interactive drama

The builder of Façade, an “interactive story world,” Michael Mateas offers both a poetics and a neo-Aristotelian project (for interactive drama and games).

Integrating story with games in a flexible way that gives interactors meaningful choices within a narrative experience has long been a goal of both game developers and digital storytellers. The "micronarrative" is an unexplored avenue of narrative structure that can be a useful tool in analysis and design of such experiences. A micronarrative is a smaller moment of plot coherence and miniature arc that is nested within a larger narrative structure. The concept was first labeled by Jenkins in 2004 in the context of a game's "meaningful moments" and expanded upon in Bizzocchi's 2007 analytical framework for videogame storytelling. It has its roots in earlier examinations of arc and scale, such as Propp's concept of "Functions" or McKee's "Beats" in literature, as well as in Barthes’ classification of a “hierarchy of levels or strata” which incorporates “micro-sequences” as described in his structural analysis of narrative (1975).

Identification and analysis of the micronarrative allows us to examine how small events build in a fractal-like pattern to form larger nested narrative arcs. The presentation argues that micronarrative units exhibit a recognizable level of coherent yet flexible granularity that is at once modular, hierarchical, and cumulative. This presentation will address the application of micronarrative as an analytical tool to three works: the commercial console videogame Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Square Enix, 2011); the art game Samorost (Amanita Design, 2003); and the interactive drama, Façade (Mateas and Stern, 2006). The presentation examines the role of micronarratives in structuring flexible narrative arcs in three artifacts that incorporate differing modalities of interaction and story design. In conclusion, this project will show that micronarrative is an essential tool for understanding the poetics of a diverse and evolving medium.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

Interactive drama has been discussed for a number of years as a new AI-based interactive experience (Laurel 1986; Bates 1992). While there has been substantial technical progress in building believable agents (Bates, Loyall, and Reilly 1992; Blumberg 1996, Hayes-Roth, van Gent, and Huber 1996), and some technical progress in interactive plot (Weyhrauch 1997), no work has yet been completed that combines plot and character into a full-fledged dramatic experience. The game industry has been producing plot-based interactive experiences (adventure games) since the beginning of the industry, but only a few of them (such as The Last Express) begin to approach the status of interactive drama. Part of the difficulty in achieving interactive drama is due to the lack of a theoretical framework guiding the exploration of the technological and design issues surrounding interactive drama. This paper proposes a theory of interactive drama based on Aristotle's dramatic theory, but modified to address the interactivity added by player agency. This theory both provides design guidance for interactive dramatic experiences that attempt to maximize player agency (answering the question "What should I build?") and technical direction for the AI work necessary to build the system (answering the question "How should I build it?"). In addition to clarifying notions of interactive drama, the model developed in this essay also provides a general framework for analyzing player agency in any interactive experience (e.g., interactive games).

This neo-Aristotelian theory integrates Murray's (1998) proposed aesthetic categories for interactive stories and Aristotle's structural categories for drama. The theory borrows from Laurel's treatment of Aristotle in an interactive context (Laurel 1986, 1991) but extends it by situating Murray's category of agency within the model; the new model provides specific design guidelines for maximizing user agency. First, I present the definition of interactive drama motivating this theory and situate this definition with respect to other notions of interactive story. Next, I present Murray's three categories of immersion, agency, and transformation. Then, I present a model of Aristotle's categories relating them in terms of formal and material causation. Within this model, agency will be situated as two new causal chains inserted at the level of character. Finally, I use the resulting model to clarify conceptual and technical issues involved in building interactive dramatic worlds, and briefly describe a current project informed by this model.

(Source: Author's abstract on ebr)

This dissertation presents theoretical and technical support for, and implementations of, narrative computational media works with the following characteristics: generative content, semantics-based interaction, reconfigurable narrative structure, and strong cognitive and socio-cultural grounding. A system that can dynamically compose media elements (such as procedural computer graphics, digital video, or text) to result in new media elements can be said to generate content. The GRIOT system, a result of this dissertation, provides an example of this. It has been used to implement computational poetry that generates new narrative poems with varying particular concepts, but fixed themes, upon each execution. This generativity is enabled by the Alloy system, which implements an algorithm that models key aspects of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner's theory of conceptual blending. Alloy is the first implementation of Joseph Goguen's algebraic semiotics approach to blending. (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002; Goguen, 1998) This research also contributes to the theory of algebraic semiotics by developing a blending-based notion of style. Semantics- based interaction means here that (1) media elements are structured according to the meaning of their content, and (2) user interaction can affect content of a computational narrative in a way that produces new meanings that are constrained by the system's author. "Meaning" in this case indicates that the author has provided formal descriptions of domains and concepts pertinent to the media elements and subjective authorial intent. Meaning can also be reconfigured at the level of narrative discourse. The formal structure of a computational narrative can be dynamically restructured, either according to user interaction, or upon execution of the system as in the case of narrative generation. Strong cognitive and socio- cultural grounding here implies that meaning is considered to be contextual, dynamic, and embodied. The formalizations used derive from, and respect, cognitive linguistics theories with such notions of meaning. Furthermore, the notion of narrative here is not biased toward one particular cultural model. Using semantically based media elements as a foundation, a cultural producer can implement a range of culturally specific or experimental narrative structures.

