Transferring Game Mastering Laws to Interactive Digital Storytelling

Abstract

Abstract. The Interactive Dilemma is the inevitable conflict between author's determinism and interactor's freedom. There are some approaches that try to tackle it, using strategies and heuristic rules that can combine on the fly the previously designed author material with the run-time decisions of the interactor. Interactive Narrative is a relatively new field and it is difficult to find formal studies that shows how to create this kind of art. Our proposal is based on the theoretical study of tabletop Role-Playing Games and it involves the practical implementation of those ideas for managing the interaction in a simple text adventure game. Game Masters are the best models we have found in real life for designing and directing interactive stories. In this paper we transfer their player modeling, their rules for interaction management and their improvising algorithms from the real world to a new Interactive Storytelling system.

User model in multiplayer mixed reality entertainment applications

“…It anticipates the user's behaviour and determines the plots. Some authors also use the character-based model as a key point of a narrative scheme: Cavazza and Mateas use the classical model of character conflicts to generate a dramaturgy [7,24]; Peinado uses Bartle's social classification as a key element of an automatized role game manager [28].…”

Explorations in Player Motivations: Virtual Agents

“…Understanding table-top role playing games and the mechanisms behind them can be useful in enhancing the quality of virtual agents. In this regard, these games have also drawn the attention of the researchers from the field of computer game studies [30,31,32]. These games represent randomness with dice rolls, for example 1d20 for a dice roll between 1 and 20.…”

Managing Emergent Character-Based Narrative

“…The role of the GM is a recurrent theme in interactive storytelling research [9,24,17,7,32,27,29] and the activity of the GM is often described at a high-level so as to illustrate successful real-time interactive storytelling management. The basic principles of GM operation have been the subject of investigation within hobbyist communities [e.g.…”