Storytelling Game Research Articles

Bringing Interactive Storytelling to Industry: Designing a Reactive Narrative Encounter System

The commercial games industry is struggling to find a form of narrative for single-player story-based games that takes advantage of the medium. Current methods are limited to structured narrative or simulation, both of which have serious game design constraints. Drama Management represents a potential new model. This talk will cover the author's research into bringing interactive storytelling to single-player story games. Focusing on the design and production needs of current titles, different groups of pen-and-paper RPG Game Masters were studied, and their interactive narrative approach was algorithmically replicated for video game storytelling on a per-encounter level. To verify these results, an “Encounter Manager” pen-and-paper algorithm was tested in place of a human Game Master, achieving similar storytelling results and exposing new conclusions. Implementing these techniques in several video game projects has shown diverse payoffs, not just in narrative, replayability, and pacing but also in risk-reduction, art production, open world and linear level design, and new game genres. However, the uncertainty and risk of a new model of game production combined with the lack of a driving need in commercial games has so far proven a major hurdle for this approach. Looking forward, similarities with other procedural narrative efforts are explored, and future steps are proposed.

A Study on the Quest structure in Myth and Digital Game Storytelling

A Study on the Quest structure in Myth and Digital Game Storytelling

Split Frame Thinking and Multiple Scenario Awareness: How boys’ game expertise reshapes possible structures of sense in a digital world

This article takes a detailed look at how a group of 10-year-old boys mutually construct an evolving multilinear scenario whilst playing a storytelling game in class, borrowing from a number of genres and forms of engagement in ICT-mediated popular culture to perform for each other in patterns which defy linear description or analysis. Their playful production challenges standard means of representing and analysing transcript, necessitating a paradigm shift to a more visual form of discourse mapping. This visual method of analysis is drawn from complexity theory and fractal geometry. The article uses this analysis to raise questions about the criteria which teachers use to assess language competence as ICT-mediated popular culture continues to powerfully reconfigure the language context surrounding schools, (Buckingham, 2000). In conclusion, the article reflects on the consequences for both teachers and children's learning identities and practices.

China misperceived: American illusions and Chinese reality

Storytelling comes naturally to children, and Jerrold Brandell makes it a reciprocal process when he re-visions their stories therapeutically and bounces them back as part of a dynamic storytelling game. Getting down to cases early on, he models the engagement of a range of struggling youngsters and the reparative interpretation and reconstruction of their narratives. The result will enhance the repertoires of play therapists and child analysts alike.