Narrative construction

Fabrizio Venerandi is author of two novels published in form of hypertextual ebooks and also co-founder of the publishing house Quintadicopertina. In this interview he talks about the book series Polistorie (Polystories) and about the basic ideas that inspired this project. Recalling the experience he made with the groundbreaking work on the first MUD in Italy in 1990, Venerandi describes the relations between literature and video games. Starting from a comparison between print literature tradition and new media, at last, he faces the problems of creation and preservation of digital works.

Existing approaches to narrative construction tend to apply basic engineering principles of system
design which rely on identifying the most relevant feature of the domain for the problem at
hand, and postulating an initial representation of the problem space organised around such a
principal feature. Some features that have been favoured in the past include: causality, linear
discourse, underlying structure, and character behavior. The present paper defends the need for
simultaneous consideration of as many as possible of these aspects when attempting to model the
process of creating narratives, together with some mechanism for distributing the weight of the
decision processes across them. Humans faced with narrative construction may shift from views
based on characters to views based on structure, then consider causality, and later also take into
account the shape of discourse. This behavior can be related to the process of representational
re-description of constraints as described in existing literature on cognitive models of the writing
task. The paper discusses how existing computational models of narrative construction address
this phenomenon, and argues for a computational model of narrative explicitly based on multiple
aspects.