Transferring game mastering laws to interactive digital storytelling

Abstract

The Interactive Dilemma is the inevitable conflict between author's determinism and interactor's freedom. There are some approaches that try to tackle it, using strategies and heuristic rules that can combine on the fly the previously designed author material with the run-time decisions of the interactor. Interactive Narrative is a relatively new field and it is difficult to find formal studies that shows how to create this kind of art. Our proposal is based on the theoretical study of table-top Role-Playing Games and it involves the practical implementation of those ideas for managing the interaction in a simple text adventure game. Game Masters are the best models we have found in real life for designing and directing interactive stories. In this paper we transfer their player modeling, their rules for interaction management and their improvising algorithms from the real world to a new Interactive Storytelling system. © Springer-Verlag 2004.