Interactive storytelling (also known as interactive drama) is a form of
digital entertainment Digital entertainment Industry includes, but is not restricted to, any combination of the following industries (that themselves have a considerable degree of overlap):
*digital media
*new media
*video on demand
*video games
*interactive entertainmen ...
in which the storyline is not predetermined. The author creates the setting, characters, and situation which the narrative must address, but the user (also reader or player) experiences a unique story based on their interactions with the story world. The architecture of an interactive storytelling program includes a drama manager, user model, and agent model to control, respectively, aspects of narrative production, player uniqueness, and character knowledge and behavior. Together, these systems generate characters that act "human," alter the world in real-time reactions to the player, and ensure that new narrative events unfold comprehensibly.
The field of study surrounding interactive storytelling encompasses many disparate fields, including
psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...
,
sociology
Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of Interpersonal ties, social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of Empirical ...
,
cognitive science,
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
,
natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...
,
user interface design
User interface (UI) design or user interface engineering is the design of user interfaces for machines and software, such as computers, home appliances, mobile devices, and other electronic devices, with the focus on maximizing usability and the ...
,
computer science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...
, and emergent intelligence. They fall under the umbrella term of
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), at the intersection of hard science and the humanities. The difficulty of producing an effective interactive storytelling system is attributed to the ideological division between professionals in each field: artists have trouble constraining themselves to logical and linear systems and programmers are disinclined to appreciate or incorporate the abstract and unproven concepts of the humanities.
Definition
What characteristics distinguish an interactive story from another form of
interactive media
Interactive media normally refers to products and services on digital computer-based systems which respond to the user's actions by presenting content such as text, moving image, animation, video and audio. Since its early conception, various fo ...
is subject to much debate.
Interactivity
Across the many fields concerned with interactivity, including information science, computer science, human-computer interaction, communication, and industrial design, there is little agreement over the meaning of the term "interactivity", but m ...
and
storytelling
Storytelling is the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatrics or embellishment. Every culture has its own stories or narratives, which are shared as a means of entertainment, education, cultural pre ...
are both
polysemic
Polysemy ( or ; ) is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, a morpheme, a word, or a phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from ''monosemy'', where a word has a single ...
terms, and the phrase "interactive storytelling" does not inherently distinguish it from other kinds of storytelling, many of which are already interactive to some extent. Some of the literature associated with the term "interactive storytelling" is actually about
transmedia storytelling
Transmedia storytelling (also known as transmedia narrative or multiplatform storytelling) is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies.
From a producti ...
, which is not a form of entertainment, but a marketing strategy for building a compelling
brand
A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's good or service from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for recognition and, importantly, to create an ...
across digital platforms. Varying levels of interactivity are a function of the "relatedness of transmitted messages with previous exchanges of information where sender and receiver roles become interchangeable." Storytelling, in this case, refers to the process of active creation and authoring rather than the final product and its passive reception. Interactive storytelling by this definition can entail any media that allows the user to generate several unique dramatic narratives. Though its final goal is a fully unauthored AI environment with a comprehensive human-level understanding of narrative construction (i.e., the
Holodeck
The Holodeck is a fictional device from the television franchise ''Star Trek'' which uses "holograms" (projected light and electromagnetic energy which create the illusion of solid objects) to create a realistic 3D simulation of a real or imag ...
), projects that use branching stories and variable gates are considered experimental prototypes in the same genre.
Interactive storytelling is defined as distinct from
interactive fiction
''
Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the ...
(or IF), as well as video games with strong narrative focus (''
Mass Effect
''Mass Effect'' is a military science fiction media franchise created by Casey Hudson, Drew Karpyshyn and Preston Watamaniuk. The franchise depicts a distant future where humanity and several alien civilizations have colonized the known univers ...
'', ''
BioShock
''BioShock'' is a 2007 first-person shooter game developed by 2K Boston (later Irrational Games) and 2K Australia, and published by 2K Games. The first game in the ''BioShock'' series, it was released for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 pla ...
'', etc.), by
user agency and
open-ended narrative.
