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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/4401 |
| Date | 30 October 2006 |
| Creators | Ong, Teong Joo |
| Contributors | Leggett, John J. |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | 1836254 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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