Computer games are now a significant cultural phenomenon, and a significant artistic output of humanity. However, little effort and attention have been paid to how the medium of games and interactive software developed, and even less to the historical storage of software development documentation. This thesis borrows methodologies and practices from computer science, the history of science and technology, and information science, and brings them to bear on the historical study of computer games. It posits that in order to understand and reconcile the place and effects of cultural software in society, new means of stabilizing software outputs, exploring their contents, and expressing their histories must be created.

The thesis’s contributions are tied to a model of scholarly process, in which software practitioners — in this case specifically game developers — produce documentation that is then explored by historians and expressed — through scholarly works — to other scholars and lay audiences. That is, the accumulation of historical records about games and software needs to be filtered through stabilizing processes before historians can make use of them. Furthermore, the subsequent expression of those records needs to take their digital, computational, and technically engineered nature into account.

The first three chapters focus on the appraisal of game development documentation, the description of game records in institutional archives, and the citation and reference of game resources. “Appraisal” analyzes the records of the game Prom Week and provides an appraisal and institutional ingestion its development documentation. “Description” presents semantic controlled vocabularies

and theoretical models for computer game platforms and media formats. “Citation” introduces the Game and Interactive Software Scholarship Toolkit (GISST), a system for the citation of emulated computer games, their computational state, and recordings of their game play. GISST allows for embedding emulated games into online documents to aid in historical expression.

The two latter chapters focus on record expression. “Discovery” presents a novel application of natural language processing to the visualization of computer game history. The final chapter focuses on the history of the computer game Doom and the need to devote more time to the organization and historicization of its documentation.

Videogames have historically relied on players picking what their characters say or do from a list or entering their desired action into a text parser and then having those intentions carried out in some form by the game characters. There is an understanding that a videogame player exists somewhere between an audience member and a stage actor---but rarely are players allowed to express themselves in a manner similar to an actor. This thesis argues that the acting and directing knowledge of theater is a potentially bountiful resource for designing player and NPC interactions and proposes the reversal of the player picking an action and the characters acting out the response: have the player gesture and move as their character and interpret those actions to alter the lines of dialogue characters are speaking (or in this case, displaying on screen). To illustrate this, this thesis presents a literature review of theatrical methodology, its existing relationship to games, and a survey of projects in the interactive narrative and character interaction spaces. The chosen theater practices provide a useful basis for a new type of interaction between players and non-player characters. Additionally, particularly when looking at acting practices, their major concerns with the relationship between character and actor provide useful language to describe and further explore the relationship between the player and their avatar. As part of this exploration, we created Puppitor, a rules-based input detection system that translates mouse and keyboard inputs into emotional affect values for use in changing the tone and direction of dialogue heavy scenes. We discuss the design principles behind Puppitor's architecture, how its inspiration from theater and fighting games influenced the implementation of each system module, authoring of rulesets and animations, and propose a direction for further work in the realm of interactive drama and storytelling more broadly.

Choices in storygames are broadly understood in terms of how they affect causation and agency, however there is little scholarship in how choices add meaning to narrative context. This work extends that knowledge by looking at how Sonder, a storygame developed alongside this thesis, uses choice to convey characterization. We also discuss how Sonder frames the relationship between player and character, how current theory of agency can be used to understand this relationship, and how it uses agency to a narrative effect.

As a videogame creator who has long thought of the games I make as akin to poems, I believe our vocabulary for discussing meaning in videogames is too limited. The last few years have seen an outpouring of fruitful scholarship around games, much of which operates outside of traditional dichotomies, but the question of how one might fruitfully apply a poetry lens to videogames has remained largely unexplored. In this paper, I consider some tensions that have come out of my own creative practice and lay some groundwork for the discussion and creation of poetic videogames. I start by laying the basis for a poetics of the lyric for videogames because I believe that any discussion of the poetic potential of videogames requires a framework for considering the nature and mechanism of poetic effect in games. I call it a poetics of the lyric because it is a poetics rooted in an examination of lyric poetry. Drawing from my own practice, I also attempt to answer the question of what poetic intervention in videogames is all about in the first place, and propose a poetic praxis founded on the idea of intervening in the established language of videogames—a vast tangled web of visual, auditory, and procedural signifiers—to recast, enliven, and make that language new. The goal of my project is not to propose a monolithic framework, or to separate videogame poems and poets from their nonpoetic counterparts, but rather to see if I can find some language that might help us notice and appreciate certain aspects of videogames that other approaches might dismiss or minimize, as well as to provide a possible starting place for those desiring to approach videogame creation as an intentional poetic practice.

