Final Draft - What am I doing... [Updated 04.03]
Storytelling has been used for many years to educate, pass down history, entertain and bond people together, so its no wonder that they had been written down in book forms or that it found its way into games, but the idea of interactive stories is new - a story where a user can change the outcome as he or she alters the paths, jumping from one to another in order to create somehow unique story. While its still fresh concept, it can already be seen in education, telltale games, simulation programs and many more. In this literature review, we will find out whether Interactive Storytelling has many benefits and if so, how is it used in today's society.
Firstly, let's discuss about Storytelling in education environment. Jason Ohler (2005) talks about the uses of technology in an classroom environment - focusing on interactive or digital storytelling. The author believes that this work of storytelling has a lot to offer to an educational system, especially when done in the right order - focusing on the story itself first, and the technology later. He believes that this system will help students with critical thinking, writing and usage of technology.
Jason Ohler believes that digital storytelling will allow students to better express themselves, not only at school, but also in work and in private life, while also allowing to uncover possible hidden talents in story writing, media production or art. And so, Stefan Göbel describes the idea of Narrative Game-Based Learning Objects, which provides an approach that uses storytelling and games as a motivational tool for learning. NGBLO is a combination of narration, game and learning and how this can be used in personalized, digital educational games. The author's discusses how to make a game and control it during the gameplay so that it suits it context and fits in with characteristics of user or a group of users. This technique had been used in a game "Save the Earth" which is used for learning and teaching geography. Jason Ohler never specified a way to include Interactive Storytelling into academic sense, but Stefan Gobel looked into it, and came up with an idea that should help students in learning and memorizing, while also having fun.
David Thue, Vadim Bulitko, Marcia Spetch and Eric Wasylishen realized that, there had been a lot of interest around the area of Interactive Storytelling and Player Modelling - not only in game industry but also in an academic environment. Despite that, the combination of those two still remain unexplored. The authors introduce "PaSSAGE", which stands for "PlayerSpecific Stories via Automatically Generated Events. This is an interactive system of narration which uses player modelling to automatically learn the player's style and adapt to it, and then uses this knowledge to create the content of the story. This idea covers the gap between interactive storytelling in education and the entertainment.
Next, let's explore storytelling in more general sense. Carolyn Handler Miller (2014) shows how to create immerse and interactive stories using different media, platforms and devices. Over the years, the way the stories are told has changed drastically, therefore the author believes that it is necessary to divide the idea of storytelling into two forms - old and new. The author focuses on a case study which talks about a wide range of platforms and genres. It also helps to plan out the process needed to develop an interactive story. Craig A. Lindley (2002) proposes a definition that game is a combination of "perceptual, cognitive, and motor activity" which in his research causes opposite reaction than expected, as this system is very repetitive. And so, to create more engaging gameplay, the author proposes a new game genre - First Person Actor, which allows the player to become a character within game and create the story through choices, meaning that certain paths will be available or not, depending on character's state or the level of the history. This will allow the players to explore deeper and more vivid themes. The studio Zero Game checks this theory out by creating a Purgatory Engine which is able to handle such game genre. But Craig and Zero Game Studio are not the only ones who wanted to explore this idea further. Dieter Grasbon and Norbert Braun (2013) talk about a morphological approach to interactive storytelling, which translates to exploring many paths and solutions to solve a complex problem. The authors had created an engine which allows the users to move within a physical space while wearing virtual reality headset. It also discusses few other approaches to the problem.
A group of three, Cavazza, M., Charles, F. and Mead, S. (2002) said that, in many interactive and narrative systems, the interaction of user is limited to "natural language communication" with virtual characters, either through single sentences or a dialogue. This is an important part in interactive narration as the user can become one of the story's characters. The authors presents a new form of interactivity, based only on the recognition of emotional speech. This allows the player to be actively involved in a dialogue with virtual character through mapping recognized emotions to narrate the situations and virtual character's feelings. This means, that the focus is strongly on emotions as the speech recognizer uses its function to create many different characteristics which then the system can learn. After more research, the same group consisting of Marc Cavazza, Fred Charles, Steven J. Mead (2009), describe an approach which is based on character-based interactive story, which allows the user to intervene at any given moment. In their prototype, they allow the player to intervene anytime, either through speech recognition system which allows to give an advice to virtual characters or through interaction physically with objects. They also describe approach to interactive storytelling where the player, instead of just watching, tries to change the story.
