Interactive Storytelling Research Articles

Dynamic emphatical narration for reduced authorial burden and increased user freedom in interactive storytelling

ABSTRACTInteractive storytelling systems have become very popular as they engage users in the creation of narrative. A fundamental challenge for such systems is that the users feel unconstrained in their exploration of the environment and yet retain for the author some control of what the user does. Traditional solutions address this challenge by hardening the authoring task, since much effort has to be devoted to create the story and the necessary mechanisms to provide the user with enough freedom that, at the same time, keeps the story consistent. We propose a solution based on dynamic narration that combines a set of authored materials associated with particular points in the environment and the exploratory movements of the user, and includes statements of varying emphasis to guide the user towards the desired elements. This allows the system to generate a narration in real time while giving the user the possibility to decide what to do. The solution has been field tested and results are reported on three different aspects: the freedom of the user in terms of combinations in which the authored material is traversed; the divergence of user explorations from author's intentions; and user response to guidance statements of differing emphasis.

Information management in interactive and non-interactive suspenseful storytelling

Suspense is one key feature in modern storytelling. One of the mechanisms to deliver a suspenseful experience to an audience is by means of controlling the information provided. The media, however, has a very strong impact on what kind of information can be delivered and how. Moreover, modern storytelling is usually conveyed interactively, in such a way that the audience is also part of the story. In this paper, we experiment and analyse the different impact of information management in interactive and non-interactive storytelling. We report on an experiment measuring the reported perceived amusement in interactive and non-interactive versions of a potentially suspenseful story, and we provide evidence that a passive, non-interactive audience usually prefers less information than an active interactive audience. The study provides informed insight on how these results could be used in real scenarios to deliver appropriate levels of information to enhance the perception of suspense.

Inanimate Alice: The Story of the Series and its Impact in Portugal

A team from the University of Coimbra is partnering with the producers of Inanimate Alice to present a distinctive vision of interactive storytelling in education. In this article, we will discuss the origins of the series, the vision of the creators and how technological developments have added to the user experience. Uniquely, this transmedia narrative demonstrates the progressive complexity of life in the digital age with Perpetual Nomads, the latest adventure, providing a narrative experience in Virtual Reality. The goal of the Portuguese translation is to introduce the reading of Inanimate Alice in elementary and secondary schools. It will be the first digital-born text to be read in Portuguese schools so, concurrently, we have been translating the pedagogical guidelines. Consequently, we intend presenting both the results of our work and the main challenges faced during preparation of the translations, especially focusing on intercultural analysis.

STEM Buddies EN by Z. Soufan

Soufan, Ziad. STEM Buddies EN. Project Hikaya, 2018. Vers. 1.1.2. Google Play Store, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.stem_buddies.en
 This educational application uses a combination of multimedia elements such as video, audio, and text to create an engaging and interactive storytelling experience that teaches children about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths (STEM) topics.
 The app consists of three parts: an animated story, a short quiz, and downloadable colouring pages. Upon opening the app, the user is prompted to watch the animation first, with learning objectives presented for the chosen topic. After the short, subtitled, five-minute video, in which the viewer has the opportunity to pause and rewind, the user is then directed to either the quiz or the colouring pages, which reflect the material presented in the video. This intuitive and logical organization ensures that the informative video is a precursor for the interactive activities and consequently enables learning through reflection and repetition.
 Through accessible language, the current module, “Water Cycle,” seamlessly integrates an original, engaging story and memorable characters with pedagogical elements that explain how rain forms (evaporation, condensation, precipitation), the importance of water, and the problems associated with the lack of rain. The simple, five-question quiz contains multiple question types and uses audio, text, and pictures to provide children with multiple avenues for identification and learning. Through the quiz, children are required to make intelligent decisions regarding what they have learned. Feedback is given in the form of gamification, with correct answers being positively reinforced by the attainment of gold stars, and completion of the quiz resulting in a personalized certificate of achievement for that module. A myriad of colouring pages, available for use within the app or for individual download, reflect familiar themes and characters and continue to provide some interactivity after the module has been completed.
 Available in English and Arabic, this new, free application currently only contains one subject module, with more scheduled to be released in the future. With superior graphic design, no ads, and no in-app purchases, the possibility for distractions and unintended purchases are removed. Despite these desirable features, the video and narrative itself could be more interactive on the textual and visual level by incorporating hotspots for touching, swiping, and exploring. I would recommend it for use in public libraries and by teachers in elementary schools for children aged 5 to 9.
 Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Raven Germain
 Raven Germain is a second year MLIS student at the University of Alberta with a love of children’s literature. When not studying, she enjoys travelling, playing piano, and immersing herself in fantasy novels.

