Timing Interactive Narratives

• Main Authors: Cabioch, Thomas, Champagnat, Ronan, Bosser, Anne-Gwenn, Chiganne, Jean-Noel, Dieguez, Martin
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Games; Hair; Petri nets; Silver; Solid modeling; Virtual reality
• ISSN: 2325-4289
• DOI: 10.1109/CIG.2019.8847967

Research in Computational Narratives has evidenced the need to provide formal models of narratives integrating action representation together with temporal and causal constraints. Adopting an adequate formalization for narrative actions is critical to the development of generative or interactive systems capable of telling stories whilst ensuring narrative coherence, or dynamic adaptation to user interaction. It may also allow to verify properties of narratives at design time. In this paper, we discuss the issues of interactive story design, verification, and piloting for a specific genre of industrial application, in the field of interactive entertainment: in the games we consider, teams of participants in a Virtual Reality application are guided in real time through a narrative experience by a human storyteller. Like in an escape game, the interactive experience is timed: it should be long enough to provide satisfaction to the players, but come to a conclusion before the game session is over in order to provide closure and a sense of achievement to them. We describe how we integrate narrative time in the story design and use it to the verification of temporal properties of scenarios, building on previous work using Linear Logic and Petri Nets.