Making stories player-specific: Delayed authoring in interactive storytelling

Abstract

Of all forms of storytelling, interactive storytelling presents authors with a unique opportunity: while most traditional stories must rely on having general high appeal, the nature of interactive stories to encourage audience interaction allows aspects of each individual's state to be automatically inferred. Given such information, an author's decisions would become more informed, and his ability to affect the audience would be improved. In this paper, we present an analysis of the decision-making process in interactive storytelling, and construct a method for characterizing storytelling systems based on features of their design. We demonstrate our method by comparing four recently published systems, and review related literature on inferring player information. Finally, we present Delayed Authoring, a new perspective on the design of interactive storytelling systems which takes advantage of their opportunity to make stories player-specific. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.