On distributing interactive storytelling: Issues of event synchronization and a solution

Abstract

Interactive storytelling represents an emerging application in the field of computer entertainment that enables the dynamic creation of complex virtual stories. In some sense, Interactive Storytelling may be seen as a form of multiuser role-playing game where different evolutions of a given cyberdrama may emerge from activities performed by virtual characters, controlled either by intelligent agents or by humans. The demand for providing a distributed support to the generation of a cyberstory is converting the Web into an interactive storytelling central. Unfortunately, the classic distributed schemes employed to synchronize events on the Web introduce large delays, thus impairing the interactivity in the cyberdrama generation. To surpass this problem, we have devised a new event synchronization service to support the distributed cyberdrama generation activity. According to this proposal, events generated by distributed agents may be discarded when they become obsolete according to the semantics of the story. Dropping obsolete events brings to the positive result of speeding up the story generation, thus gaining interactivity while maintaining the consistency of the distributed state of the plot. Actual measurements from a deployed simulation show that our approach can implement a responsive event synchronization service for distributed interactive storytelling. © Springer-Verlag 2004.