David Gaider
David Gaider is a Canadian Narrative Designer and writer. He was the lead writer and creator of the setting for the role-playing video game series ''Dragon Age''.
He worked for Edmonton, Alberta-located game developer BioWare from 1999 to 2016, ...
, an RPG developer at
BioWare
BioWare is a Canadian video game developer based in Edmonton, Alberta. It was founded in 1995 by newly graduated Doctor of Medicine, medical doctors Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk and Augustine Yip, alongside Trent Oster, Brent Oster, and Marcel Zes ...
, stated that "every possible branch needs to be written and fully realized, even if not every player sees it, and thus any game which allows for a lot of player choice becomes a much more expensive proposition for a developer." IF and video games, to balance user choice with authorial effort, must constrain the directions the narrative can take with puzzles, battles, or unchangeable plot points and bottlenecks, all of which detract from a sense of immersion. Only the most critical of the user's narrative choices are used or remembered in narrative development, according to the need to fulfill specific player goals that define a "gameplay" experience. A true IS system would incorporate all of them, as do living human agents, simultaneously and continuously - a task only artificial intelligence can meet. Sandbox games like ''
The Sims
''The Sims'' is a series of life simulation video games developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. The franchise has sold nearly 200 million copies worldwide, and it is one of the best-selling video game series of all time.
The games ...
'' and ''
Spore
In biology, a spore is a unit of sexual or asexual reproduction that may be adapted for dispersal and for survival, often for extended periods of time, in unfavourable conditions. Spores form part of the life cycles of many plants, algae, f ...
'', which do involve extensive AI-based social interaction, do not manage dramatic tension or produce a cohesive narrative .
To Mateas and Stern, creators of ''
Façade
A façade () (also written facade) is generally the front part or exterior of a building. It is a Loanword, loan word from the French language, French (), which means 'frontage' or 'face'.
In architecture, the façade of a building is often t ...
'' and ''The Party'', interactive storytelling is best understood as interactive theater, in that its goal is dramatic meaning rather than fun. It was
Chris Crawford who coined the term interactive storytelling in the 1990s, arguing that IS is not a video game with a narrative, and that a game and IS cannot be combined successfully. Because of limited technology and the amount of work required, it is still difficult to combine a robust interactive storytelling system and a game engine without detracting from the effectiveness of both.
Emerging voices in the field, however, argue for the possibilities of adding narrative complexity and realistic characters to existing video game genres. Using MADE (Massive Artificial Drama Engine), a team of AI researchers developed a
genetic algorithm
In computer science and operations research, a genetic algorithm (GA) is a metaheuristic inspired by the process of natural selection that belongs to the larger class of evolutionary algorithms (EA). Genetic algorithms are commonly used to gene ...
to guide emergent behavior for secondary non-player characters (NPCs) based on
literary archetypes. In the
AI engine of ''
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim'', this was tested to elaborate on the mechanistic behavior of townspeople:
History
Early attempts to understand interactive storytelling date back to the 1970s with such efforts as
Roger Schank
Roger Carl Schank (born 1946) is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur.
Beginning in the late 1960s, he pioneered conceptual dependency theory (within th ...
's research at Northwestern University and the experimental program TaleSpin. In the early 1980s Michael Liebowitz developed "Universe", a conceptual system for a kind of interactive storytelling. In 1986,
Brenda Laurel
Brenda Laurel (born 1950) is an American interaction designer, video game designer, and researcher. She is an advocate for diversity and inclusiveness in video games, a "pioneer in developing virtual reality", a public speaker, and an academic. ...
published her PhD dissertation, "Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System."
During the 1990s, a number of research projects began to appear, such as the Oz Project led by Dr. Joseph Bates and
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
, the Software Agents group at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
, the Improv Project led by Ken Perlin at
New York University
New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin.
In 1832, the ...
, and the Virtual Theater group at Stanford, led by
Barbara Hayes-Roth
Barbara Hayes-Roth is an American computer scientist and psychologist whose research in artificial intelligence includes work on knowledge acquisition, automated planning and scheduling, spatial cognition, the blackboard system, adaptation, and ...