This dissertation explores the notion of shared authorship in interactive narratives and computational media. A work of shared authorship is one in which the player and the system collaboratively create a narrative artifact, ideally one which neither would have been capable of producing on their own. This is in contrast to many works of interactive narrative, which ship with either a single story or a relatively small number of stories for the player to experience through gameplay.

After introducing the notion and pleasures of shared authorship, this document discusses many fields of research relevant to this particular brand of interactive storytelling, including sculptural fiction, story generators, and player modeling. It also borrows theory from the humanities---with particular emphasis on Brechtian and improvisational theatre---to help further discover possible avenues and ideal qualities pieces of shared authorship should possess. This section then ends with a discussion of several existing games with narrative elements and varying degrees of collaboration, and proposes several dimensions with which to measure them, in the hope of discovering as of yet

unexplored shared authorship design space.

The dissertation then goes into its first of three examinations of a playable shared authorship experience enabled by new artificial intelligence technology: Prom Week. Over the course of three chapters, Prom Week is examined in three dierent ways: through the underlying technology that enabled it, though the playable experience itself, and through a variety of novel evaluation mechanisms. Throughout each of these explorations, the systems are discussed through a lens of shared authorship; their successes and failures at being works of shared authorship in and of themselves, and their potential for creating and inspiring works of shared authorship in the future. This pattern is repeated two more times with the playable experiences of Bad News and the in-development Writing Buddy.

Though there is still much design space yet to be explored, Prom Week, Bad News, and Writing Buddy nevertheless manage to be notable advances in the cause of shared authorship.

Within the realm of computational story generation sits Minstrel, a decades old system which was once used to explore the idea that, under the correct conditions, novel stories can be generated by taking an existing story and replacing some of its elements with similar ones found in a different story. This concept would eventually fall within the bounds of a strategy known as Case-Based Reasoning (CBR), in which problems are solved by recalling solutions to past problems (the cases), and mutating the recalled cases in order to create an appropriate solution to the current problem. This dissertation uses a rational reconstruction of Minstrel called Minstrel Remixed, a handful of upgraded variants of Minstrel Remixed, and a pair of similar but unrelated storytelling systems, to explore various characteristics of Minstrel-style storytelling systems.

In the first part of this dissertation I define the class of storytelling systems that are similar to Minstrel. This definition allows me to compare the features of these systems and discuss the various strengths and weaknesses of the variants. Furthermore, I briefly describe the rational reconstruction of Minstrel and then provide a detailed overview of the inner workings of the resulting system, Minstrel Remixed.

Once Minstrel Remixed was complete, I chose to upgrade it in order to explore the set of stories that it could produced and ways to alter or reconfigure the system with the goal of intentionally influencing the set of possible outputs. This investigation resulted in two new storytelling systems called Conspiracy Forever and Problem Planets. The second portion of this dissertation discusses these systems as well as a number of discoveries about the strengths and weaknesses of Minstrel Style Storytelling Systems in general. More specifically, I discuss that, 1) a human reader's capacity for creating patterns out of an assortment of statements is incredibly useful and output should be crafted to use this potential, 2) Minstrel-Style Storytelling tends to be amnesiac and do a poor job of creating long stories that remain cohesive, and 3) the domain that a storytelling system is working from is incredibly important and must be well engineered. I continue by discussing the methods that I discovered for cleaning up and maintaining a domain and conclude with a section covering interviews with other storytelling system creators about the strengths and weaknesses of their systems in light of my findings about Minstrel Remixed.

