Robust Interactive Storytelling Framework for Automatic TV Content/Story Production

Abstract

With the rapid advancement of hardware and software, entertainment computing industry has been popularized during the last decade. TV content/story production is a major bottleneck in the entertainment industry. Previous work has identified key problems, such as narrative control, the duality between character and plot, the tension between interactivity and storytelling, and the tools that artists can use to create interactive story worlds. Due to the tradeoff between narrative progression and user interaction, striking a balance between the two is a big challenge. As a solution to such a challenge, Bcreative system has been developed. It is a unified prototype of both plot-based and character-based interactive storytelling. The idea is derived from the study of both Petri nets (PN) and cinematography in interactive storytelling. The system architecture is composed of two engines: a story engine and a character engine through a smart user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI). The story engine models the story plot based on the Petri nets (PN) reachability analysis, while the character engine enhances the modeling of character behavior based on filmmaking theory. This paper discusses the development process of our proposed system, illustrating the design and implementation in detail. Comparisons with existing techniques are included, and the advantages of our proposed system over existing ones are examined. Evaluation and practical performance results are also demonstrated.