This paper presents the Interactive Storyteller, a multiuser interface for AI-based interactive storytelling, where stories emerge from the interaction of human players with intelligent characters in a simulated story world. To support face-to-face contact and social interaction, we position users around a shared multi-touch table, which very much resembles the social setting of traditional tabletop board games. To our knowledge, the Interactive Storyteller is the first AI-based interactive storytelling system that combines an emergent narrative approach with the social aspects of traditional tabletop board games. We carried out user experiments to investigate to what extent our system supports social interaction. By analysing the interactions of pairs of children with the Interactive Storyteller, we determined which system aspects triggered cooperation and highly social behaviour and which aspects caused players to behave less socially. We also tried to find out whether the use of tangible playing pieces offered any advantages over touch-only interaction, but we did not find any differences between the two.

Abstract. In this paper we investigate the communication of children playing with an interactive digital storytelling system. What users say during their interaction with a digital storytelling system can tell us much about how they relate to the characters and how engrossed they are in the storytelling activity. We propose a communication annotation scheme that combines ideas about framing from research on pretend play and role-playing games, and use it to analyse children's utterances gathered in a small-scale user experiment. Our results show that certain kinds of communication are prevalent among the children's interactions. We conclude that this can be attributed to the design of our system, and we envisage future use of the annotation scheme to inform the design of other interactive storytelling systems.

The Interactive Storyteller is an interactive storytelling system with a multiuser tabletop interface. Our goal was to design a generic framework combining emergent narrative, where stories emerge from the actions of autonomous intelligent agents, with the social aspects of traditional board games. As a visual representation of the story world, a map is displayed on a multi-touch table. Users can interact with the story by touching an interface on the table surface with their fingers and by moving tangible objects that represent the characters. This type of interface, where multiple users are gathered around a table with equal access to the characters and the story world, offers a more social setting for interaction than most existing interfaces for AI-based interactive storytelling.

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