Awash: prospective story sifting intervention for emergent narrative
Awash: prospective story sifting intervention for emergent narrative
Emergent Narrative (EN) affords extensive agency to participants but conflicts with the desire to guarantee compelling narrative. Recent work presents story sifting, an approach that curates simulation output, believing that intervention compromises the aesthetics of EN. However, this type of retrospective story sifting cannot improve narrative in participatory storyworlds, where the story emerges through play. We propose a new form of prospective story sifting intervention, that uses an incremental story sifter to identify possible stories during play, and passes these to a drama manager that intervenes in the simulation to make those stories more likely to complete. Our approach is incorporated into Awash, a pirate-themed EN game, and through qualitative analysis we find that the intervention increases narrative completeness and does not appear to compromise key EN aesthetics.Our work thus demonstrates a new technique that mixes generative and emergent approaches, and shows that intervention can be compatible with the aesthetics of emergent narrative.
Clothier, Ben
d5378bbc-642a-483d-b136-999c518b3cff
Millard, David
4f19bca5-80dc-4533-a101-89a5a0e3b372
Clothier, Ben
d5378bbc-642a-483d-b136-999c518b3cff
Millard, David
4f19bca5-80dc-4533-a101-89a5a0e3b372
Clothier, Ben and Millard, David
(2023)
Awash: prospective story sifting intervention for emergent narrative.
Holloway-Attaway, Lissa and Murray, John T.
(eds.)
In Interactive Storytelling: 16th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2023, Kobe, Japan, November 11–15, 2023, Proceedings, Part II.
vol. 14384,
Springer Cham.
20 pp
.
(In Press)
Record type:
Conference or Workshop Item
(Paper)
Abstract
Emergent Narrative (EN) affords extensive agency to participants but conflicts with the desire to guarantee compelling narrative. Recent work presents story sifting, an approach that curates simulation output, believing that intervention compromises the aesthetics of EN. However, this type of retrospective story sifting cannot improve narrative in participatory storyworlds, where the story emerges through play. We propose a new form of prospective story sifting intervention, that uses an incremental story sifter to identify possible stories during play, and passes these to a drama manager that intervenes in the simulation to make those stories more likely to complete. Our approach is incorporated into Awash, a pirate-themed EN game, and through qualitative analysis we find that the intervention increases narrative completeness and does not appear to compromise key EN aesthetics.Our work thus demonstrates a new technique that mixes generative and emergent approaches, and shows that intervention can be compatible with the aesthetics of emergent narrative.
Text
Awash
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Accepted/In Press date: 19 August 2023
Venue - Dates:
International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling 2023, , Kobe, Japan, 2023-11-11 - 2023-11-15
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 482864
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/482864
ISSN: 0302-9743
PURE UUID: 3a5e8cca-acfc-4fa6-8d76-47ab5664b921
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Date deposited: 16 Oct 2023 16:31
Last modified: 18 Mar 2024 02:49
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Contributors
Author:
Ben Clothier
Author:
David Millard
Editor:
Lissa Holloway-Attaway
Editor:
John T. Murray
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