.
There were also a number of conferences touching upon these subjects, such as the Workshop on Interactive Fiction & Synthetic Realities in 1990; Interactive Story Systems: Plot & Character at Stanford in 1995; the AAAI Workshop on AI and Entertainment, 1996; Lifelike Computer Characters, Snowbird, Utah, October 1996; the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents at Marina del Rey, CA. February 5–8, 1997.
The first conference to directly address the research area was the 1st International Conference on Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment, which took place in March 2003 and focused specifically on concepts and first prototypes for automated storytelling and autonomous characters, including modeling of emotions and the user experience. The concepts were developed by
Chris Crawford, in his 2005 book.
In the 2000s, work on interactive storytelling and related topics expanded, and was presented at events including the alternating bi-yearly conferences, TIDSE (Conference on Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment) and ICVS (International Conference on Virtual Storytelling), hosted in Germany and France, respectively. TIDSE and ICVS were superseded by ICIDS (International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling), a yearly event established in 2008.
The first published interactive storytelling software that was widely recognized as the "real thing" was ''
Façade
A façade () (also written facade) is generally the front part or exterior of a building. It is a Loanword, loan word from the French language, French (), which means 'frontage' or 'face'.
In architecture, the façade of a building is often t ...
'', created by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. The system was publicly released in 2006, and was the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006
Slamdance Independent Games Festival.
Strategies
The architecture of an interactive storytelling system has three component parts: a drama manager, a user model, and an agent model. The drama manager is responsible for guiding the narrative by searching and executing story "beats" in a coherent sequence, refining story events by providing new information and reconciling contradictory plots, and collaborating with the agent model to choose the best narrative actions for the characters. It monitors a number of overview variables in the storyworld to make the best decision for the narrative, defined by the goals of the author: a measure of worldwide conflict would help to increase or decrease dramatic tension, while measures of relationships and likability could guide a story towards a romantic storyline. The agent model collects information about the story world and characters and generates possible actions in response for each non-player character in the story. Possible actions are drawn from the personality and emotional model of the character, allowing each one to exhibit autonomous behavior with intelligent dramatic goals. Finally, the user model keeps track of player choices and inputs, such that the drama manager and agent model can cooperate with the way the user attempts to play rather than challenging or misunderstanding their decisions.
Crawford discusses three potential strategies for developing interactive storytelling systems. Firstly, environmental approaches are those which take an interactive system, such as a computer game, and encourage the actions of a user in such a way as to form a coherent plot. With a sufficiently complex system, emergent behavior may form story-like behavior regardless of the user's actions.
Secondly, data-driven strategies have a library of "story components" which are sufficiently general that they can be combined smoothly in response to a user's actions (or lack thereof). This approach has the advantage of being more general that the directed environmental approach, at the cost of a much larger initial investment.
Finally, language-based approaches require that the user and system share some, very limited, domain-specific language so that they can react to each other and the system can 'understand' a greater proportion of the users actions. Crawford suggests approaches that only use, for example, pictorial languages or restricted versions of English.
Planning-based systems can be integrated into any of the above approaches to ensure narrative cohesion. The system does this by anticipating potential holes in the plot and repairing them by introducing new information and events. Two such systems include Automated Story Director (ASD), which forms narrative repairs based on plot points predefined by the author, and Player-Specific Automated Storytelling (PAST), which chooses from several possible repairs according to the player's previous behaviors. PAST characterizes a player along five vectors of style based on
Robin Laws
Robin D. Laws (born October 14, 1964 in Orillia, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian writer and game designer who lives in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of a number of novels and role-playing games as well as an anthologist.
Career
Robin D. Laws ...
' work on player types—fighter, power gamer, storyteller, method actor, and tactician—and may choose to solve a broken plot point for a fighter by adding a battle with a new character, or for a storyteller by adding new background information that justifies the break.
