Proceedings of the Intelligent Narrative Technologies III Workshop

Abstract

Narrative is a pervasive aspect of human culture in both entertainment and education. Historically, humans have been the primary agents behind the creation, telling, and adapting of narrative. However, as society's reliance on digital technology for both entertainment and communication increases, the need for more innovative approaches to represent, perform, and adapt narrative experiences increases as well. With recent research advances, computer systems now have the means to organize experiences into a narrative form enabling them to interact and communicate with human users in novel and intuitive ways that were not possible a short time ago. A computer system that possesses narrative intelligence can interact with and communicate with human users in novel and intuitive ways. The research presented through the Intelligent Narrative Technologies workshop represents the state of the art in the use of computational representation and reasoning about narrative for entertainment, communication, and education. The academic research community is continuing to make advances in intelligent computing that bring these experiences closer to realizing the full potential of the computer as an interactive medium. The Intelligent Narrative Technologies III (INT3) workshop at the 2010 Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) conference brings together participants from the research community and industry in an effort to accelerate technology transfer to commercial games. Computer games are a natural modality for storytelling because of the sense of immersion and transportation into a virtual world with compelling characters and the promise of opportunity to interact with characters and the world in a meaningful way. Many experiences in virtual worlds are entertaining but not necessarily strictly games. A second goal of the INT3 workshop was to explore the role of narrative intelligence in facilitating other forms of computer-based entertainment, education, and training. Narrative appears prominently in many forms of entertainment and interpersonal communication, including novels, movies, and machinima. Narrative can also play a role in education and training. Novel techniques for entertaining, training, and education have been developed in such fields as narrative understanding, narrative generation, storytelling, virtual cinematography, models of emotion, narrative cognition, and natural language generation. The 2010 INT3 workshop is the third in a successful sequence of symposia and workshops on artificial intelligence in representation and reasoning about narrative. The one-day INT3 workshop features 17 paper presentations from authors around the world on topics ranging from narrative understanding, emergent storytelling, player evaluations, narrative discourse, improvisation, and story generation.