. This goal raises a set of practical and theoretical challenges to artificial intelligence. In particular, an intelligent narrator has to dynamically maintain a satisfactory storyline and adapt to the user intervention. After reviewing the existing approaches to interactive drama, an original model is described, based on several theories on narrative. This model is based on a rule-based component for the generation of meaningful narrative actions and on a model of the user for the ranking of these actions and the action selection. A simple but authorable text generation system is also described, for the display of the actions on the computer. The system is implemented on a real-size scenario and experimental results are discussed. We conclude by discussing the possibility of a wider application of our approach within the field of AI.

Authoring Highly Generative Interactive Drama

Authoring non linear narratives is a difficult and challenging issue. In this paper we focus on the process of authoring with the IDtension system, an interactive drama system designed by one of the authors. We report an experiment of realizing a real-size scenario and start from this point to think about nonlinear narratives and the possibilities and limits of the IDtension writing tool.

An implementation of real-time 3D interactive drama

Interactive fiction and adventure video games are narrative genres which provide the player with the option of acting as the main character of the story. However these genres do not fully match the expectations of their authors and readers because the player cannot deeply affect the storyline. This article describes a system integrating highly interactive narrative structures in a real-time 3D environment. Based on a theoretical foundation of narrative and drama, an interactive drama engine (IDE) has been implemented. It comprises an action calculus system, a text-generation system, a behavior engine, an animation engine as well as an innovative adaptive user interface. The IDE is demonstrated with two scenarios.

The IRIS Network of Excellence: Integrating Research in Interactive Storytelling

Interactive Storytelling is a major endeavour to develop new media which could offer a radically new user experience, with a potential to revolutionise digital entertainment. European research in Interactive Storytelling has played a leading role in the development of the field, and this creates a unique opportunity to strengthen its position even further by structuring collaboration between some of its main actors. IRIS (Integrating Research in Interactive Storytelling) aims at creating a virtual centre of excellence that will be able to progress the understanding of fundamental aspects of Interactive Storytelling and the development of corresponding technologies.

Minimal structures for stories

Our research on Interactive Drama aims at conciliating interaction and story at the deepest level, the level of action. From a given story representation formalism, a set of elementary narrative structures is derived in order to capture the minimal requirements for providing a narrative and interactive experience to a user. Some of these structures are implemented and simulated, to illustrate the quality and limitations of each structure.

Stepping into the Interactive Drama

Achieving a successful Interactive Drama where the user can act as a character in the story requires not only finding an algorithmic solution for combining interactivity and narrativity, but also interfacing those algorithms with the user. This paper focuses on the way in which the user can choose the actions of the character. Three specific issues are discussed: the variety of choices proposed to the user, the need for the user to anticipate his/her future possibilities for actions and the time necessary to enter the action. This allows us to propose a taxonomy of different user interfaces and to evaluate the advantages and drawbacks of each category of interface. This should serve as a guideline for the design of user interfaces for Interactive Drama.

PastMaster@storytelling: a controlled interface for interactive drama

In this paper, we describe a controlled interface for Interactive Drama, PastMaster@Storytelling. PastMaster is used for interacting with an Interactive Drama engine. The paper discusses the test results regarding the usability of the interface.

Narrative-driven camera control for cinematic replay of computer games

This paper presents a system that generates cinematic replays for dialogue-based 3D video games. The system exploits the narrative and geometric information present in these games and automatically computes camera framings and edits to build a coherent cinematic replay of the gaming session. We propose a novel importance-driven approach to cinematic replay. Rather than relying on actions performed by characters to drive the cinematography (as in idiom-based approaches), we rely on the importance of characters in the narrative. We first devise a mechanism to compute the varying importance of the characters. We then map importances of characters with different camera specifications, and propose a novel technique that (i) automatically computes camera positions satisfying given specifications, and (ii) provides smooth camera motions when transitioning between different specifications. We demonstrate the features of our system by implementing three camera behaviors (one for master shots, one for shots on the player character, and one for reverse shots). We present results obtained by interfacing our system with a full-fledged serious game (Nothing for Dinner) containing several hours of 3D animated content.

3D simulated interactive drama for teenagers coping with a traumatic brain injury in a parent

This paper describes the current state of a pedagogical immersive 3D story TBI-SIM and the changes that have been made to it. The system is a narrative simulation in a fully immersive 3D world in which the user controls a character that can interact with non-player characters (NPCs). The users achieve goals and make decisions that have an impact on the course of the story.

Propositions for innovative forms of digital interactive storytelling based on narrative theories and practices

This paper takes a look at narrative forms as of yet unexplored in the field of digital interactive storytelling, and proposes methods for how they can be used in engaging ways for the user. Digital Interactive Storytelling, while nearly two decades old as a field of research, has yet to produce a tool capable of producing masses of narratively interesting and engaging pieces for the end user. Although the various prototypes available produce several different story genres, they stem from the same classic narrative form. With this paper, we aim to introduce narrative techniques that have successfully been used in cinema, literature and the gaming world, and show how they can be adapted to DIS. We believe that by presenting these techniques authors can gain a better understanding of how to use existing systems.