A tabletop interactive storytelling system: designing for social interaction

Alofs, Thijs; Theune, Mariët; Swartjes, Ivo

doi:10.1504/ijart.2015.071206

Cited by 10 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…My work expands the research carried out with the Virtual Storyteller (Swartjes, 2010), a story generation system which has virtual storyteller been adapted to enable user interaction (Alofs, Theune & Swartjes, 2015). I look at how users interact with the Virtual Storyteller and how agents can reason about a story's plot to overcome the narrative paradox.…”

Section: The Narrative Of This Dissertationmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…The remainder of this chapter is based on the interaction corpus collected by Alofs et al (2015), which I discuss in Section 3.2. In Section 3.3, I explain how we analysed the coherence of stories that users of the Interactive Storyteller created.…”

Section: Siri Keetonmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The interface narrates the character's actions through the Narrator agent, which uses a text-to-speech module. Additionally, all actions are listed in natural text in story scrolls, which can be read, enlarged and scrolled through.A series of interactions with the ist by four pairs of children yielded a variety of created stories (Alofs et al, 2015). Each of the pairs played two sessions, one with the touch-only version of the system, and one with the characters being 7 To increase the similarity to board games, Alofs et al created another form of interacting with the characters, namely through tangible playing pieces instead of the portraits in the interface.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A series of interactions with the ist by four pairs of children yielded a variety of created stories (Alofs et al, 2015). Each of the pairs played two sessions, one with the touch-only version of the system, and one with the characters being represented through tangibles.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The evaluation of the ist by Alofs et al (2015) raised several questions. Firstly, the coherence of the children's co-created stories is not always apparent at first sight.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Meta matters in interactive storytelling and serious gaming : a play on worlds

Linssen

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Stories, in games, novels, films, and all media alike, help us understand our world. Stories provide an escape from the real world, but they also reflect reality. They provide situations that may previously have been unimaginable, leading us to think about concepts in different ways. We learn through stories, we construct our mental model of the world through them.In this dissertation, I investigate the use of storytelling techniques in the domains of interactive storytelling and serious gaming. The field of interactive storytelling attempts to create and analyse systems that provide an interactive experience to users: the latter can influence the plot of story as it is being told. Serious gaming is concerned with the use of games for purposes other than only entertainment; in this dissertation, I investigate serious games with educational purposes. In both domains, I inspect how both human users and virtual agents (artificial, autonomous entities) can perceive stories.In Part i of this dissertation, I present my main thesis: the meta matters when interacting with interactive storytelling systems and serious games. All stories and games take place in a context: they take place in virtual worlds embedded within the real world. This concept is captured by the term magic circle. Virtual worlds are not separated from the real world; they are interconnected. Moreover, events and perceptions in the real world influence people's behaviour in the virtual world and vice versa. My research revolves around the use of such meta-information to improve experiences with interactive storytelling systems and serious games.In Part ii of this dissertation, I delve into the field of interactive storytelling, specifically focusing on the Virtual Storyteller (vst) and its successor, the Interactive Storyteller (ist). The vst provides users with an emergent narrative: stories are generated based on the interactions between virtual agents which play characters in the story. In the ist, users can take control of one of the characters, substituting a virtual agent, and influence how the story plays out. I first investigated how the meta matters to these systems by analysing interactions between pairs of children and the ist. This analysis showed that children, apart from only enacting in-character (ic) behaviour, actively go meta to reason about their plans and discuss their experience amongst each other (out-of-character behaviour, ooc). We created a scheme that allows for the annotation of this communication to discern the types of ic and ooc behaviour. With this scheme, we could see how the children's perspectives toward their interaction changed over time.Using the vst, we investigated how the meta can matter to its virtual agents. The generation of stories in the vst relies on the characters in the story world performing actions that advance the story. However, this does not necessarily entail that characters will take those actions. For example, if they can go about their way and never meet each other, possible conflicts can be avo...

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Section: The Narrative Of This Dissertationmentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Siri Keetonmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The evaluation of the ist by Alofs et al (2015) raised several questions. Firstly, the coherence of the children's co-created stories is not always apparent at first sight.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Meta matters in interactive storytelling and serious gaming : a play on worlds

Linssen

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Designing a Smart Toy Interactive Setting for Creating Stories

Stal¹,

Catalá²,

Theune³

et al. 2020

Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Smart and robotic toys introduce more possibilities than ever for building interactive settings for playful learning. Here we explore their use for supporting the development of storytelling skills in children. Previous research on interactive storytelling prototypes has already shown their potential to this end. However, the focus has often been set on technical implementation issues or using very specialized hardware that may limit their potential to go outside the lab. The lack of a general and integrated application with off-the-shelf affordable components has encouraged our research on how to combine a tablet application with an existing smart robotic toy, so that it supports the creation of structured stories and children's reflection on them. Thus, this paper reports on the design and development of a multimedia storytelling application that includes a smart robotic toy, adopting a user-centric approach with iterative design and user-testing cycles.

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Acting, Playing, or Talking about the Story: An Annotation Scheme for Communication during Interactive Digital Storytelling

Theune

Alofs

2013

Interactive Storytelling

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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.

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A tabletop interactive storytelling system: designing for social interaction

Cited by 10 publications

References 24 publications

Meta matters in interactive storytelling and serious gaming : a play on worlds

Meta matters in interactive storytelling and serious gaming : a play on worlds

Designing a Smart Toy Interactive Setting for Creating Stories

Acting, Playing, or Talking about the Story: An Annotation Scheme for Communication during Interactive Digital Storytelling

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