Artificial intelligence methods open up new possibilities in art and entertainment,enabling rich and deeply interactive experiences. At the same time as AI opens up newfields of artistic expression, AI-based art itself becomes a fundamental research agenda,posing and answering novel research questions that would not be raised unless doing AIresearch in the context of art and entertainment. I call this agenda, in which AI researchand art mutually inform each other, Expressive AI. Expressive AI takes seriously theproblem of building intelligences that robustly function outside of the lab, engaginghuman participants in intellectually and aesthetically satisfying interactions, which,hopefully, teach us something about ourselves.This thesis describes a specific AI-based art piece, an interactive drama calledFaçade, and describes the practice of Expressive AI, using Façade, as well as additionalAI-based artwork described in the appendices, as case studies.An interactive drama is a dramatically interesting virtual world inhabited bycomputer-controlled characters, within which the player experiences a story from a firstperson perspective. Over the past decade, there has been a fair amount of research intobelievable agents, that is, autonomous characters exhibiting rich personalities, emotions,and social interactions. There has been comparatively little work, however, exploringhow the local, reactive behavior of believable agents can be integrated with the moreglobal, deliberative nature of a story plot, so as to build interactive, dramatic worlds. Thisthesis presents Façade, the first published interactive drama system that integratescharacter (believable agents), story (drama management) and shallow natural languageprocessing into a complete system. Façade will be publicly released as a free downloadin 2003.In the Façade architecture, the unit of plot/character integration is the dramatic beat.In the theory of dramatic writing, beats are the smallest unit of dramatic action, consistingof a short dialog exchange or small amount of physical action. As architectural entities,beats organize both the procedural knowledge to accomplish the beat’s dramatic action,and the declarative knowledge to sequence the beat in an evolving plot. Instead ofconceiving of the characters as strongly autonomous entities that coordinate toaccomplish dramatic action through purely local decision-making, characters are insteadweakly autonomous – the character’s behavioral repertoire dynamically changes as beatsare sequenced. The Façade architecture includes ABL (A Behavior Language), a newreactive planning language for authoring characters that provides language support forjoint action, and a drama manager consisting of both a language for authoring thedeclarative knowledge associated with beats and a runtime system that dynamicallysequences beats.Façade is a collaboration with independent artist and researcher Andrew Stern.Expressive AI is not the “mere” application of off-the-shelf AI techniques to art andentertainment applications. Rather, Expressive AI is a critical technical practice, a way ofdoing AI research that reflects on the foundations of AI and changes the way AI is done.AI has always been in the business of knowing-by-making, exploring what it means to behuman by building systems. Expressive AI just makes this explicit, combining thethought experiments of the AI researcher with the conceptual and aesthetic experimentsof the artist. As demonstrated through Façade and the other systems/artworks describedin the appendices, combining art and AI, both ways of knowing-by-making, opens upnew research questions, provides a novel perspective on old questions, and enables newmodes of artistic expression. The firm boundary normally separating “art” and “science”is blurred, becoming two components of a single, integrated practice.

(Source: Author's abstract)

Harger's interview with Mateas and Stern focuses on the development of theiir conception of interactive drama and the Façade project.

The most talked-about, and potentially the most significant consequence of recent advances in electronic technology for the practive and theory of literature is the promise of interactivity. The idea of interactivity is traditionally associated with hypertext. But compared to Interactive Drama, a genre existing mainly in the conceptual stage, hypertext involves a relatively low grade of interactivity: the freedom to select an itinerary on a network of author-defined pathways. In Interactive Drama, ideally, "the interactor is choosing what to do, say, and think at all times" (Kelso, Bates and Weyhrauch); "the users of such a system are like audience members who can march up onto the stage and become various characters, altering the action by what they say and do in their roles" (Laurel). This essay investigates the basic dilemma encountered by Interactive Drama, a dilemma reminiscent of a familiar theological problem: how can the system grant users some freedom of action, and yet enact an aesthetically satisfying narrative scheme ? The predominantly epic structure of Brenda Laurel's VR installation Placeholder is contrasted to the Aristotelian design philosophy of Joseph Bates' Oz. In spite of these structural differences, both works uphold the ideal of a system designed in such a way that every traversal of the virtual world will provide a rewarding experience. This concern for the "safety of a controlled situation" suggests that in contrast to most forms of hypertext, interactive drama owes more to the spirit of classicism than to postmodern aesthetics.

(Source: Author's website)