Interactive Narrative Theories and Structure

國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

CHAPTER 2

Related Work

Narratives, interactive or not, have been a constant topic of interest in the fields of literature and communications. How to tell a compelling story by combining discourse (the expression), story (the action and plotline), and narration (the organization of the events) (Lothe 2000) is crucial to literary as well as communication design. Moreover, with interactive technologies in the picture, multimedia storytelling further explores the many aspects of automation, personalization, and replay-value in storytelling.

In this chapter we attempt to approach topics in interactive storytelling from its roots in narrative theory, the role of the author and computer technology in narrative creation, and current implementations of virtual storytelling environments that have influenced the design of our system.

2.1 Interactive Narrative Theories and Structure

Since Roland Barthes’s statement in his “The Death of the Author” (1967) that releases part of the authorial control to the reader, the role of the reader in the creative text has gone from singly receptive to participative in the work and its societal impact: “a text is not a line of

‧ 國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.”

Recent attempts to understand collaborative storytelling include the Story Circle experiment carried out by a cross-national research group to encourage the mass public to film parts of their lives and stories to share with the world (Hartley & McWilliam 2009).

Though the stories created are not interactive, the project was pioneering in leading the world into the era of digital storytelling in which every reader is also a creator, challenging the forms of storytelling to change with the advancement in technologies and communications.

Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck also provides an optimistic viewpoint for the development of computer assisted films and novels, believing that computer technologies can transform narratives into a more immersive and expressive form through computational technologies and recombination of new mediums (Murray 1997).

With the rise of multimedia technologies, the emergence of non-linear storytelling has been explored by researchers in the field. In her book Avatars of Story, Marie-Laure Ryan examines issues in electronic and transmedia storytelling (2008). She proposes that there are certain textual architectures that are typical of interactive narratives, which affect the plotline, discourse, and story as demonstrated in Figure 1. Ryan also identifies the types of interactivity commonly seen, and how they relate to characteristics such as perspective, time, and dramatization discussed in narrative theory.

‧ 國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

Figure 1. Plot architectures of interactive narratives proposed by Marie-Laure Ryan

Bryan Alexander (2011) also points out how the internet, multimedia, and computer games exploit the benefits of digital storytelling to create collaborative narratives, bring together new perspectives to the story, and blend the line between fiction and reality to establish a more immersive experience.

In order to break down a narrative to fine-grained fragments for story generating, we survey literary theories on narrative structure. Existing structuralist theories provide an excellent basis in designing a story structure comprised of fragments, or analyzable units of story, and these theories also serve as an important source to designing temporal and character arrangements such as flashback, chronology, or ellipses. Vladimir Propp had provided a theorem for the breaking down of folktales into 31 functions (Propp 1928), and the functions

‧ 國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

are connected into sequences of plot units called “moves.” However, Propp’s formalism has been found to be too rigid and is considered linear to be modeled for interactive narratives due to its restrictions on the order and content of story events (Tomaszewski & Binsted 2007).

Chatman proposes models in which there is a separation between form and content, narrative and discourse to break down the story content into elements that can be manipulated and recombined individually, as shown in Figure 2 (Chatman 1980). He also provides story characteristics such as hero complexion, plotline, ending, times sequence, and etc. as points of interest in narrative analysis.

Figure 2. Chatman’s formalization of elements in narrative

In the areas of generative narrative creativity and literature of drama managements systems, the concept of story fragments has also been greatly discussed. Mateas and Stern (2002) introduced the concept of beats, which are a collection of goals and actions for each story fragment. The structure allows the user to specify what happens in each beat, and whether there are goals or preconditions, but does not address the question of reusability or time sequences, and they are also platform specific. Case-Based Reasoning methods were proposed for plot generation of specific structured stories (Turner 1992; Gervás et al. 2005).

Riedl and León (2008) proposed the concept of a “vignette” which is comprised of an action,

‧

the character, and its current states. Preconditions for each vignette are checked to be fulfilled before the story progresses. This brings the story down to very concise character-action-state statements, but may result in a more loosely structured story in terms of story themes or overall plotlines. Moreover, though the concept of beats and vignettes have a basis in planning algorithms for story generation, the preconditions in the vignettes and beats is sometimes just as or even more rigid and complicated than branching formalisms. The planning formalism also requires much more effort on the authoring side to maintain the logic of the overall storyline. To deal with complicated storytelling scenarios, branching algorithms are much more intuitive for current storytelling applications.