The book is concerned with narrative in digital media that changes according to user input—Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN). It provides a broad overview of current issues and future directions in this multi-disciplinary field that includes humanities-based and computational perspectives. It assembles the voices of leading researchers and practitioners like Janet Murray, Marie-Laure Ryan, Scott Rettberg and Martin Rieser. In three sections, it covers history, theoretical perspectives and varieties of practice including narrative game design, with a special focus on changes in the power relationship between audience and author enabled by interactivity. After discussing the historical development of diverse forms, the book presents theoretical standpoints including a semiotic perspective, a proposal for a specific theoretical framework and an inquiry into the role of artificial intelligence. Finally, it analyses varieties of current practice from digital poetry to location-based applications, artistic experiments and expanded remakes of older narrative game titles.
As I gaze out of my window, I am met with a totem. This totem is gray and windowless, nestled in between offices and academic buildings. Behind it is a park, and the longer I stare, the deeper it becomes embedded in the natural landscape, after a bit I forget it’s there. But in the corner of my eye I can see another one; another totem. This one intimidates me with its red glow. These buildings came to serve as mystical pillars of data flows to me, they became sites of reification, sites where the cloud finally condensed and data rained down. They assumed a posthuman status; high-tech facilities where humans are only needed to keep other humans out. I always imagined data as something abstract, as a floating entity, but as my encounters with these pillars started a process of materialization, it simultaneously sparked a desire to interrogate and to demystify.
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In this paper we introduce a novel highly interactive process to generate natural language narratives on the basis of our ongoing work on semiotic relations. To the two basic components of interactive systems, namely, a software tool and a user interface, we add a third component - AI agents, understood as an upgraded rendition of software agents. Our semiotic relations approach considers four ways of composing new narratives from existing narratives. Along what semioticians call the horizontal syntagmatic axis, one can form the new narrative by combining two or more previous narratives. Along the vertical paradigmatic axis, the new narrative may emerge as a similar version, which imitates the previous one, possibly in a different context. Along the depth meronymic axis, the hierarchic narrative levels, such as plot, event, and scene, are explored, allowing either expansion or summarization. Lastly, the antithetic consideration, rather than adding a dimension, aims at some form of reversal, through the adoption of opposite values. A fully operational prototype is described. Its name, ChatGeppetto, conflates the skilled Geppetto, who fashioned Pinocchio, an early case of artisanship-produced human level intelligence, with ChatGPT, which operates as the main AI agent component. To run the experiments, we concentrated on book narratives.
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