Accessibility statement

Multi-Player Interactive Drama

Investigators

In recent decades, computer games have become a major driving force of the digital economy. However, these days there is increasing talk of a creative crisis, with most game innovation currently involving incremental improvements of graphics, but no real innovation in the area of game play itself. Interactive drama, the dynamic creation of interactive stories in virtual worlds, has the strong potential to create a new game genre. This is desperately needed to maintain consumer enthusiasm and tap into the potential of a much wider audience.

Although most modern computer games involve a story, it is normally pre-written and at best has very few decision points that allow the player to affect the story. This presents an obstacle to the basic requirement that players should feel able to truly influence the story. Interactive drama offers a different kind of interaction where players are able to generate and experience meaningful stories through their relationships with game characters and each other, a feature that is especially important in the context of the overwhelming success of multi-player games.

The research


This research will build on existing single-player interactive drama technology in the creation of a multi-player interactive drama system. This will allow a group of players to interact within a virtual world and will add a dramatically compelling component to their experience, without restricting the players’ freedom. The generated story will be based on player interactions and the dynamically changing relationships between player-characters.

The research poses novel challenges from both a computer science and a narratology perspective. Therefore, we propose a collaboration between computer scientists and narratologists, which bridges the gap between engineering and humanities in a unique and productive fashion.

The proposed system will make two unique contributions: the ability to extract information about group relationships; and the creation of a multi-player interactive drama in which all of the players have first-person control of a character within the storyworld.

Narratology

Narratology has provided a number of story grammars, typologies of plot, and anatomies of genre conventions, all of which can help to map the narrative expectations of players at several levels of generality. Such conceptual frameworks are serviceable as resources for generating interactive dilemmas, conceived as decision points which evoke two or more equally plausible lines of narrative development.

However, while the application of this narratological apparatus in interactive contexts may provide for well-formed storylines, it offers little prospect, beyond the player’s own creative abilities, of generating satisfying narratives; and the problem is compounded in a multi-player environment, where control of the story arc is fragmented. Multiple players cannot all be the protagonist of all the storylines unfolding in an interactive environment, but must sometimes take minor roles; this consideration drives a wedge between the notions of narrative satisfaction and first-person experience, and requires more nuanced management of the relation between the interests of individual player-characters and a global, third-person sense of narrative significance.

To the extent that narratology has addressed interactive narratives, it has tended to obscure the discursive level of narrative meaning by placing the emphasis upon the events in virtual storyworlds, and in doing so has entrenched the antagonism between narrativity and interactivity. A positive approach will require the assimilation of recent developments in rhetorical narratology, in which the emphasis falls less upon story events in themselves than upon the qualitative (meaningful, emotional) dynamics those events embody.

The objectives

The narratological dimension of the project will have two aspects, comprising the application of narratological concepts and principles to the challenges of implementing the proposed system, and the reflective analysis of that undertaking as a way of interrogating the adequacy of current orthodoxies in narrative theory. Key elements of the first objective will be:

  • defining narrative criteria that enable the effective creation and deployment of dilemmas with respect both to the actions available to multiple player-characters in a given situation, and to the sense of narrative significance each dilemma presents to the perspective of each of the players;
  • incorporating a value-based narrative logic – as distinct from the factual/counterfactual basis of extant accounts of narrative logic – one that maximizes the sense of narrative satisfaction arising from the consequences of player choices, in terms of cycles of tension and resolution;
  • finding ways to accommodate, and capitalize upon, the possibility of both collaborative and competitive relations not only at the representational level of the player-characters and their action goals, but also at the level of the interacting players and their narrative goals – their sense of the most satisfying story outcome.

The second objective will be met in part by theoretical reflection upon the challenges of the first objective and the adequacy of the results achieved, and in part by a review of the narrative elements of the evaluation strategy, and will involve referring the features of the achieved system to the presuppositions of the several extant models of interactive or emergent narrative, and to the broader conceptual framework of narrative inherited from its largely literary theoretical heritage.