Emergent narrative and interactive narrative Ruth Aylett CVE University of Salford

1. Emergent narrative and interactive narrative Ruth Aylett CVE University of Salford www.nicve.salford.ac.uk/ruth Letting GO

2. Overview • What is the problem? • Emergence • The user • Artefact or process? • Practicalities

3. Assumptions • The context is Virtual Environments • 3D graphical worlds • Interactive in real-time • So not pre-rendered • Visually displayed • But not necessarily immersive • And also Augmented Reality • Mix of virtual and real-world spaces

4. Freedom v structure • Physical freedom • To navigate through the world • To interact with objects and characters • Conceptual freedom • The user is autonomous - own sense-reflect-act cycle • BUT story implies structure • Supplied in advance by an author • User has pre-determined role

5. What has been tried • User-as-author • Branching structures • Choice points • Can work for user-as-spectator • Covering the whole space • Universal plans (Cavazza) • Scaling up problem • Beats (Mateus and Stern) • Also a scaling up problem

6. Characteristics of VEs

7. Predictive planning v behavioural control Planning Top-down Produces task structure Behavioral control Bottom-up Stimulus-response A robot parallel

8. Emergence • Complex behaviour from simple roots • Interaction provides complexity • Examples: • Formation of animal fur patterns • Brownian motion • Fractals • Game of Life

9. Beacon Obstacle Obstacle Agent path Intentionality? • Looks like path planning • But outcome of interaction between beacon seeking and obstacle avoidance

10. Emergent narrative • A contradiction in terms? • Author time v story time • But improvisational forms do exist • Drama, RPGs, verbal story-telling • Life is itself a seed-bed of stories • The anecdote • The football match

11. Teletubby narratives • Aimed at very young children • Age 2 or less • Event or disturbance driven • pink cloud; rubber boots; run run run • Precipitating incident • With ‘suitable’ behaviours

12. Importance of hierarchy • ‘Star-crossed lovers’ • Specifies characters and some plot elements • Abstract-action level • Boy meets girl • Action instantiation • Boy introduces self • Execution-level variation

13. The User: Storification • What people do with their own experience • The autobiographical memory (Dautenhahn) • Need to provide the right kind of experience • The ‘before time’ (Stanislavski), see also Lord of the Rings • The possibility of social immersion • Multiple threads

14. Participation v spectating • VERY different activities • The commitment to act • Self-structuring of actions • Storification • The first-person perspective • The Good Terrorist - Doris Lessing • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - Tom Stoppard • Making a video

15. User as participant • Freedom supports physical presence • Physical immersion does make a difference • Real-world constraints • The autonomy of others • Uncertain (but final) outcomes • Limited ability to act - not God

16. Social presence • The other characters matter • Enforce the role boundaries • Living with consequences • Characters ‘remember’ what you have done • Time cannot be wound back • The world goes on without you • Back story is continuously constructed

17. Spectrum of involvement • God-like role inimical to narrative • Far too predictable (outside of authoring) • SpectACTOR - Augusto Boal • Forum Theatre • The ‘invisible friend’ - VICTEC project • And others • Living history, murder weekend

18. Experienced story Constructed story Presented story author Experienced story user spectator characters external events Artefact v process

19. Dynamic systems • Defined by: • Set of variables • Functions for specifying change in variables over time • Parameter settings of the functions • An initial state

20. An analogy • A jar of billiard balls (no gravity!) Initial conditions External events

21. Journey on the surface of story

22. Steep sections Substantial changes in state variables For example character emotional state Shallow sections Low impact (the boring football match) Use as a dramatic metric? Trajectory profile

23. Practical issues • Entrances and exits • Graceful; within logic of the world • What’s happening ‘off-stage’? • Or at other times • The virtual gossip? • The voice over • Influencing from afar

24. Still more issues • Challenging-but-forgiving environments • From a small part to a bigger one? • Character state-of-the-art • Problems with natural language • Problems with naturalism • Capturing user interaction

25. A story manager? • A script is a (dumb) manager • As gamesmaster? • Trying to ‘get back on track’? • External events? • New characters, plane crashes, fate • A distributed manager • Characters also as actors

26. Example: towards the holodeck.. • A user in a cave • Soap like environment • Multiple threads • Fertile ground for storification • User has defined role • Present from time to time • May also observe and influence

27. Example: the haunted room • Use of augmented reality • Real room • Some virtual characters • ‘Real’ events • As in Majestic • Phone calls, email, materials in the desk, other users

28. Conclusions • A new paradigm? • but not an ‘all-or-nothing’ thing • Letting Go, but not abandoning authorship • Not all stories are the same • Quests v soaps • Both difficult and risky • Hey, that’s research!