TY - GEN
T1 - Computer-assisted authoring of interactive narratives
AU - Kapadia, Mubbasir
AU - Falk, Jessica
AU - Zünd, Fabio
AU - Marti, Marcel
AU - Sumner, Robert W.
AU - Gross, Markus
N1 - Publisher Copyright: Copyright © ACM.
PY - 2015/2/27
Y1 - 2015/2/27
N2 - This paper explores new authoring paradigms and computer-assisted authoring tools for free-form interactive narratives. We present a new design formalism, Interactive Behavior Trees (IBT's), which decouples the monitoring of user input, the narrative, and how the user may influence the story outcome. We introduce automation tools for IBT's, to help the author detect and automatically resolve inconsistencies in the authored narrative, or conflicting user interactions that may hinder story progression. We compare IBT's to traditional story graph representations and show that our formalism better scales with the number of story arcs, and the degree and granularity of user input. The authoring time is further reduced with the help of automation, and errors are completely avoided. Our approach enables content creators to easily author complex, branching narratives with multiple story arcs in a modular, extensible fashion while empowering players with the agency to freely interact with the characters in the story and the world they inhabit.
AB - This paper explores new authoring paradigms and computer-assisted authoring tools for free-form interactive narratives. We present a new design formalism, Interactive Behavior Trees (IBT's), which decouples the monitoring of user input, the narrative, and how the user may influence the story outcome. We introduce automation tools for IBT's, to help the author detect and automatically resolve inconsistencies in the authored narrative, or conflicting user interactions that may hinder story progression. We compare IBT's to traditional story graph representations and show that our formalism better scales with the number of story arcs, and the degree and granularity of user input. The authoring time is further reduced with the help of automation, and errors are completely avoided. Our approach enables content creators to easily author complex, branching narratives with multiple story arcs in a modular, extensible fashion while empowering players with the agency to freely interact with the characters in the story and the world they inhabit.
KW - Behavior trees
KW - Computer-assisted authoring
KW - Interactive narrative
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/84943279453
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/84943279453#tab=citedBy
U2 - 10.1145/2699276.2699279
DO - 10.1145/2699276.2699279
M3 - Conference contribution
T3 - Proceedings of the 19th Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, i3D 2015
SP - 85
EP - 92
BT - Proceedings of the 19th Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, i3D 2015
A2 - Spencer, Stephen N.
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 2015 19th ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, i3D 2015
Y2 - 27 February 2015 through 1 March 2015
ER -