License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/OASIcs.CMN.2013.293
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-41595
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2013/4159/
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Theune, Mariët ; Alofs, Thijs ; Linssen, Jeroen ; Swartjes, Ivo

Having one's cake and eating it too: Coherence of children's emergent narratives

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p293-theune.pdf (2 MB)

Abstract

In the emergent narrative approach to Interactive Storytelling,
narratives arise from the interactions between player- or
computer-controlled characters in a simulated story world. This
approach offers much freedom to the players, but this freedom may come
at the cost of narrative structure. In this paper we study stories
created by children using a storytelling system based on the emergent
narrative approach. We investigate how coherent these stories actually
are and which types of character actions contribute the most to story
coherence, defined in terms of the causal connectedness of story
elements. We find that although the children do produce goal-directed
story lines, overall the stories are only partially coherent. This can
be explained by the improvisational nature of the children’s
storytelling with our system, where the interactive experience of the
players is more important than the production of a coherent narrative.
We also observe that the communication between the children, external
to the system, plays an important role in establishing coherence of
the created stories.

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{theune_et_al:OASIcs:2013:4159,
  author =	{Mari{\"e}t Theune and Thijs Alofs and Jeroen Linssen and Ivo Swartjes},
  title =	{{Having one's cake and eating it too: Coherence of children's emergent narratives}},
  booktitle =	{2013 Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative},
  pages =	{293--309},
  series =	{OpenAccess Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-939897-57-6},
  ISSN =	{2190-6807},
  year =	{2013},
  volume =	{32},
  editor =	{Mark A. Finlayson and Bernhard Fisseni and Benedikt L{\"o}we and Jan Christoph Meister},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2013/4159},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-41595},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.CMN.2013.293},
  annote =	{Keywords: Interactive storytelling, coherence, emergent narrative, children}
}

Keywords: Interactive storytelling, coherence, emergent narrative, children
Collection: 2013 Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative
Issue Date: 2013
Date of publication: 02.08.2013

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