Tampa Tarot: An Experiment in Community Storytelling

Tampa Tarot combines web-based interactive storytelling and an Augmented Reality (AR) feature that displays virtual tarot cards on users’ smart phones in specific geographical locations throughout the city. The project attempts to answer the following question: In a world of diffuse and fragmented media, where old places and stories are displaced and obscured by layers of disconnected images and a growing, changing population, how do we understand who we are as a community? Emphasizing the intrinsically social and historical character of the tarot, the project employs the narrative structure of cartomancy (card reading) as a form of community storytelling.

Teaching writing for videogames

Though recent years have seen an increase in scholarship exploring the links between games and the classroom (such as gamification and game mechanics in education), far less research has engaged with the practical challenges involved in the pedagogy of games writing itself. In this article, I explore the unique challenges that arise when teaching creative writing for non-linear and ludic contexts. When our exposure to more traditional forms of storytelling structures such as those in film or literature is so much greater than our proficiency in creating branching story structures, the introduction of player or reader agency to a piece of fiction requires a massive shift in process within a practitioner. Students are still trained from a young age to understand stories as following certain rules based on linear and non-interactive media contexts. These rules are at times contradictory to what is required when writing games. Students of game writing often fall into familiar and observable patterns as they become proficient in the requirements of interactive practice for the first time. Throughout this article I reflect on these pedagogical issues through my observations teaching interactive storytelling, and examine the importance of exposure to peers from other creative disciplines for game design and game writing students.

Gutter Talk: Co-Constructing Narratives Using Comics in the Classroom

ABSTRACTThis article combines theory on comics, narrative, and discursive psychology and analyses how the gutter is co-constructed for storytelling in classroom interaction. Closure of the gutter has previously been treated as a cognitive aspect. Here, interactional video data are analysed, with participants organizing ten separate comic panels. The analysis focuses on participants’ talk about the gutter, and how this constructs social actions. The results show how participants co-construct the gutter as meaningful space, hereby organizing time, actions, and events in narratives. The paper evinces that gutters are co-constructed as too narrow or too broad, relating chronologically and logically to surrounding panels. This contributes to sociocultural perspectives on literacy and use of comics for engaging with narratives in classroom practice.

Transmedia Storyworlds, Literary Theory, Games

This article focuses on some of the connections between digitally transmitted stories, games, narrative processes, and the discipline whose ostensible job is the study of storytelling, namely literature. My observations are limited to the specific case of computer games, storytelling, and what is often unproblematically referred to as “literature,” in order to focus attention on historical and contemporary features of the development of the relationship between the two that remain largely unexamined. Further, this article addresses the dissemination of narrative on/through various platforms before mass-media, such as textually transmitted stories that anticipate digitally disseminated narrative. This includes specific examples as well as a more general a re-examination of claims made on the topic of literature, narrative and computer games, via a brief review of disciplinary insights from the study of digital games and narrative. The article is therefore intended as a view of games and (literary) narrative in pre-digital forms as an attempt to build bridges between media studies and other disciplines by calling for a longer, developmental history of games, narrative and/or literature that considers them together rather than as separate territories.

12. Fantasy and the Holocaust: Suspending Belief to Grasp the Unbelievable

This paper endeavors to explore how recent media has engaged with the memory of the Holocaust, and, more broadly, how fiction and technologies have found new and effective ways to engage with controversial histories. I propose specifically, fiction, fantasy, and magical realism are innovative ways of keeping memory of atrocities in history, such as the Holocaust, alive. I examine the genre of fiction and magical realism, while bringing particular examples from Yoram Gross’ animated series Sarah and the Squirrel, Jonathan Safran Foer’s film Everything is Illuminated, and Luc Bernard’s upcoming video game Imagination is the Only Escape. These three are all vastly different medias, but share very common motivations: to engage with history, principally the Holocaust, through imaginative and interactive story telling. Each also treat the subject of representation and memory, concluding that “reality” is diverse, fragmented, and ever changing through time and people. Through the fantastical, their stories lead spectators with a child-like perspective through experiences that transfer meaning, feelings, and affect, rather than facts. As survivors continue to pass away and time and distance puts the unbelievable events of the Holocaust in the far inaccessible past, the new generation endeavors to find immersive, interactive medium to continue to keep memory –what Alison Landsberg refers to as “prosthetic” or artificial memory –alive. While unconventional, the works listed above demonstrate that fantasy and magical realism can be an engaging, informative, and worthwhile form to engage with history, especially histories of violence.