Another duo, Michael Mateas and Phoebe Sengers (1999) describe the interactive and narrative systems and how they improve the importance of the audience experience. The main focus is not to build a system with models of story using an internal process, but instead to create an interactive story that will be a pleasurable experience for the audience.
Interactive fiction is trying to make systems that allow the player to experience a story as an active participant, usually in form of a first-actor. The research in this area includes approaches that don't use AI components such as text fiction and text and graphical games. While those had been quite successful when it came to researching interactivity and further possibilities. While they attempts and research are vastly different, they are aiming towards a similar goal - to find out more about the uses of Interactive storytelling and how they can be beneficial to the society.
And finally, Cavazza M. and Pizzi D. (2006) talk about theories that influenced further development and work on Interactive Storytelling, as well as critically looking into theories that would support further research and development of that learning area. While many other researchers already use IS, there is still a lot that can be done and researched. This article is meant to show perspective and few critical comments which could be useful when further considering the narratology to support researching Interactive Storytelling.
In conclusion, Interactive Storytelling is gaining its popularity, both in gaming and academic industry, and as more research is being done, more possibilities are being discovered and further developed. Furthermore, groups and studios started to work on specifically designed engines which make interactive storytelling programs and games possible. It seems like it has bright future ahead of it as it has a potential to be something often used.
Citation:
Firstly, let's discuss about Storytelling in education environment. Jason Ohler (2005) talks about the uses of technology in an classroom environment - focusing on interactive or digital storytelling. The author believes that this work of storytelling has a lot to offer to an educational system, especially when done in the right order - focusing on the story itself first, and the technology later. He believes that this system will help students with critical thinking, writing and usage of technology.
Jason Ohler believes that digital storytelling will allow students to better express themselves, not only at school, but also in work and in private life, while also allowing to uncover possible hidden talents in story writing, media production or art. And so, Stefan Göbel describes the idea of Narrative Game-Based Learning Objects, which provides an approach that uses storytelling and games as a motivational tool for learning. NGBLO is a combination of narration, game and learning and how this can be used in personalized, digital educational games. The author's discusses how to make a game and control it during the gameplay so that it suits it context and fits in with characteristics of user or a group of users. This technique had been used in a game "Save the Earth" which is used for learning and teaching geography. Jason Ohler never specified a way to include Interactive Storytelling into academic sense, but Stefan Gobel looked into it, and came up with an idea that should help students in learning and memorizing, while also having fun.
David Thue, Vadim Bulitko, Marcia Spetch and Eric Wasylishen realized that, there had been a lot of interest around the area of Interactive Storytelling and Player Modelling - not only in game industry but also in an academic environment. Despite that, the combination of those two still remain unexplored. The authors introduce "PaSSAGE", which stands for "PlayerSpecific Stories via Automatically Generated Events. This is an interactive system of narration which uses player modelling to automatically learn the player's style and adapt to it, and then uses this knowledge to create the content of the story. This idea covers the gap between interactive storytelling in education and the entertainment.
