In my interactive narrative class, we defined the space of interactive narrative along two dimensions: interactivity and narrative. The interactivity dimention was further defined along the following dimensions (most interactive narratives will have one or more of these interactivity modes):

- psychological space connection:

interactor is observer, does not affect action; click on character to get psychological state revealed in text. e.g. John Laird et al.’s Hunted: interactor as ghost/dybyck with limited affective power-can act as direct agent once they’ve taken over the host.

- Spatial Connection

(e.g Myst, Exile)

first or third person interactor has control of movement, uses movement through space as primary mode of exploration or experience.

- Titillation

(e.g. games-Silent Hill 1, Silent Hill 2, Dracula)

first or third person interactor with direct agency; driven by and rewarded with sensual stimulation (i.e. breathing and other sounds, visuals with high color content.

- Problem Solving

(games/quests –RPG’s, Myst, Silent Hill)

first or third person interactor with direct agency; puzzling, strategizing hunts, fights, competitions; rewarded with winning.

- Relational

(e.g. Living Letters , Woogles, Cats & Dogs, Fallout 2)

first or third person interactor with direct agency of a primarily reactive type; major task is building relationship with Believables (short term and limited depth with Woogles vs. true give and take with the Cats & Dogs.) NB programmers: representing relationships in programs.

- voyeur, playwright, god

(e.g. Sims, Black and White, Dune, Warcraft)

interactor dictates action/ decisions to characters; Sims and Black and White utilize Believeables.

- Relational Intra and Interpersonal

(e.g. Mirage, Facade)

first or third person interactor with direct agency of both reactive and proactive dynamic

- Customizing

(e.g. most RPGs, Summoner, Sims)

pre-game choices about personality and or appearances of avatars or characters; descriptions range from shallow to in-depth;

reward adds investement

We described the narrative in terms of:

-linear

(e.g. Revenant)

not interactive in a narrative sense, but appears in games where interaction is limited to puzzle solving.

-non-linear

(e.g. Silent Hill 1, Silent Hill 2)

branching, accumulating or planning engine

-closed set

describing the possibility of change as closed set instead of open-ended

-open set

(e.g. Sims)

no narrative represented in program, only dictionary of behaviors

This seemed to work well for critiquing interactive narrative experiences…

Re: tools/languages point

I TAed a class on game design class and taught my own interactive narrative class. In the game design class, we used Inform, and game engines such as Unreal, and others. As, Michael pointed out, I found them very restrictive and inflexible, they are very good for producing similar games to the games the engine was designed for, but that was too restrictive to produce anything different from the games/interactive narratives that we see today. So for my interactive narrative class, I used Wildtangent/ and a story language. These were libraries that the students can use or ignore. Even though they were more flexible than game engines, they were too flexible and require too much content generation to be used for a class project. Although the students were able to build some interesting forms of interactive narratives, it took them far too long to accomplish and some of them stayed the summer to finish their projects.

I was wondering if anyone has any comment or can suggest an engine or a system for that purpose?

Regarding tools, I just want to clarify that when I described tools such as StorySpace and Inform as encoding a specific design tradition, I didn’t mean to say that they were “very restrictive and inflexible”. Yes, since they encode a design tradition, they do make certain kinds of experiences easier to build, while other kinds of experiences are difficult or impossible to build. But to focus on the “restrictive” part is to ignore the power of a design framework and tradition, the way it gives the author a conceptual space to develop their work. For example, in Inform in just a few lines of code one can implement a small set of locations and objects with a large number of default verbs – the ability to move between locations, open and close doors, pickup and drop objects, etc. is all built into the framework (technically, implemented in standard library code). Now in building a specific IF, the author will probably not want the default actions and responses on objects, and, conveniently, the default framework has already identified many things (verbs) that the author can customize. And these customization points encode the collective design wisdom of years of IF authoring experience. This is powerful as well as “restrictive”. I think the answer is that there are no general purpose tools for interactive narrative, if, by general purpose, one means you can build any story-like thing you want. I suppose compilers for general purpose programming languages (e.g. C++, lisp, Java) might be considered such tools, but their very generality makes them of limited use for thinking about interactive experiences (the design traditions they encode aren’t about interactive experience, but about objects, functional abstraction, closures and so forth). In order to move into radically different points in design space, you have to build your own tools which define the new point in the design space.

As far as what tools to teach in an IF class, so far my approach has been to let students use what they want. During the class I present examples of work from many interactive narrative traditions – what tools a student may use for design projects depends on what work resonated with them. For example, Danny Muller, a student with a screenwriting background, decided to do a final project using Inform. He wanted to think about how to turn a screenplay he’s been working on into an interactive experience. He also likes working with words. He’s never really programmed before – he gave himself a crash course in Inform programming (with some help from me over some sticky spots), developed a nice final project, and learned a lot about what it means to segment bits of writing among collections of locations and objects in such a way as to create a world with story potential. Brian Hochhalter, a student with a background in film studies, modified Tale-Spin, an early AI story generator, to generate stories in the Anime high-school love drama genre. Heather Logas, a student with a BFA background, used Director (and did a lot of lingo programming) to build a solitaire card game that generates simple fables as you play the game (cards represent characters, events, and so forth).

Second, Michael, does it seem possible to you that something like Facade might become a technical genre? (Encoded in a tool like Inform, Storyspace, the Quake engine, etc.) Or is it always going to be more on the gcc end of things?