Storybird: A Motivational Storytelling Website to Increase Students’ Ability In Narrative Writing

Writing is an essential tool for communication. Good writing allows people to communicate clearly. Among the four basic skills, writing is the most complicated one. Writing has several types and one of them is narrative. The purposes of narrative are to tell story and share information whether it is a book, thesis, journal, and an article. Unfortunately, some students do not like to write. They think that writing is so complicated and they always feel that English is horrible. Such negative attitudes are problematic in ESL/EFL writing classroom. The arising of media techonology like Storybird as internet-based CALL and an interactive storytelling website helps to boost student engagement and the students’ ability in narrative writing will increase. Meanwhile, by using Storybird, the students can study narrative writing at anywhere and anytime as long as each student has an internet connection and a laptop or netbook. The students can use it by themselves because there is a simple guide for them available in Storybird. Through Storybird, they can be autonomous learners and it is related to the Principle of Eclecticism. The aims of this article are to give a brief description about the importance and the guidelines of using Storybird in teaching and learning narrative writing. Storybird will promote literacy, enthusiasm, imagination, creativity and collaboration in learning narrative writing

AUTOMATIC VIDEO EDITING FOR VIDEO-BASED INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING

The development of interactive narratives with the quality of feature films is the central challenge of what we can name Video-Based Interactive Storytelling. A promising approach to this question is the use of prerecorded videos with real actors. Amongst several technical challenges, this approach firstly requires automatic video editing methods for interactive narratives. However, this is a critical issue not fully covered in the literature. In this paper, we present a real-time editing method for interactive storytelling systems, which automatically generates the most adequate shot transitions, swaps video segments to avoid jump cuts, and creates adequate looping scenes. Moreover, these features consider the characteristics of the ongoing story.

Leveraging Pervasive Games for Tourism

Creating an augmented reality (AR) urban tourism application presents several interactivity challenges on how to convey an engaging multimedia experience on-site. This article describes a methodology for fast prototyping of multimedia mobile applications dedicated to urban tourism storytelling with special focus on AR techniques. Following the lessons learned in previous applications the systematic creation of location-based augmented reality (LBAR) applications is explored in this article. The goal is to create serious games for tourism that follow a main narrative but where the story can automatically adapt itself to the current location of the player, assimilate possible detours and allow posterior out-of-location playback. Adaptable stories can use dynamic information from map sources such as points of interest (POI), elevation or virtual buildings. The article discusses and presents solutions for media acquisition, interactive storytelling, game-design interface and multi-disciplinary coordination for mobile app development.

The changing panorama of interactive storytelling: a review from locative to transmedia

Since the early days of civilization, the way we tell and consume stories defines how do we make sense of the world. Every new technology has an impact on our narrative artifacts. Nowadays ubiquitous digital technologies allow us to structure and distribute our narratives in novel and unprecedented ways. This paper discusses the evolution of interactive storytelling brought about by the advent of mobile Interfaces. I will exemplify this shift reviewing a series of case studies highlighted from my own research path. Keywords: transmedia storytelling; interactive narrative; locative media; location aware multimedia stories; context aware technologies; human computer interaction.

Using Intelligent Personal Assistants for Second Language Learning: A Case Study of Alexa

The proliferation of smartphones has given rise to intelligent personal assistants (IPAs), software that helps users accomplish day‐to‐day tasks. However, little is known about IPAs in the context of second language (L2) learning. Therefore, the primary objectives of this case study were twofold: to assess the ability of Amazon's IPA, Alexa, to understand L2 English utterances and to investigate student opinions of the IPA. Four university students of English as a foreign language (EFL) in Japan participated in the study, which involved each participant interacting with Alexa in a 20‐min session. Three sets of data were collected and analyzed to achieve the study's aims: learner‐generated command performance, interactive storytelling performance, and interviews. The quantitative results showed that Alexa accurately understood only 50% of learner commands, whereas comprehensibility during the interactive storytelling skill, Earplay, was much higher (90%). Three themes were identified from the interviews based on criteria developed by Hubbard (): hindered learner efficiency due to the lack of first language (L1) support, improved learner effectiveness through indirect pronunciation feedback, and better access to conversational opportunities. These findings demonstrate that EFL learners perceive Alexa to be a potentially useful tool to enhance language learning and underscore the need for additional (L2) research of IPAs.

“El lenguaje sonoro en los relatos digitales interactivos”

Sound narratives find in the interactive narrative a new creative field to generate new expressive experiences. Within the broad field of Digital Storytelling, Internet technology allows the construction of interactive stories in which sound design and musical language play a fundamental role, sometimes protagonist, in the development of new models of multimedia and interactive storytelling. Through the narrative analysis of a sample of cases, selected from an own census developed through the selective search of paradigmatic examples, we propose a classification of interactive sound stories that allows a first approximation to its narrative functionalities.

