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Evaluation of an automatically-constructed graph-based representation for interactive narrative

Published: 26 August 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Interactivity and player experience are inextricably entwined with the creation of compelling narratives for interactive digital media. Narrative shapes and buttresses many such experiences, and therefore designers must construct compelling narrative arcs while carefully considering the effects of interaction on both the story and the player. As the narrative becomes more structurally complex, due to choice-based branching and other player actions, designers need to employ commensurately capable models and visualizations to keep track of that growing complexity. However, previous models of interactive narrative have failed to fully capture interactive elements with automated, operationalized visualizations. In this paper, we describe an algorithm for automated construction of a framework-driven, graph-based representation of interactive narrative. This representation more fully and transparently models structural and interactive features of the narrative than did prior approaches. We present an initial evaluation of this representation, based on modified cognitive walkthroughs performed by interactive narrative design and research experts from our research team, and we describe the takeaways for future improvement on interactive narrative modeling and analysis.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
FDG '19: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
August 2019
822 pages
ISBN:9781450372176
DOI:10.1145/3337722
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 26 August 2019

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Author Tags

  1. AI
  2. computational co-creativity
  3. computational media
  4. design
  5. design representation
  6. games
  7. graphical models
  8. interactive narrative
  9. knowledge representation
  10. player agency
  11. structural models

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  • Research-article

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FDG '19

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FDG '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 46 of 124 submissions, 37%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 152 of 415 submissions, 37%

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  • (2021)Graph-Based Analysis of Drama Text—Case Study Based on Shakespeare’s ‘Measure for Measure’Graph-Based Modelling in Science, Technology and Art10.1007/978-3-030-76787-7_11(221-242)Online publication date: 2-Aug-2021
  • (2020)Getting Academical: A Choice-Based Interactive Storytelling Game for Teaching Responsible Conduct of ResearchProceedings of the 15th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games10.1145/3402942.3403005(1-12)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2020
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  • (2020)Progression Maps: Conceptualizing Narrative Structure for Interaction Design SupportProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376527(1-13)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020

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