Andrew Stern: Embracing the Combinatorial Explosion: A Brief Prescription for Interactive Story R&D
Abstract. This talk offers a reassessment of ongoing
research and development efforts to create both capable and
entertaining interactive story systems. Both academia and industry
have been working on this problem in various forms for decades, with
mixed success. To help calibrate our expectations for what is
reasonable progress over time, we find it useful to compare interactive
story technology to other endeavors that have both similar and different
characteristics, to help us understand the special nature of the
challenge and what research and development it may take to accomplish
it. Next, we focus on the quintessential requirements of
interactive story, and along the way, prescribe an agenda for R&D in
the field. Specifically, we focus on the importance of agency,
generation, interface, and terminology. Finally, we recommend some
specific guidelines, such as: researchers should begin their projects
with a specific concept of an interactive story in mind to target; build
an architecture to accomplish that target; and strive to release
publicly playable projects.
Andrew Stern is a designer, writer
and engineer of personality-rich, AI-based interactive characters and
stories. In 2005 he completed the interactive drama Façade, a 5-year
art/research collaboration with Michael Mateas, which received the Grand
Jury Prize at the 2006 Slamdance Independent Game Festival. Andrew
recently co-founded the game studio Procedural Arts to develop
next-generation interactive story games. Previously Andrew was a
lead designer and software engineer at PF.Magic, developing Virtual
Babyz, Dogz, and Catz, that sold over 3 million units worldwide.
Press coverage for his projects includes The New York Times, The
Atlantic Monthly, The Economist, Newsweek, Wired and AI Magazine.
Andrew has presented and exhibited work at the Game Developers
Conference, Independent Games Festival, SIGGRAPH, ISEA, Digital Arts and
Culture, DiGRA, TIDSE, AAAI symposia, and several art shows
internationally. Andrew blogs at grandtextauto.org. (http://quvu.net/andrew/resume.html)
Marie-Laure Ryan: Narratology and Interactive Storytelling: What Can They Do for Each Other
Abstract.
The relations between narratology and interactive digital storytelling
(IDS) started out on a sour note with the “ludology” vs. “narrativism”
controversy. It is now time to bury the hatchet by assessing what each
side has to learn from the other. The ludologist position, by pointing
out the inadequacies of classical narratology for the description of
interactive entertainment and by denying narrative status to games
challenges narratology to expand its scope beyond the domain of literary
fiction, and to propose a medium-independent concept of narrative. The
narrativist position, by stressing the importance of building playfields
into fictional worlds populated with concrete objects and characters,
and of turning player’s moves into the pursuit of goals that emotionally
matter to human beings captures what potentially distinguishes digital
entertainment from abstract games like chess and go: IDS-based games
speak not only to strategic imagination, but also to the “imagining”
imagination. But the usefulness of classical narratology for IDS has
been so far hampered by the traditionally descriptive stance of the
discipline and by its predilection for phenomena of discourse--how a
story is presented--over phenomena of story--how good plots are
constructed and what makes a story tellable. The design of an
interactive story starts with two pragmatic questions that narratology
has been reluctant to address: what is the role of the player in the
story, and what kind of gratification should the system provide? In this
presentation I argue that interactive digital texts can provide two
types of immersion: ludic immersion, which is typical of games, and
consists in an intense absorption in a task, and narrative immersion,
which is an engagement of the imagination in the construction and
contemplation of a concrete world populated by intelligent creatures.
This second kind of immersion can take at least at least five forms:
spatial, epistemic, temporal, emotional and social. I will examine the
compatibility of these five forms with interactivity and the
possibilities of their combination with ludic immersion.
Marie-Laure Ryan is Scholar in
Residence in the English department at the University of Colorado,
Boulder. Her interests cover narrative in both traditional and new
media. She edited Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and
Literary Theory (1999), Narrative Across Media (2004) and co-edited the
Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (2005together with David
Herman and Manfred Jahn, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory
(2005). She is also the author of Possible Worlds, Artificial
Intelligence and Narrative Theory (1991), Narrative as Virtual
Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic
Media (2001), and Avatars of Story: Narrative Modes in Old and New
Media (2006), as well as of numerous articles.
Her personal home page currently resides at http://users.frii.com/mlryan/ and her curriculum at http://www.colorado.edu/English/faculty/facpages/ryan.shtml