Next, let's explore storytelling in more general sense. Carolyn Handler Miller (2014) shows how to create immerse and interactive stories using different media, platforms and devices. Over the years, the way the stories are told has changed drastically, therefore the author believes that it is necessary to divide the idea of storytelling into two forms - old and new. The author focuses on a case study which talks about a wide range of platforms and genres. It also helps to plan out the process needed to develop an interactive story. Craig A. Lindley (2002) proposes a definition that game is a combination of "perceptual, cognitive, and motor activity" which in his research causes opposite reaction than expected, as this system is very repetitive. And so, to create more engaging gameplay, the author proposes a new game genre - First Person Actor, which allows the player to become a character within game and create the story through choices, meaning that certain paths will be available or not, depending on character's state or the level of the history. This will allow the players to explore deeper and more vivid themes. The studio Zero Game checks this theory out by creating a Purgatory Engine which is able to handle such game genre. But Craig and Zero Game Studio are not the only ones who wanted to explore this idea further. Dieter Grasbon and Norbert Braun (2013) talk about a morphological approach to interactive storytelling, which translates to exploring many paths and solutions to solve a complex problem. The authors had created an engine which allows the users to move within a physical space while wearing virtual reality headset. It also discusses few other approaches to the problem.
A group of three, Cavazza, M., Charles, F. and Mead, S. (2002) said that, in many interactive and narrative systems, the interaction of user is limited to "natural language communication" with virtual characters, either through single sentences or a dialogue. This is an important part in interactive narration as the user can become one of the story's characters. The authors presents a new form of interactivity, based only on the recognition of emotional speech. This allows the player to be actively involved in a dialogue with virtual character through mapping recognized emotions to narrate the situations and virtual character's feelings. This means, that the focus is strongly on emotions as the speech recognizer uses its function to create many different characteristics which then the system can learn. After more research, the same group consisting of Marc Cavazza, Fred Charles, Steven J. Mead (2009), describe an approach which is based on character-based interactive story, which allows the user to intervene at any given moment. In their prototype, they allow the player to intervene anytime, either through speech recognition system which allows to give an advice to virtual characters or through interaction physically with objects. They also describe approach to interactive storytelling where the player, instead of just watching, tries to change the story.
Another duo, Michael Mateas and Phoebe Sengers (1999) describe the interactive and narrative systems and how they improve the importance of the audience experience. The main focus is not to build a system with models of story using an internal process, but instead to create an interactive story that will be a pleasurable experience for the audience.
Interactive fiction is trying to make systems that allow the player to experience a story as an active participant, usually in form of a first-actor. The research in this area includes approaches that don't use AI components such as text fiction and text and graphical games. While those had been quite successful when it came to researching interactivity and further possibilities. While they attempts and research are vastly different, they are aiming towards a similar goal - to find out more about the uses of Interactive storytelling and how they can be beneficial to the society.
In conclusion, Interactive Storytelling is gaining its popularity, both in gaming and academic industry, and as more research is being done, more possibilities are being discovered and further developed. Furthermore, groups and studios started to work on specifically designed engines which make interactive storytelling programs and games possible. It seems like it has bright future ahead of it as it has a potential to be something often used.
Citation:
- Jason Ohler, Number 4 Learning in the Digital Age Pages 44-47 The World of Digital Storytelling. https://imoberg.com/
- Carolyn Handler Miller, Digital Storytelling A creator's guide to interactive entertainment. https://doi.org/
- Craig A. Lindley, Zero Game Studio, The Gameplay Gestalt, Narrative, and Interactive Storytelling. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/
- Dieter Grasbon, Norbert Braun, A morphological approach to interactive storytelling. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu
- Cavazza M., Pizzi D. (2006) Narratology for Interactive Storytelling: A Critical Introduction. https://doi.org/
- Michael Mateas, Phoebe Sengers, Narrative Intelligence. http://www.aaai.org/
- David Thue, Vadim Bulitko, Marcia Spetch and Eric Wasylishen, Interactive Storytelling: A Player Modelling Approach. http://www.aaai.org/
- Cavazza, M., Charles, F. and Mead, S. (2002). Character-based interactive storytelling. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 17(4), pp.17-24. www.dl.acm.org/
- Marc Cavazza, Fred Charles, Steven J. Mead, Interacting with Virtual Characters in Interactive Storytelling. www.ivizlab.sfu.ca/
- Stefan Göbel, Personalized, Adaptive Digital Educational Games using Narrative Game-Based Learning Objects. www.igi-global.com
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