Interactive Film Recombination

In this article, we discuss an innovative media entertainment application called Interactive Movietelling. As an offspring of Interactive Storytelling applied to movies, we propose to integrate narrative generation through artificial intelligence (AI) planning with video processing and modeling to construct filmic variants starting from the baseline content. The integration is possible thanks to content description using semantic attributes pertaining to intermediate-level concepts shared between video processing and planning levels. The output is a recombination of segments taken from the input movie performed so as to convey an alternative plot. User tests on the prototype proved how promising Interactive Movietelling might be, even if it was designed at a proof of concept level. Possible improvements that are suggested here lead to many challenging research issues.

Glitch Perfect: Malfunction and the Machinic Assemblage of Girlhood

Abstract This short experimental article, which can be accessed at http://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/var/media/43.1/wolfgang/, introduces a concept of Glitch Feminism as a digital tool of creative resistance that disrupts a normative gendered identity and fabricated female body in 21st-century digital cultures (Russell, 2012; 2013). It showcases video work by adolescent girls in a juvenile arbitration program who used glitch effects to “break” music video clips by popular female artists and their own self-directed videos, to thereby render female bodies on screen as ambiguous, flawed, and indistinguishable. This action of glitching challenged surveillance and fetishization of female bodies in social media and popular digital cultures and allowed girl participants to play with self-representations outside of the institutional labels of “law offenders” and girls “in trouble.” To better represent the complex entanglements and intersections of theory and the girls’ digital productions, we use the interactive storytelling format of Twine (https://twinery.org), linking text and still and moving images in a nonlinear fashion, and prompting the reader to continuously move back and forth between the conceptual ideas and visual representations to embrace incompleteness, ambiguity, and inquiry.

Innovation in preregistration midwifery education: Web based interactive storytelling learning

Backgroundthrough a critical description of the implementation of a web based interactive storytelling learning activity introduced into an undergraduate, preregistration midwifery education programme, this paper will explore how low-cost, low-fidelity online storytelling, designed using Moodle, can be used to enhance students’ understanding of compassion and empathy in practice. Samplecross sectional sample of first year undergraduate Midwifery students (n111) Methoddrawing from both research and audit data collected in an Higher Education Institution in London England, the paper presents the case for using web based technology to create a sustainable model for midwifery education. Findingsinitial results indicate that it is both the low cost and positive student evaluations of web based interactive storytelling, which make this approach to preregistration midwifery education which suggests that this approach has significant potential for learning and teaching in midwifery education in diverse settings around the world. Or how about: global relevance?.

Mobile Gaming and Student Interactions in a Science Center: the Future of Gaming in Science Education

This article explores the impact of an augmented reality iPad-based mobile game, called The Great STEM Caper, on students’ interaction at a science center. An open-source, location-based game platform called ARIS (i.e. Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling) was used to create an iPad-based mobile game. The game used QR scan codes and a challenge-based game structure to encourage engagement in science. Participants wore head-mounted GoPro cameras to record interactions within the physical and social environment. The purpose of this research was to study the impact of a mobile game on student interactions in a science center. Gender differences in gameplay behaviors and perceptions were compared. The study included a quasi-experimental design with two groups: one group that played the iPad mobile game during their science center visit, and one group that explored the science center in a traditional free exploration manner. Video data from the GoPro cameras provided examination of the different ways students interacted with the science center. The female students outperformed the male students on every measure of the iPad game achievement. Lazzaro’s (2004) four types of fun was used to describe the gender differences in game perceptions and interactions. Females tended to enjoy hard fun and collaborative people fun, while males enjoyed easy fun and competitive people fun. The females tended to be more goal-oriented, persistent in the face of difficulty, and appreciative of hard fun. The results of this study have implications for the design of mobile-based gaming technology to encourage interaction in an informal science center setting.

Video-based interactive storytelling using real-time video compositing techniques

Interactive storytelling systems usually adopt computer graphics to represent virtual story worlds, which facilitates the dynamic generation of visual content. However, the quality of the images and motion produced by these systems is still inferior compared to the high quality experience found in live-action films. Interactive rates in photorealistic rendering for the film industry will not be possible for decades to come. A promising alternative is the replacement of 3D virtual characters with video sequences with real actors. In this paper, we propose a new method for video-based interactive narratives that uses video compositing algorithms that run at truly interactive frame rates. The proposed method is consistent with plots that are generated by nondeterministic planning algorithms. Moreover, we propose a system of artificial intelligent agents that perform the same roles played by filmmaking professionals. A user evaluation of the proposed method is presented. We believe that future improvements of the techniques proposed in this paper represent an important contribution to the quest for new and more immersive forms of interactive cinema.