Dramachina

IRIS Wiki - IS Systems - Dramachina

Availability

Dramachina is a research prototype provided on a as-is basis - meaning it is not maintained. However it can be obtained for research purposes by sending a message to donikian @ irisa.fr.

Technical Description

DraMachina is an authoring tool dedicated to the description of narrative elements composing an interactive fiction. It was developed at INRIA during a collaborative project partnership between IRISA and the Daesign company and was partially funded by the RNTL (French National Network for Research and Innovation in Software Technology) for two years up until march 2003.

DraMachina is an interactive application using mainly text edition. Authors of classical linear stories can write the (interactive) story, including character descriptions and linear dialogue edition. A scenarist of an interactive fiction can also describe the skeleton of a story at different levels (period, act, scene, action) and specify relations between these elements. He can freely specify a more complete dialogue structure including user choices and branching depending on specific parameters.

As summarized by Marie-Laure Ryan (1997), different architectures are possible for an interactive fiction, we decided not to make a choice between these possible architectures, but to let authors writing stories make the choice by providing a low constrained approach.

The main window allows authors to access the story elements, and is structured by using the file/directory metaphor. The main elements are:

- Authors directory: each author can enter his own reference;

- Narration directory: this directory includes acts, periods, dramatic actions and units description;

- Objects directory: description of objects important in the course of the story;

- Areas directory: description of locations of the story;

- Actors directory: this directory includes elements related to the description of characters, which is composed of their characteristics, psychology, actions they can perform, roles they can play and relationships between actors;

- Scenes directory: detailed description of scenes;

- Dialogues directory: dialog edition based on protodialog patterns

This logical description is based on a structural analysis, not only of drama but also of film morphology. It allows the author to set up a series of criteria which will determine a virtual director's cut each time the interactive fiction is performed. For example, a Scene object is logically described as the combination of current setting / actors on stage / Dramatic Action currently going on / and present state of the Dramatic Units map. Entrance of a character, change of Dramatic Action... will automatically change the Scene Object and thus its parameters such as Mood / Ambience, Level of Formality, Rythm of Action, Actions Allowed, etc.

Dramatic units mark the evolution of the narration. They can be validated by different events as dramatic actions, dialogues or relationship evolutions. These elements are then associated to dramatic units by declaring logical formulas which are preconditions or implications of the dramatic units, such as the Bremond logical model. Links between nodes of the drama unit map are then extracted from these logical formulas and a drama map can be constructed.

Psychological description of characters is a delicate and important point. In DraMachina we decided to focus on strokes. Each stroke has an impact which could be either positive (caress) or negative (blow), and a duration on the receiver. Declaring strokes that characters received before the start of a story helps to represent the characters' initial psychological state. We decomposed it in a description, a duration value from seconds to whole life and an impact value from traumatism to happiness. Other characteristics could be given to complete the description of an actor, such as the speaking and listening focus, the accepted distance to other people in a discussion, the normal walking speed. We can also describe lists of actions and roles that the actor will be able to perform.

The protodialog edition window is a graph based structure including nodes, arcs and three kinds of branching - binary, ternary and unbounded. Protodialogs are used to characterize different dialog structures. Branching nodes can either correspond to a conditional expression on variables of the story or a question/answer interaction phase with spectators. All classical style characteristics can be specified for each element of the graph. No specific protocol is defined, it is of the responsibility of the development team to define its own writing protocol with the author. A dialog structure is then based on one of the protodialogs available. A dialog is also defined by its protagonists and each node of the protodialog can correspond to a sequence of one's lines.

The internal file format is expressed in XML. We have chosen XML as it gives easily the possibility to export data to other applications. During the DOM tree generation process, an optional functionality can be used which consists in syntaxic and semantic analysis of phrases. The result consists in a decomposition of each character's action into several parameters: nature, manner, source and target of the action. Verbs are classified in different categories (action, dialog, motion) by using available corpus. These data can be very interesting to integrate in an action databasis, and permit to extract informations about actions that can be performed by each of the characters.

Ref.: M.L. Ryan. Interactive drama: Narrativity in a highly interactive environment. Modern Fiction Studies, 43(3):677-707, 1997.

Result Description (end user perspective)

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Authoring Description

Dramachina has been created with a strong authoring point of view, see description above.

Strong Points

DraMachina offers a consistent management of the different dramatic elements from the author point of view. Additionally, transcripts of an author's results can be automatically transferred to the development team.

Limitations

The main limit of the tool is that it is an unfinished prototype. Due to the interface complexity several man months are required to either extend or redevelop the tool.

Main Publications

Donikian, S. (2006). De l’écriture à la réalisation d’une fiction interactive : simplification de la chaîne allant de la création à l’adaptation. Chapter of the book « Créations de récits pour les fictions interactives », Hermès, October 2006.

Donikian, S. & Portugal, J.N. (2004). Writing Interactive Fiction Scenarii with DraMachina. Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 3105, pp 101-112, Springer-Verlag.

Donikian, S. (2003). DraMachina: an authoring tool to write interactive fictions. TIDSE'03, 1st International Conference on Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment, Darmstadt, Germany, March 2003.

Supporting Narrative Theories

This authoring tool refers mainly to Claude Brémond's Narrative Theory.

Dramachina borrows the concept of act and scene from dramaturgy and screenwriting (cf the Three-Act Paradigm), but the three act structures is not imposed by the system.

Character's definition comprises a system of values, following the ethical dimension of narrative.

Dramachina also borrows concepts from the Transactional Analysis theory, by Eric Berne.

Computational Model

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