Writing a good story requires immense patience, creativity and work from the author, and the practice of writing a story requires a good grasp of the readers' psychology to create suspense and thrills and to merge the readers' world with that of the story. In the digital writing space, authors can still adhere to these rules of thumb while being aware of the disappearance of certain constraints due to the added possibility of narrating in a nonlinear fashion. There are many overlapping approaches to interactive storytelling or authoring, but each of the approaches has its own strengths and weaknesses. The motivation for this research arises from the perceived need for a new hybrid approach that coalesces and extends existing approaches. Since each of the approaches empowers certain aspects of the storytelling and narration process, the result forces a new research direction which eliminates certain weaknesses exhibited by a single approach, due to the synergistic nature of the various approaches. We have developed: 1) a Hybrid Evolutionary-Fuzzy Time-based Interactive (HEFTI) storytellling engine that generates dynamic stories from a set of authored story constructs given by human authors; 2) a set of authoring tools that allow authors to generate the needed story constructs; and, 3) a storytelling environment for them to orchestrate a digital stage play with computer agents and scripts. We have conducted a usability study and system evaluation to evaluate the performance of the engine. Our experiments and usability study have shown that the authoring environment abstracted the complexity of authoring an interactive, dynamic story from the authors with the use of windows-based interfaces to help them visualize various aspects of a story. This reduces the amount of learning and knowledge required to start having the pleasure of authoring dynamic stories. The studies also revealed certain features and tools that may be reflected by authoring tools in the future to automate various aspects of the authoring process so that the authors may spend more time thinking rather than writing (or programming) their stories.

This work explores the possibility of Interactive Storytelling being able to mediate meanings of Chinese Characters used in the Japanese language, or kanji, and successful learning foundations of kanji. A great inspiration for this work was Dr. James Heisig and his series of books “Remembering the Kanji”. The advanced learning principles he proposed were used as a foundation to create an interactive storytelling experience prototype to test if students were able to pick up on said learning strategies and also meanings of kanji. Furthermore, to ensure didactical correctness of the software teachers of Japanese and Japanese studies were asked as well to participate in the test phase with the request for didactic feedback. The obtained results showed that learnability was improved, speaking for the future prospects of this project.

Because games set in persistent virtual game worlds (VGWs) have massive numbers of players, these games need methods of characterisation for playable characters (PCs) that differ from the methods used in traditional narrative media. VGWs have a number of particularly interesting qualities. Firstly, VGWs are places where players interact with and create elements carrying narrative potential. Secondly, players add goals, motives and driving forces to the narrative potential of a VGW, which sometimes originates from the ordinary world. Thirdly, the protagonists of the world are real people, and when acting in the world their characterisation is not carried out by an author, but expressed by players characterising their PCs. How they can express themselves in ways that characterise them depend on what they can do, and how they can do it, and this characterising action potential (CAP) is defined by the game design of particular VGWs. In this thesis, two main questions are explored. Firstly, how can CAP be designed to support players in expressing consistent characters in VGWs? Secondly, how can VGWs support role-play in their rule-systems? By using iterative design, I explore the design space of CAP by building a semiautonomous agent structure, the Mind Module (MM) and apply it in five experimental prototypes where the design of CAP and other game features is derived from the MM. The term semiautonomy is used because the agent structure is designed to be used by a PC, and is thus partly controlled by the system and partly by the player. The MM models a PC’s personality as a collection of traits, maintains dynamic emotional state as a function of interactions with objects in the environment, and summarises a PC’s current emotional state in terms of ‘mood’. The MM consists of a spreading-activation network of affect nodes that are interconnected by weighted relationships. There are four types of affect node: personality trait nodes, emotion nodes, mood nodes, and sentiment nodes. The values of the nodes defining the personality traits of characters govern an individual PC’s state of mind through these weighted relationships, resulting in values characterising for a PC’s personality. The sentiment nodes constitute emotionally valenced connections between entities. For example, a PC can ‘feel’ anger toward another PC. This thesis also describes a guided paper-prototype play-test of the VGW prototype World of Minds, in which the game mechanics build upon the MM’s model of personality and emotion. In a case study of AI-based game design, lessons learned from the test are presented. The participants in the test were able to form and communicate mental models of the MM and game mechanics, validating the design and giving valuable feedback for further development. Despite the constrained scenarios presented to test players, they discovered interesting, alternative strategies, indicating that for game design the ‘mental physics’ of the MM may open up new possibilities. The results of the play-test influenced the further development of the MM as it was used in the digital VGW prototype the Pataphysic Institute. In the Pataphysic Institute the CAP of PCs is largely governed by their mood. Depending on which mood PCs are in they can cast different ‘spells’, which affect values such as mental energy, resistance and emotion in their targets. The mood also governs which ‘affective actions’ they can perform toward other PCs and what affective actions they are receptive to. By performing affective actions on each other PCs can affect each others’ emotions, which - if they are strong - may result in sentiments toward each other. PCs’ personalities govern the individual fluctuations of mood and emotions, and define which types of spell PCs can cast. Formalised social relationships such as friendships affect CAP, giving players more energy, resistance, and other benefits. PCs’ states of mind are reflected in the VGW in the form of physical manifestations that emerge if an emotion is very strong. These manifestations are entities which cast different spells on PCs in close proximity, depending on the emotions that the manifestations represent. PCs can also partake in authoring manifestations that become part of the world and the game-play in it. In the Pataphysic Institute potential story structures are governed by the relations the sentiment nodes constitute between entities.

