Grand Text Auto

Last semester I taught a course on interactive narrative. One of the challenges in teaching such a course is presenting a unifying framework within which the many computer-based “story-like things” that people have made can be understood as a unity, as all being instances of interactive narrative. (The alternative is to present a hodge-podge of approaches to interactive narrative, but this isn’t nearly as much fun.) My approach was to present a design space organized around four degrees of freedom:

• Interaction – the interactor’s relationship to the narrative. Is she interacting as a first-person character within the story, sitting above the story-world manipulating it from afar, constructing stories out of pieces provided by a story construction kit, etc.?
• Narrativity – in what sense is the interactive experience a story? Is the experience a heroic journey in which the interactor must complete a quest, an ironic commentary on a specific story genre in which interaction is used to expose the limits of the genre, a single situation designed to be experienced multiple times with variation, etc.?
• Segmentation – what are the pieces of the story? Are the fundamental pieces snippets of dialog, dramatic situations, story events constrained by a grammar, pages of text, etc.?
• Representation – the sensory display, what the player actually sees, hears, etc.

Hi, I’m Michael Mateas. My particular interest in the topics of this blog is thinking about, and making, artificial intelligence-based interactive experiences. AI techniques enable interactive art to be more porous to human meanings, to generate responses that more deeply incorporate interaction. In my work I’m interested in developing AI techniques and architectures that enable new forms of interactive experience. I’m currently working with Andrew Stern on the interactive drama Façade, which he described in more detail in his first post. Previous work includes Terminal Time, an interactive video piece that constructs ideologically-biased documentary histories in response to audience feedback, and Office Plant #1, a desktop robot that responds to the social and emotional tone of the email you receive.