Denna slutreflektion beskriver mitt arbete med mitt kandidatarbete samt mina tankegånger under och efter projektet samt hur jag arbetat, de problem jag stött på och hur jag löst dem. Delarna av denna reflektion är först en beskrivning av vad jag gjort, därefter en beskrivning av hur detta projekt var tänkt att fungera. Den tredje delen är en beskrivning av hur jag arbetat under projektet, baserat på mina veckorapporter. Den fjärde delen är själva reflektionen och den beskriver mitt arbete i mer detalj samt mina tankar och funderingar och hur jag löst de problem som uppstått. Den sista delen är ett slutord där jag sammanfattar mina tankar om utbildningen och mitt projekt jämfört med de liknande spel som finns idag samt mina tankar kring genren i allmänhet. / • Detta är en reflektionsdel till en digital medieproduktion.

This essay examines the narrative aspect of interactive fiction. The study uses Janet H. Murrays analysis of the digital environment and the properties of it as procedural, participatory, spatial and encyclopedic. From this, her three characteristic pleasures in digital narratives - immersion, agency and transformation - are examined from the perspective of interactive fiction. The study also examines Nick Montforts analysis of interactive fiction as a potential narrative and a simulated world or environment. His comparison of interactive fiction with the literary riddle is also used in regards to puzzles and other game-related aspects in interactive fiction as a part of storytelling. Furthermore, the essay uses Espen J. Aarseths analysis on ergodic text and non-linearity to place interactive fiction in a tradition of participatory texts not necessarily bound to the computer. The essay show how the repeated and sudden nature of death in interactive fiction poses a potential problem in its aspiration to create a cohesive storytelling experience. Death can however be used as an aid in other narrative aspirations, such as humour. Furthermore, the participatory aspect of interactive fiction can create a meaningful and strong emotional response to the death of non-player characters. The essay also show how interactive fiction may use puzzles and other challenges as a method to create suspense and drama. The quality of interactive fiction as a simulated world enables it to create mazes and related experiences based on spatial navigation. Especially it underlines its capacity to in this manner portrait abstract concepts such as bureaucracy in a convincing and literal way. Finally the essay proposes that interactive fiction can be viewed as a bridge between traditional literary texts and the new digital texts of computer based entertainment. The essay therefore suggests that interactive fiction, with its expressed literary ambitions, is especially qualified as a starting point for understanding computer games as a capable storytelling tool. Further studies on interactive fiction may help reach a deeper understanding of the narrative qualities of computer games.

The present diploma work describes the early development of digital narrative on the territory of the former Czechoslovakia in the 80's and at the beginning of the 90's of the 20th century. In that period, the text adventure game production and use were influenced by the socio-cultural and economic environment in the east-European Communist bloc, and by its following transformation into a democratic system with market economy. That brought about unique approaches to the computer game development and playing, and it also led to a formation of a cultural phenomenon of digital text games connected with the context of that time. The text deals with a brief historic development of digital game playing in the world, and a general situation in the information technologies on the territory of the former Czechoslovakia including direct participants' selected opinions. Within the framework of the present work, basic theoretical approaches have been presented, examining the adventure games genre, and especially their narrative part and the principles of intertextuality. The latter have been described using the examples of the respective Czechoslovak game production.

The design of autonomous agents capable of performing a given goal in a 3D domain continues to be a challenge for computer animated story generation systems. We present a novel prototype which consists of a 3D engine and a planner for a simple virtual world. We incorporate the 2D planner into the 3D engine to provide 3D animations. Based on the plan, the 3D world is created and the objects are positioned. Then the plan is linearized into simpler actions for object animation and rendered via the 3D engine. We use JINNI3D as the engine and WARPLAN-C as the planner for the above-mentioned prototype. The user can interact with the system using a simple natural language interface. The interface consists of a shallow parser, which is capable of identifying a set of predefined basic commands. The command given by the user is considered as the goal for the planner. The resulting plan is created and rendered in 3D. The overall system is comparable to a character based interactive story generation system except that it is limited to the predefined 3D environment.

This paper describes the development process of an Interactive Fiction game focused on the theme oflanguage. The paper includes a brief description of the history of the genre and its definitions, a discussionabout its multiple variations and attributes, and an overview of some examples that handled similar subjects.Then it considers some of the unique properties of the written language and examines language as both ashared and subjective relationship with reality . This is followed by a description of tools and methodsadopted in the design process and how the development went — from initial research to the final concept.The results is then described, followed by the user test results and a critical evaluation. At the end, someconcluding remarks are included together with possible future developments.