Evaluation
The success of an interactive storytelling experience depends on a balanced
dramatic structure
Dramatic structure (also known as dramaturgical structure) is the structure of a dramatic work such as a book, play, or film. There are different kinds of dramatic structures worldwide which have been hypothesized by critics, writers and scholar ...
and user agency. A dramatically interesting narrative experience is one that moderates tension between characters and events over time, such that conflicts arise logically and are not left without resolution. It must also differ noticeably on every "playthrough" as a function of the user's freedom to interact with characters and objects in the virtual world. This can be achieved to varying degrees of success by branching, emergent, character-driven, and plot-driven systems, but no existing system fully achieves a lifelike experience. AIs do not yet have a human grasp of the rules of drama and narrative, so existing interactive dramas produce a limited number of significantly different story outcomes, relative to the amount of labor required of the author.
There have been several attempts at formalizing an evaluation system for interactive dramas, despite the fact that all existing projects are still in experimental stages. Player agency and fun remain the primary concerns, though fun is often exchanged for more narrative-specific metrics, like "interestingness" and "suspense." Likert scales filled out by players create a rough quantitative picture of user experience, but leave out much of the subjective interpretation that lies behind complex human interactions.
Mehta et al. focused on conversation-centric systems to develop qualitative metrics for the user's successful engagements, instead of quantitative measures of "inappropriate utterances" (in which the AI misunderstands player input and responds nonsensically) and other technical failures. After a "breakdown" in conversation, how effectively the user incorporates it into the overall understanding of the characters and story depends on design features. In their study of ''Façade'', some AI actor breakdowns include shallow semantic understanding, inverted meanings, and the timing of responses. Artificially intelligent agents have trouble translating ambiguous user input into the limited narrative meaning system, as when "sad" or "hurt" is interpreted only as a reference to clinical depression. Similarly, negative and positive user sentiments are often confused with one another, especially if a positive statement is preceded by disagreement with a negative one. This is exacerbated if a user cannot send a reply fast enough – their utterance is understood as referring to the most recent speaker, leading to unintended interactions. However, background information is referenced often enough for a player to invent narrative justifications for apparently strange behaviors, which most participants did.
Projects
The Oz Project
''The Oz Project'' was an attempt in the early 1990s to use intelligent agent technology to attack the challenges in IS. Its architecture included a simulated physical world, several characters, an interactor, a theory of presentation, and a drama manager. Users communicated with the system using either a text based or graphical interface.
''Façade''
''Façade'' is an artificial-intelligence-based approach created by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. It was the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Slamdance Independent Games Festival and is recognized as the first true interactive storytelling software. It is text based and uses natural language processing and other artificial intelligence routines to direct the action.
HEFTI
The ''Hybrid Evolutionary-Fuzzy Time-based Interactive'' (HEFTI) storytelling system was produced at the
University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...
and uses genetic algorithms to recombine and evaluate story components generated from a set of story templates. Although Crawford described it as the "wrong approach to development systems
..incomprehensible to the kind of creative talent needed for storytelling," it continues to be discussed as a research and approach and genetic algorithm continue to be considered a potential tool for use in the area.
Library of story traces
Figa and Tarau have used
WordNet
WordNet is a lexical database of semantic relations between words in more than 200 languages. WordNet links words into semantic relations including synonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms. The synonyms are grouped into '' synsets'' with short definition ...
to build technologies useful to interactive storytelling. This approach defines 'story traces' as an abstract reduction (or skeleton) of a story, and 'story projection' as a fragment of a story that can be treated as a single dramatic building block. This work seeks to build up large repositories of narrative forms in such a way that these forms can later be combined.
Interactive narrative design
As defined by Stephen Dinehart, Interactive narrative design combines
ludology
Game studies, also known as ludology (from ''ludus'', "game", and ''-logia'', "study", "research"), is the study of games, the act of playing them, and the players and cultures surrounding them. It is a field of cultural studies that deals with a ...
