Increasing Authorial Leverage in Generative Narrative Systems
Abstract
Generative narratives are an important subset of interactive narratives in games, enabling works that can provide unique media experiences not possible through more static forms. Such experiences can include character dialogue-driven games, systemic games with narrative bindings to mechanics, dynamic narratives responding to player actions, and many other forms. However, the concomitant authorial burden from creating content for these systems, in comparison with static narrative media, often makes completing generative narrative experiences difficult or infeasible.
This dissertation contributes a framework for evaluating and developing generative narrative systems while avoiding runaway authorial burden. This Authorial Leverage Framework was generalized from pragmatics learned through implementing three generative narrative systems in three particular spaces of interactive narrative, which represent three additional research contributions. The Ice-Bound system uses thematic-driven combinatorics to explore the sculptural space of vignette-style stories, seeking to maximize uniqueness while minimizing authorial overhead. StoryAssembler is a hybrid forward state space planner and hierarchical task network (HTN) planner, created to explore how choice-based narratives could be dynamically generated from diegetically embedded planner parameters. Lastly, the Delve system seeks to create vignettes whose text can be manipulated and sculpted through an ontologically-connected 3D object system.
Each of these systems presented their own particular challenges, which were confronted head-on with the intent of creating fully realized interactive experiences. In the course of doing so, pragmatic lessons were learned, which were generalized to form The Authorial Leverage Framework.
It is my hope that this framework and these systems will provide a useful tool for other practitioners and scholars in this area, grounded as they are in the production of playable experiences, whose creation is a critical component of systems-driven scholarship.