Generation of Potential Narratives in Interactive Fiction

Abstract

Digital media has created more opportunities for stories to be interactive, allowing the user to participate in plot events and even change the direction of a story. Interactivity can make stories more engaging however if the plot can change as a result of user input then the story becomes non-linear. The resulting system is known as a potential narrative because a narrative is only presented through user interaction. Non-linear stories require extra considerations and content compared to a linear story of similar length. Computer generated content for video games has grown as a field and this raises the possibility of using computer assistance for the creation and management of interactive stories. This thesis explores the paradigm required for both computers and developers to understand potential narratives. The success of a potential narrative requires the same coherency and credibility that a regular story does, in addition to a new layer known as player agency. Coherency refers to the logical causal progression of a plot, credibility is the verisimilitude of the presented story world and player agency is how satisfying the interactive elements are. These three criteria are the guiding principles for the creation of an intuitive potential narrative model. We present a state transition model for potential narratives as well as a prototype using relational programming to generate coherent traversals through a manually authored potential narrative.