,
narratology
Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. It is an anglicisation of French ''narratologie'', coined by Tzvetan Todorov (''Grammaire du Décaméron'', 1969). Its theoretical li ...
and
game design
Game design is the art of applying design and aesthetics to create a game for entertainment or for educational, exercise, or experimental purposes. Increasingly, elements and principles of game design are also applied to other interactions, in ...
to form interactive entertainment development methodologies. Interactive entertainment experiences allow the player to witness data as navigable, participatory, and dramatic in real-time: “a narratological craft which focuses on the
structuralist, or
literary
Literature is any collection of Writing, written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to ...
semiotic
Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes ( semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something ...
creation of stories." Interactive Narrative design seeks to accomplish this via viewer/user/player (VUP) navigated dataspaces.
Interactive narrative design focuses on creating meaningful participatory story experiences with interactive systems. The aim is to transport the player through play into the videogame (dataspace) using their visual and auditory senses. When interactive narrative design is successful, the VUP (viewer/user/player) believes that they are experiencing a story.
Generative web series
''Tour-Réservoir'' is the first generative web series, conceived by French artist Jean Michel Bruyère and his collective LFKs. Launched in 2016, it was developed and realised in co-operation with Le Volcan - Scène nationale du Havre, 296 inhabitants from a suburb of the city of Le Havre in France and more than 100 local music groups.
The website platform offers an active visit through five media – radio, TV, book, series, music video. The users can choose among a wide range of material which topics, actress(es) and music they want to appear/listen to and they can edit their own episodes or music videos.
It was nominated at the Côté Court
short film festival in Pantin (Paris) in the New Media category in 2017.
Summary table
Story possibilities are not precisely calculable, and are represented as orders, such that O(10) would be in the order of tens of stories, and O(1) would be fewer than 10 unique story possibilities.
See also
*
Interactive media
Interactive media normally refers to products and services on digital computer-based systems which respond to the user's actions by presenting content such as text, moving image, animation, video and audio. Since its early conception, various fo ...
*
Types of fiction with multiple endings
A narrative typically ends in one set way, but certain kinds of narrative allow for multiple endings.
Comics
* ''The Death-Ray'' by Daniel Clowes.
* '' Cliff Hanger''.
Literature
* The ''Choose Your Own Adventure'' series.
* ''Fighting Fantas ...
*
Narrative Structure: Interactive narration
*
Interactive fiction
''
Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the ...
*
Drama annotation
*
Visual novel
A , often abbreviated as VN, is a form of digital semi-interactive fiction. Visual novels are often associated with and used in the medium of video games, but are not always labeled as such themselves. They combine a textual narrative with sta ...
*
Ergodic literature
Ergodic literature is a term coined by Espen J. Aarseth in his book ''Cybertext—Perspectives on Ergodic Literature'' to describe literature in which nontrivial effort is required for the reader to traverse the text. The term is derived fr ...
*
Cybertext
Cybertext is the organization of text in order to analyze the influence of the medium as an integral part of the literary dynamic, as defined by Espen Aarseth in 1997. Aarseth defined it as a type of ergodic literature where user traverses the te ...
References
Bibliography
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Further reading
*
*
*
*{{cite book
, last=Bhatty
, first=Michael
, author-link=Michael Bhatty
, title=Interaktives Story Telling: Zur historischen Entwicklung und konzeptionellen Strukturierung interaktiver Geschichten
, publisher=Shaker Verlag
, isbn=978-3826567179
, date=January 1999
External links
"Video Games are Dead: A Chat with Storytronics Guru Chris Crawford" Gamasutra
''Game Developer'', known as ''Gamasutra'' until 2021, is a website founded in 1997 that focuses on aspects of video game development. It is owned and operated by Informa and acts as the online sister publication to the print magazine '' Gam ...
Erasmatazz- More information by
Chris Crawford.
ICIDS — Interactive Storytelling hub of the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling series (includes ICVS and TIDSE)
Interactive Storytelling and Narrative Theories wikiGrouping descriptions of various narrative theories, IS systems and the computational models behind the systems.
Computational Narrative Intelligence: Past, Present, and FutureAn overview of the history and the future of Computational Narrative Intelligence.
Entertainment Intelligence LabThe Website of the Entertainment Intelligence Lab of Georgia institute of Technology, which focus on the research of narrative intelligence and the application of Interactive storytelling.
Video game design
*
Storytelling
Emergent gameplay