Balancing passive and interactive experiences within a narrative experience is an area of research that has broad applicability to the video game, cinematic, and comic book industries. Each of these media formats has attempted various experiments in interactive experience. The goal of this research was to better understand how to construct an interactive narrative experience that preserves the integrity of the author's story, but allows for inspired interaction by a willing audience. A study was designed to test three different conditions. The two control conditions were examples of passive narrative storytelling: the Comic Book Condition and the Cinematic Condition. The experimental condition was a hybrid format of interactive and passive storytelling, wherein the participant had the opportunity to interact with the story to further engage with the narrative world. Participants used a mobile tablet to experience each format, geared toward minimizing the separation of the participant from the story. Touch / swipe interactions were used for the hybrid format to create as intuitive of an experience as possible. Narrative Transportation, engagement, and flow were the primary evaluators of the narrative's effectiveness for each participant. An analysis of the data showed that, in general, the current Beyond Panels framework was not effective in producing higher levels of reported Narrative Transportation, engagement, or flow. However, of those participants in the Beyond Panels condition, those that interacted more consistently throughout the experience did report higher Narrative Transportation compared to those that had minimal interaction. Data was collected to better understand the relationship that optional interactivity has with these factors. The results of this study will help to further research in the areas of interactive storytelling for mobile platforms. The results will be used to continue to evolve a framework for this hybrid storytelling format called Beyond Panels.

Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) constitutes a research field that emerged from several areas of art, creation and computer science. It inquires technologies and possible artefacts that allow ‘highly-interactive’ experiences of digital worlds with compelling stories. However, the situation for story creators approaching ‘highly-interactive’ storytelling is complex. There is a gap between the available technology, which requires programming and prior knowledge in Artificial Intelligence, and established models of storytelling, which are too linear to have the potential to be highly interactive. This thesis reports on research that lays the ground for bridging this gap, leading to novel creation philosophies in future work. A design research process has been pursued, which centred on the suggestion of conceptual models, explaining a) process structures of interdisciplinary development, b) interactive story structures including the user of the interactive story system, and c) the positioning of human authors within semi-automated creative processes. By means of ‘implicit creation’, storytelling and modelling of simulated worlds are reconciled. The conceptual models are informed by exhaustive literature review in established neighbouring disciplines. These are a) creative principles in different storytelling domains, such as screenwriting, video game writing, role playing and improvisational theatre, b) narratological studies of story grammars and structures, and c) principles of designing interactive systems, in the areas of basic HCI design and models, discourse analysis in conversational systems, as well as game- and simulation design. In a case study of artefact building, the initial models have been put into practice, evaluated and extended. These artefacts are a) a conceived authoring tool (‘Scenejo’) for the creation of digital conversational stories, and b) the development of a serious game (‘The Killer Phrase Game’) as an application development. The study demonstrates how starting out from linear storytelling, iterative steps of ‘implicit creation’ can lead to more variability and interactivity in the designed interactive story. In the concrete case, the steps included abstraction of dialogues into conditional actions, and creating a dynamic world model of the conversation. This process and artefact can be used as a model illustrating non-programmer approaches to ‘implicit creation’ in a learning process. Research demonstrates that the field of Interactive Digital Storytelling still has to be further advanced until general creative principles can be fully established, which is a long-term endeavour, dependent upon environmental factors. It also requires further technological developments. The gap is not yet closed, but it can be better explained. The research results build groundwork for education of prospective authors. Concluding the thesis, IDS-specific creative principles have been proposed for evaluation in future work.

Indexter is a plan-based model of narrative that incorporates cognitive scientific theories about the salience—or prominence in memory—of narrative events. A pair of Indexter events can share up to five indices with one another: protagonist, time, space, causality, and intentionality. The pairwise event salience hypothesis states that when a past event shares one or more of these indices with the most recently narrated event, that past event is more salient, or easier to recall, than an event which shares none of them. In this study we demonstrate that we can predict user choices based on the salience of past events. Specifically, we investigate the hypothesis that when users are given a choice between two events in an interactive narrative, they are more likely to choose the one which makes the previous events in the story more salient according to this theory.

