Interactive Storytelling and Narrative Theories
Interactive Storytelling and Narrative Theories
Context
This wiki is launched by the IRIS project, a European Network of Excellence dedicated to Interactive Storytelling.
Objectives
If various forms of Interactive Storytelling (IS) can be found in Interactive Fiction and early adventure games, the birth of IS as a field of research can be dated to pioneer research, started about 20 years ago. Despite its fundamentally interdisciplinary nature, since it borrows from Narrative Theories, Computer Science, Psychology, Drama, etc., IS, in its concrete realizations, has mostly been influenced by Artificial Intelligence. Narrative theories and formalisms had a limited influence on the models that have been implemented in IS. Concepts such as goals, plans, variables, instantiations, predicates, graphs, etc. are more often handled than concepts of climax, closure, unity of plot, etc. Often, a single narrative concept forms the basis of a whole IS system, while the variety and complexity of narrative theories clearly shows that narrative is a complex phenomenon involving many aspects. This wiki aims to fill the gap between technical implementations of IS and narrative theories, by providing IS engineers with a catalog of narrative models and formalisms, whenever a potential benefit in terms of system building exists.
This wiki contains three main categories:
- Existing Narrative Theories that aim at explaining narrative phenomena and that have been used in IS or that may be useful.
- IS Systems, that are at least partially implemented.
- Computational Models, used within IS systems.
Each page follows a unified template in order to foster a systematic investigation of the relations between the three categories above. For example, for each narrative theory, we would systematically need to answer two questions: How could this theory help IS, and which system referred to this theory in its implementation.
Adding your system
If you want to add your system to the list, please contact monica.axelrad @ unige.ch for an account, and mention the name of the system you wish to add