This study examines how themes, conventions and concepts in Gothic discourses are remediated or developed in selected works of contemporary interactive fiction. These works, which are wholly text-based and proceed via command line input from a player, include Nevermore, by Nate Cull (2000), Anchorhead, by Michael S. Gentry (1998), Madam Spider’s Web, by Sara Dee (2006) and Slouching Towards Bedlam, by Star C. Foster and Daniel Ravipinto (2003). The interactive fictions are examined using a media-specific, in-depth analytical approach. Gothic fiction explores the threats which profoundly challenge narrative subjects, and so may be described as concerned with epistemological, ideological and ontological boundaries. In the interactive fictions these boundaries are explored dually through the player’s traversal (that is, progress through a work) and the narrative(s) produced as a result of that traversal. The first three works in this study explore the vulnerabilities related to conceptions of human subjectivity. As an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem “The Raven,” Nevermore, examined in chapter one, is a work in which self-reflexivity extends to the remediated use of the Gothic conventions of ‘the unspeakable’ and ‘live burial’ which function in Poe’s poem. In chapter two, postmodern indeterminacy, especially with regard to the tensions between spaces and subjective boundaries, is apparent in the means through which the trope of the labyrinth is redesigned in Anchorhead, a work loosely based on H. P. Lovecraft’s terror fiction. In the fragmented narratives produced via traversal of Madam Spider’s Web, considered in chapter three, the player character’s self-fragmentation, indicated by the poetics of the uncanny as well as of the Gothic-grotesque, illustrates a destabilized conception of the human subject which reveals a hidden monster within, both for the player character and the player. Finally, traversal of Slouching Towards Bedlam, analyzed in chapter four, produces a series of narratives which function in a postmodern, recursive fashion to implicate the player in the viral infection which threatens the decidedly posthuman player character. This viral entity is metaphorically linked to Bram Stoker’s vampire, Dracula. As it is the only work in the study to present a conception of posthuman subjectivity, Slouching Towards Bedlam more specifically aligns with the subgenre ‘cybergothic,’ and provides an illuminating contrast to the other three interactive fictions. In the order in which I examine them, these works exemplify a postmodern development of the Gothic which increasingly marries fictional indeterminacy to explicit formal effects, both during interaction and in the narratives produced.

Denna rapport utforskar forskningsfrågan hur uppfattar erfarna spelare det avsiktliga utövandet av sekvensbryt i relation till deras upplevande av ett spels narrativ? då granskning av tidigare forskning kring ämnet sekvensbryt väckt frågor kring spelares åsikter om ämnet och huruvida utövandet av sekvensbryt är motsatt viljan att uppleva spelnarrativ. En studie utformades med ändamålet att samla spelares åsikter kring sekvensbryt. För att åstadkomma detta skapades ett textspel kallat Sequerience som gav spelare möjligheten att utöva sekvensbryt och detta användes i kombination med en enkät där de kunde reflektera över ämnet. Studien spreds online och till kanadensiska universitetskretsar och totalt deltog 11 personer. Dessa svar var tillräckliga för att etablera att det finns spelare som kan avsiktligt utöva sekvensbryt med viljan att uppleva ett spels narrativ i behåll. Vid framtida studier kan ett större deltagarantal ge djupare insikt i de olika ställningar som spelare kan ha gentemot sekvensbryt i relation till upplevandet av narrativ. / This report explores the research question how do skilled players perceive the intentional act of sequence breaking in relation to their experiencing of a game’s narrative? as examination of earlier research has raised questions concerning players’ opinions on the matter and whether the act of sequence breaking is counter to the desire to experience game narratives. A study was designed in order to collect players’ opinions on sequence breaking. This involved the creation of a text-based game called Sequerience wherein players were given the opportunity to perform sequence breaking, combined with a survey collecting the players’ thoughts on the subject. The study was spread online and to Canadian universities, with a total of 11 participants. The responses were sufficient to establish that there are players who may intentionally perform sequence breaking while maintaining the desire to experience a game’s narrative. In future studies, a larger amount of participants may give deeper insights in the various perspectives players may have on sequence breaking in relation to the experiencing of narratives.

The topic of video games is expansive, encompassing numerous domains that have yet to be thoroughly examined within a scholarly context. Modern games, especially those in the adventure and role-playing genres, are oftentimes heavily laden with text, and therefore serve as excellent subjects when formulating hermeneutical models for simulated virtual contexts. Furthermore, many games belong under the umbrella of literary studies due to their reliance upon text to forge interactive, fictional narratives. While this means many games possess qualities that render them germane to academics within the sphere of English studies, they remain neglected outliers due to manifold factors, ranging from outmoded biases against the medium, to a lack of established evaluative methodologies. As a result, the field is largely bereft of consensus strategies for engaging digital works featuring literary exposition and dialogue in the form of on-screen text; however, existing theories, including more abstruse ones relating to ergodic literature, hypertext and cybertext, provide a foundation on which to construct new modalities for assessing texts that exist within virtual environs. Research indicates that audience experiences in text-driven games are markedly different than those offered by analog texts due to their interactivity and non-linearity, thus reinforcing the need for the expansion of existing models. Of additional concern, analyses of modern text-oriented games prefigure some important implications for the areas of pedagogy and textual information conveyance in general. These considerations all coalesce to illustrate the exigency for a new or updated theory for understanding and interpreting text in digital substrates, ultimately allowing for inchoate and emergent art facilitated by technology to be recognized as academically relevant.

Natural Language (NL) mechanics are seemingly underutilized within modern game development and may be capable of inducing unexpected levels of agency within its users. This study focuses specifically on NL Input (NLI) and examines its capability of inducing an experience of agency, control, and freedom through an interactive fiction with a database searching context. To get a more nuanced result, a version of the artefact but with an NL Understanding (NLU) system will also be tested to create a baseline. Due to the limited time and resources, the NLU version will be employing the Wizard of Oz (WOZ) method. In total, five NLI tests and four NLU tests were performed and interview results indicated full experience of control and mixed experience of freedom and agency in both versions. Possible causes include the participants‘ genre preference and the limited content in the artefact.

No description available.