Location: DSV, Sal C, Forum, Isafjordsgatan 39, Kista
Time: June 06, 12:30

Socio-emotionally rich interactive narratives are a form of digital entertainment that focuses on immersion in a story. The overall question of this thesis is: how can we create interactive narratives that are sufficiently entertaining, interactive, socially and emotionally engaging and varied from one session to another so that players have rewarding experiences and wish to return to find out what else could have happened?

The two main challenges addressed here are how to combine interactivity and narrative and how to create believable agents that can function as actors in a narrative.

The thesis makes three contributions. First it presents a multi-layered view of how believability arises in the interaction between a user and an artifact. Second it presents a prototype that takes a first step toward creating socially and emotionally rich interactive narrative. The prototype combines interactivity and narrative by letting the player navigate through a story where the links between story events are partly determined by the emotional state of characters. Finally it suggests that anticipatory planning can be used for guiding plot unfolding in an interactive narrative. It presents a system architecture that allows a story manager to simulate -- and if necessary alter -- the unfolding of a plot line created through the interplay between a community of agents and a player.

A prototype-driven approach, interleaving design, implementation and evaluation is used. We use a single scenario, the Kaktus scenario, that is iteratively refined to illustrate various aspects of our work.