Towards a theory of narrative for interactive fiction

TLDR

Current synthetic‑reality interactive fiction focuses on realistic worlds, but this limits exploration of worlds where users experience a character’s subjective reality with a different personality. The study aims to broaden the paradigm to incorporate worlds where users experience a character’s subjective reality. The authors survey cinema techniques, formulate a narrative theory, and outline a system architecture that adapts film techniques to support enriched interactive fiction. The work advances interactive fiction toward becoming a rich, high‑quality artistic medium. The authors, affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University, received support from an Office of Naval Research Graduate Fellowship.

Abstract

The current paradigm for synthetic reality based interactive fiction features familiar kinds of worlds realistically presented. This approach is unsatisfying in that it excludes several interesting classes of worlds, such as worlds where the user experiences the subjective reality of a character with a substantially different personality. We wish to extend the current paradigm to include classes of worlds such as these. To achieve this, we survey cinema technique and develop a theory of narrative and roughly sketch a system architecture to support enriched interactive fiction based on analogy with film techniques. This work is significant because it brings us closer to our goal of making interactive fiction into a rich, high quality artistic medium. PA lS 3 a U , h 0 r S reaCh6d a ^ ***** ° f C 0 m p W e r S d e n c e Mellon University. Pittsburgh S. Smith was supported by an Office of Naval Research Graduate Fellowship. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors alone. Towards a Theory of Narrative for Interactive Fiction Sean Smith Joseph Bates School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213