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A New Vision for Interactive Stories

A New Vision for Interactive Stories. Ernest W. Adams. The core experience of trying to understand interactive narrative: You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all different!. Three Traditional Assumptions. “Our goal is to create a sandbox that allows maximum freedom.”

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A New Vision for Interactive Stories

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  1. A New Vision for Interactive Stories Ernest W. Adams

  2. The core experience of trying to understand interactive narrative:You are in a maze oftwisty little passages,all different!

  3. Three Traditional Assumptions “Our goal is to create a sandbox that allows maximum freedom.” “Interactive stories shouldn’t be games.” “The player shouldn’t have tothink about any rules.”

  4. Façade www.interactivestory.net

  5. A Bizarre Façade Playscript (Audrey [the player’s character] knocks on the front door.) (Trip opens the front door.) TRIP: Audrey!! AUDREY: Trip, I’ve been shot! TRIP: Hi, it’s so great to see you! AUDREY: Help me! TRIP: Uh, well, come on in… Uh, I’ll… I’ll go get Grace. AUDREY: There was a man with a gun. TRIP and GRACE: (Unintelligible arguing) AUDREY: HELP! I’m going to die. GRACE: Hi! How are you? I’m so happy to see you after so long! AUDREY: For God’s sake, I’m bleeding… (etc.)

  6. Ken Perlin’s Law: “The cost of an event in aninteractive story must bedirectly proportional toits improbability.”

  7. Holy $#∫†!! Façade is a role-playing game! (But it’s not a dungeon crawl.)

  8. Laws We May Impose • Physical Laws • No materializing chickens. • Social Laws • Inappropriate behavior gets you locked up. • Dramatic Laws • Bad role-playing can cause the story to end. • A war game doesn’t let you be a bad general. • Nothing entitles you to be a bad role-player.

  9. ROLE- PLAYING NARRATIVE INTERACTIVITY

  10. Branching Narratives

  11. Branching Narratives CHARACTER LIVES CHARACTER DIES

  12. Ithe guy.

  13. Stress Situations Act to Change People

  14. function murder( • victim, • murderers, • relatives); • murder(King, • Claudius & Gertrude, • Hamlet);

  15. Against the Flying Circus Tuonela Productions jussi.autio@mail.student.oulu.fi

  16. Summary • Credibility is the currency of all narrative. • Role-playing mediates the tension between interactivity and narrative. • Treating interactive narratives as role-playing creates a contract between the designer and the player, such that: • The designer promises to provide a credible, coherent story if and only if… • The player promises to behave in credible, coherent ways.

  17. Summary • The combination of human-written, embedded, but character-agnostic situations, plus a character simulator, offers: • More flexibility than hard-coded narratives and characters. • More interesting dramatic possibilities than a pure social simulator. • … and it merits further study.

  18. Conclusion No other form of interactiveentertainment tries to be allthings to all players. Why should interactive stories have to shoulder that burden? It’s time to stop apologizing fornot working miracles,and get on with the job.

  19. A New Vision for Interactive Stories Ernest W. Adams

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