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interactive narrative
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
Most computer games and more generally entertainment applications use implicitly or explicitly a user model as a reference for the gameplay and dramaturgy progression. with mixed reality technology and ubiquitous computing, user-centered design is required now more than ever to provide an adaptable and personal content at any time and in any context. The goal of our research is to provide a narration model correlated to a user model in the design of mixed reality entertainment. In this paper we give a brief survey of the current researches on user model for adaptation and personalization of services and some empirical studies of user model in games and interactive narration. We propose three possible levels of the user model: generic, localized and personalized and three types of narration scheme. We will describe that the user model and narration schemes can be used in a mixed reality system.
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
Interactive Narrative is an approach to interactive entertainment that enables the player to make decisions that directly affect the direction and/or outcome of the narrative experience being delivered by the computer system. Interactive narrative requires two seemingly conflicting requirements: coherent narrative and user agency. We present an interactive narrative system that uses a combination of narrative control and autonomous believable character agents to augment a story world simulation in which the user has a high degree of agency with narrative plot control. A drama manager called the Automated Story Director gives plot-based guidance to believable agents. The believable agents are endowed with the autonomy necessary to carry out directives in the most believable fashion possible. Agents also handle interaction with the user. When the user performs actions that change the world in such a way that the Automated Story Director can no longer drive the intended narrative forward, it is able to adapt the plot to incorporate the user's changes and still achieve dramatic goals.
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
Interactive narrative and video games are two fields divided between the will to follow a scenario and that to offer a maximum of freedom and interaction. We propose a method combining emergent narrative theory and game monitoring to create a new system of dynamic generation of narrative. This method is based on a multi-agent architecture, which supervises and monitors the game execution.allIt uses of narrative structures descriptors as a reference to lead the evolution of an emergent narrative world. A first application has been developed to test the validity of the system in term of effectiveness and computational cost.
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
Interactive virtual environments are becoming increasingly popular for their utility in virtual training, distributed decision-making and collaborative environments. Some of these applications rely on a scenario that is revealed to the user as he/she interacts with synthetic objects and characters that inhabit virtual worlds. The development and authoring of interactive dynamic scenarios is often hard and difficult to accomplish using current techniques. Many interactive scenario developers use decision trees, which yield very limiting and unfulfilling training experiences, because they do not stimulate learning or thinking beyond the scripted paths. Some researchers proposed plan-based interactive narrative architectures, which, although superior to decision trees, do not scale and do not address user’s goals and intentions, yielding inflexible scenarios that do not adapt suitably to players’ goals or behaviors. In this paper, we propose a dynamic scenario architecture that aims at enhancing scalability and reuse by using a multi-agent layered problem solving technique. Additionally, the interactive scenario architecture will automatically adapt to users’ goals by integrating a user model and a user monitoring technique.
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
Interactive virtual environments are becoming increasingly popular for their utility in education, virtual training, and entertainment. These applications often rely on a scenario that is revealed to the user as he/she interacts with synthetic objects and characters that inhabit virtual worlds. Current interactive narrative architectures used in the interactive entertainment industry often use decision trees, which are hard to author and modify. Some interactive entertainment productions are starting to use more generative techniques, such as plan-based or goal-based narrative. In this paper, I present an interactive narrative architecture that extends current research in interactive narrative by integrating a user modeling and user behavior analysis technique, which I argue facilities a more engaging and fulfilling experience. I have implemented the architecture within an interactive story called Mirage. The architecture resulted from an iterative design and development process involving a team that included film and theatre professionals. During this design and development process, I have experimented and evaluated different narrative techniques, which resulted in the proposed architecture.
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
Increasing emotional engagement in 3-D interactive environments is a hard, but important problem. It is important
for its potential utility in increasing motivation, involvement, and engagement. These constructs are not only useful
for entertainment applications, but also impact training and edutainment applications due to the impact of emotions
on learning (Ulate, 2002; Wolfe, 2001). Many researchers have explored several techniques, including enhancing
the story content to stimulate emotional engagement, developing new algorithms for dynamically creating stunning
visual effects, and enhancing 3-D sound. Theatre and film have integrated many techniques that increase
engagement, attention, and emotional involvement. In this paper, I describe a set of new design techniques
integrated in an architecture that uses theatric and cinematic theories, specifically acting and screenwriting methods,
to stimulate and improve emotional engagement in 3-D interactive narratives. In this paper, I discuss two research
directions: (1) defining an interaction model for 3-D interactive narrative based on screenwriting theories, and (2)
developing an actor-based agent architecture to simulate believable actions within an interactive narrative. The
resulting architecture was implemented and tested within Mirage, an interactive story based on the Greek Tragedy
Electra. Based on the critiques from several participants, I deduce that the resulting architecture presents
significantly encouraging design techniques that can potentially increase emotional involvement and dramatic
content of an interactive desktop 3D VR experience. The system and approach presented in this paper demonstrates
an important new direction that adds to the set of techniques currently used and expand the design methodologies to
include methods from disciplines, such as performance arts, theatre, and film.
