Section: New Results

Logic control in interactive storytelling

Participants : Marc Christie, Hui-Yin Wu.

With the rising popularity of engaging storytelling experiences in gaming arises the challenge of designing logic control mechanisms that can adapt to increasingly interactive, immersive, and dynamic 3D gaming environments. Currently, branching story structures are a popular choice for game narratives, but can be rigid, and authoring mistakes may result in dead ends at runtime. This calls for automated tools and algorithms for logic control over flexible story graph structures that can check and maintain authoring logic at a reduced cost while managing user interactions at runtime. In this work we introduce a graph traversal method for logic control over branching story structures which allow embedded plot lines. The mechanisms are designed to assist the author in specifying global authorial goals, evaluating the sequence of events, and automatically managing story logic during runtime. Furthermore, we showed how our method can be easily linked to 3D interactive game environments through a simple example involving a detective story with a flashback. See [36] for more details.