This thesis aims to answer the following question : “How could gestures and facial expressions be used to control the behavior of an interactive entertaining application?”. An answer to this question is presented and illustrated in the context of mixed reality interactive storytelling. The first part focuses on the description of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) mechanisms that are used to model and control the behavior of the application. We present an efficient real-time hierarchical planning engine, and show how active modalities (such as intentional gestures) and passive modalities (such as facial expressions) can be integrated into the planning algorithm, in such a way that the narrative (driven by the behavior of the virtual characters inside the virtual world) can effectively evolve in accordance with user interactions. The second part is devoted to the automatic recognition of user interactions. After briefly describing the implementation of a simple but robust rule-based gesture recognition system, the emphasis is set on facial expression recognition. A complete solution integrating state-of-the-art techniques along with original contributions is drawn. It includes face detection, facial feature extraction and analysis. The proposed approach combines statistical learning and probabilistic reasoning in order to deal with the uncertainty associated with the process of modeling facial expressions.

Interactive narratives are marked by two characteristics: 1) a space of player interactions, some subset of which are specified as aesthetic goals for the system; and 2) the affordance for players to express self-agency and have meaningful interactions. As a result, players are (often unknowing) participants in the creation of the experience. They cannot be assumed to be cooperative, nor adversarial. Thus, we must provide paradigms to designers that enable them to work with players to co-create experiences without transferring the system's goals (specified by authors) to players and without systems having a model of players' behaviors. This dissertation formalizes compact representations and efficient algorithms that enable computer systems to represent, reason about, and shape player experiences in interactive narratives. Early work on interactive narratives relied heavily on "script-and-trigger" systems, requiring sizable engineering efforts from designers to provide concrete instructions for when and how systems can modify an environment to provide a narrative experience for players. While there have been advances in techniques for representing and reasoning about narratives at an abstract level that automate the trigger side of script-and-trigger systems, few techniques have reduced the need for scripting system adaptations or reconfigurations---one of the contributions of this dissertation. We first describe a decomposition of the design process for interactive narrative into three technical problems: goal selection, action/plan selection/generation, and action/plan refinement. This decomposition allows techniques to be developed for reasoning about the complete implementation of an interactive narrative. We then describe representational and algorithmic solutions to these problems: a Markov Decision Process-based formalism for goal selection, a schema-based planning architecture using theories of influence from social psychology for action/plan selection/generation, and a natural language-based template system for action/plan refinement. To evaluate these techniques, we conduct simulation experiments and human subjects experiments in an interactive story. Using these techniques realizes the following three goals: 1) efficient algorithmic support for authoring interactive narratives; 2) design a paradigm for AI systems to reason and act to shape player experiences based on author-specified aesthetic goals; and 3) accomplish (1) and (2) with players feeling more engaged and without perceiving a decrease in self-agency.

In this Bachelor thesis we navigate the ample world of vocal storytelling. Stories are told in all types of media today, but it all started with voices and narrative—from when poetry was sung and theatrical performances such as opera were amongst the most popular and beloved arts. We lift the ground where voices lie today and take them to their deserved place, from solely being an audial companion in media to a main element in interactive storytelling. Hand in hand with Design Fiction as a chosen design perspective and Research through Design as our research approach, we explore ways of creating an immersive, dynamic experience both creative and academically. We found ourselves in infinite ideations of futuristic scenarios which we wanted to symbolize with a world and characters through voices. With Research through Design, we learn not only by doing research, but through actually designing a functional prototype that grants agency to the person interacting with it. The learning process in building this prototype helped us gain significant knowledge in programming, implementation technique and writing for games, especially considering that we had very little experience with these subjects prior to this project. One could say that we were confident in our audio production skills and came with blind eyes when approaching this theme for the first time. The results of our work lead us to the conclusion that, with the adequate knowledge and methods, voices can function as a main element in interactive media prototypes. Narrative, voice design and implementation techniques combined create a group of powerful tools that can achieve interactive storytelling. / I denna kandidatuppsats utforskar vi i en värld av röstligt berättande. Berättelser berättas i alla typer av media idag, men det hela började med röster. Vi vill lyfta fram röster och deras förmåga att driva en berättelse, från att endast vara en osynlig del i ett audiovisuellt verk till ett huvudelement i en interaktiv berättelse. Med hjälp av Design Fiction som designperspektiv och Research through Design som forskningsmetod utforskar vi ett sätt att skapa en uppslukande, dynamisk upplevelse både kreativ och akademisk. Vi lär oss inte bara genom forskning, utan genom att faktiskt utforma en funktionell prototyp där användaren aktivt interagerar med narrativet. Berättelsen befinner sig i tankar om futuristiska scenarier som vi försöker få till liv. Resultatet av vår undersökning leder oss till slutsatsen att med tillräcklig kunskap och rätt metoder så kan röster fungera som ett huvudelement i interaktiva medieproduktioner. Berättande, röstdesign och implementeringstekniker skapar tillsammans en grupp kraftfulla verktyg för att uppnå interaktivt berättande.

This paper will create, define & develop the concept of retroactive characterisation as a narrative device for games. In doing so, it will investigate a method of conveying character and narrative to a player after a given event has already taken place, hence, retroactively. The paper will present data collected through surveys and interviews held in conjunction with test sessions. The paper presents and discusses this data through compiled diagrams and interview transcripts, in order to fulfill its purpose of determining the validity of retroactive characterisation as a narrative device in games.