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
Interactive narratives have been used in a variety of applications, including video games,
educational games, and training simulations. Maintaining engagement within such environments is
an important problem, because it affects entertainment, motivation, and presence. Performance arts
theorists have discussed and formalized many techniques that increase engagement and enhance
dramatic content of art productions. While constructing a narrative manually, using these
techniques, is acceptable for linear media, using this approach for interactive environments results
in inflexible experiences due to the unpredictability of users’ actions. Few researchers attempted to
develop adaptive interactive narrative experiences. However, developing a quality interactive
experience is largely an art process, and many of these adaptive techniques do not encode artistic
principles. In this paper, I present a new interactive narrative architecture designed using a set of
dramatic techniques that I formulated based on several years of training in film and theatre.
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
Lighting design is an important topic of game development. There are many functions
that lighting assumes in game environments, including directing attention, establishing
good action visibility, evoking emotions, setting atmosphere, and providing depth.
Current lighting design techniques rely on static manually designed lighting, where designers
set up the positions, angles, and colors for each light in a level. Game environments are
dynamic and unpredictable; physical and narrative scene content, including character locations,
tension, and narrative goals, change unpredictably in real time due to user interaction.
Thus, current static techniques often do not adequately adapt to serve desired aesthetic and
communicative functions or perceptual effects. Recently, Doom 3 incorporated dynamic
real-time lighting and demonstrated many advantages of using real-time dynamic lighting in
games, including heightening the emotional engagement and enhancing the overall interactive
experience. However, the technique is scripted and tightly coupled to game content. In
this article, we present ELE (Expressive Lighting Engine), an intelligent lighting system that
automatically sets and adjusts scene lighting in real time to achieve aesthetic and communicative
functions, including evoking emotions, directing visual focus, and providing visibility
and depth. ELE operates as a separate system that interacts with game/graphics engines
through a standard interface. In this article, we will discuss ELE and its interface with Unreal
Tournament 2003. We will also present results showing ELE in action. These results show:
• Utility of real-time adaptive lighting in providing visual focus, setting atmosphere,
evoking emotions, and establishing visibility during interaction in interactive
environments
• Acceleration in the development process due to the introduction of an automatic
system for lighting that can be overridden by designers at a high level, thus eliminating
the time-consuming process of setting individual light parameters for each level and
scene.
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
Recent advances in computer graphics, particularly in real-time rendering, have caused major improvements in 3D graphics and rendering techniques used in interactive entertainment. In this paper, we focus on the scene lighting process, which we define as the process of configuring the number of lights used in a scene, their properties (e.g. range and attenuation), positions, angles, and colors. Lighting design is well known among designers, directors, and visual artists for its vital role in influencing viewers’ perception by evoking moods, directing their gaze to important areas (i.e. providing visual focus), and conveying visual tension. It is, however, difficult to set positions, angles, or colors for lights within interactive scenes to accommodate these design goals, because an interactive scene’s spatial and dramatic configuration, including mood, dramatic intensity, and the relative importance of different characters, change unpredictably in real-time. There are several techniques developed by the game industry that establish spectacular real-time lighting effects within 3-D interactive environments. These techniques are often time and labor intensive. In addition, they are not easily used to dynamically mold the visual design to convey communicative, dramatic, and aesthetic functions as addressed in creative disciplines, such as art, film, and theatre. In this paper, we present a new real-time lighting design model based on cinematic and theatric lighting design theory. The proposed model is designed to automatically, and in real-time, adjust lighting in an interactive scene accommodating the dramatic, aesthetic, and communicative functions described by traditional lighting design theories while accommodating artistic constraints concerning style, visual continuity, and aesthetic function.
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
Interactive fiction and adventure video games are narrative genres which provide the player with the option of acting as the main character of the story. However these genres do not fully match the expectations of their authors and readers because the player cannot deeply affect the storyline. This article describes a system integrating highly interactive narrative structures in a real-time 3D environment. Based on a theoretical foundation of narrative and drama, an interactive drama engine (IDE) has been implemented. It comprises an action calculus system, a text-generation system, a behavior engine, an animation engine as well as an innovative adaptive user interface. The IDE is demonstrated with two scenarios.
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