In the final portion of this document I create a framework of six interrelated attributes of stories (length, coherence, creativity, complexity, contextuality, and consolidation,) and use this along with the learning discussed in the first two portions of the dissertation to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this class of CBR systems when applied to both static story generation and interactive storytelling. I discuss the finding that these systems seem to have some amount of power and although they can be tweaked to produce for example, longer or more consolidated stories, these improvements always come along with a reduction in complexity, coherence, or one of the other attributes. Further discussion of the output power of this class of storytelling systems revolves around the primary limiting factor to their potential, namely the fact that they have no understanding of the symbols and patterns that they are manipulating. Finally, I introduce a number of strategies that I found to be fruitful for increasing the 'output power' of the system and getting around the lack of commonsense reasoning, chiefly improving the domain and adding new subsystems.

Prior interactive narrative research has extensively investigated the question of how game designers can tell stories through games, but little investigation has been done of how and why players use games to tell stories of their own. This thesis investigates player storytelling practices around emergent narrative games as a form of authorship play. First, we examine existing play practices centered on the authorship of written stories based on play experiences. We find that some players deliberately seek out emergent narrative games as storytelling partners, and argue that this is due in part to the creativity support features common to several games within this genre, which can help players overcome certain barriers to creativity—including fear of the blank canvas, fear of judgment, writer's block, and perfectionism. Second, we present Why Are We Like This? (WAWLT), a mixed-initiative co-creative storytelling game based on design insights gleaned from this analysis. We discuss the AI architecture of WAWLT, focusing especially on how it makes use of story sifting and social simulation technologies to provide players with creativity support, and present the results of preliminary playtesting. Finally, we conclude with some brief discussion of the implications of our work in this design space, including our priorities for future work.

There is a peculiar method in the area of procedural narrative called emergent narrative: instead of automatically inventing stories or deploying authored narrative content, a system simulates a storyworld out of which narrative may emerge from the happenstance of character activity in that world. It is the approach taken by some of the most successful works in the history of computational media (The Sims, Dwarf Fortress), but curiously also some of its most famous failures (Sheldon Klein's automatic novel writer, Tale-Spin). How has this been the case? To understand the successes, we might ask this essential question: what is the pleasure of emergent narrative? I contend that the form works more like nonfiction than fiction—emergent stories actually happen—and this produces a peculiar aesthetics that undergirds the appeal of its successful works. What then is the pain of emergent narrative? There is a ubiquitous tendency to misconstrue the raw transpiring of a simulation (or a trace of that unfolding) as being a narrative artifact, but such material will almost always lack story structure.

So, how can the pain of emergent narrative be alleviated while simultaneously maintaining the pleasure? This dissertation introduces a refined approach to the form, called curationist emergent narrative (or just 'curationism'), that aims to provide an answer to this question. Instead of treating the raw material of simulation as a story, in curationism that material is curated to construct an actual narrative artifact that is then mounted in a full-fledged media experience (to enable human encounter with the artifact). This recasts story generation as an act of recounting, rather than invention. I believe that curationism can also explain how both wild successes and phenomenal failures have entered the oeuvre of emergent narrative: in successful works, humans have taken on the burden of curating an ongoing simulation to construct a storied understanding of what has happened, while in the failures humans have not been willing to do the necessary curation. Without curation, actual stories cannot obtain in emergent narrative.

But what if a storyworld could curate itself? That is, can we build systems that automatically recount what has happened in simulated worlds? In the second half of this dissertation, I provide an autoethnography and a collection of case studies that recount my own personal (and collaborative) exploration of automatic curation over the course of the last six years. Here, I report the technical, intellectual, and media-centric contributions made by three simulation engines (World, Talk of the Town, Hennepin) and three second-order media experiences that are respectively driven by those engines (Diol/Diel/Dial, Bad News, Sheldon County). In total, this dissertation provides a loose history of emergent narrative, an apologetics of the form, a polemic against it, a holistic refinement (maintaining the pleasure while killing the pain), and reports on a series of artifacts that represent a gradual instantiation of that refinement. To my knowledge, this is the most extensive treatment of emergent narrative to yet appear.