Abstract
Emergent Narrative (EN) affords extensive agency to participants but conflicts with the desire to guarantee compelling narrative. Recent work presents story sifting, an approach that curates simulation output, believing that intervention compromises the aesthetics of EN. However, this type of retrospective story sifting cannot improve narrative in participatory storyworlds, where the story emerges through play. We propose a new form of prospective story sifting intervention, that uses an incremental story sifter to identify possible stories during play, and passes these to a drama manager that intervenes in the simulation to make those stories more likely to complete. Our approach is incorporated into Awash, a pirate-themed EN game, and through qualitative analysis we find that the intervention increases narrative completeness and does not appear to compromise key EN aesthetics. Our work thus demonstrates a new technique that mixes generative and emergent approaches, and shows that intervention can be compatible with the aesthetics of emergent narrative.
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Clothier, B., Millard, D.E. (2023). Awash: Prospective Story Sifting Intervention for Emergent Narrative. In: Holloway-Attaway, L., Murray, J.T. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14383. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47655-6_12
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