Whose story is it anyway? : How Improv Informs agency and authorship of emergent narrative

Socially-Aware Emergent Narrative

“…Each episode defines pre-and post-conditions, as well as sets of possible locations, objects, choices, and goals available. However, as discussed in [11], such a strong episodic design is limiting, as a global sense of time -and what happens during scenes, or what happens between them in the "world"-or emotional residue after each scene are not accounted for.…”

“…Furthermore, research on this topic tries to tackle the problem of the narrative paradox : virtual environments -such as games -and narratives exist on different ontological levels, and thus there is a fundamental conflict between free-form interactivity provided by the virtual environment and the level of satisfaction produced by a man-made narrative structure [11]. The main hypothesis of emergent narrative is that this problem cannot be solved by treating both issues as separate and combining them, but by treating narrative as a direct result of the actions of the characters [5].…”

“…The main idea is that characters take responsibility in managing the drama, including in their plan selection mechanism a bias towards choices that have the greatest impact on the emotions of other characters. This idea of distributed drama management has been adopted by the Virtual Storyteller [11], the architecture of which is depicted in Figure 1. Character agents are based on the FAtiMA agent architecture and the world agent is the interface to a simulation layer.…”

“…The plot agent acts as an intermediary, setting up the simulation and sending perceptions to, and receiving actions from the character agents. Stories are stored using Fabula [11], a formal model based on causal network theory to represent events already occurred with respect to the story. Events are linked to other narrative concepts such as goals, actions, or perceptions, via causal relationships -e.g., physical or psychological.…”

“…NPCs are usually mere enactors of a story previously designed, and their main use is to help advancing the story rather than acting on their own. It is well known that there is a compromise between narrative control and character autonomy [11]. This has been a topic of interest from the agent community in what has usually been called emergent narrative: stories can emerge through simulation of a virtual world inhabited by virtual characters.…”