Argax Project:: Dissertation: A Rough Draft Node

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Narrative

In an interactive drama, the Action level of narrative--specifically, the story's event structure--is of particular importance. The poetics outlined earlier provides a working definition of narrative structure: a unified, complete series of events with a beginning, middle and end, in which all events are connected by necessity such that none can be removed without leaving the whole disjointed or disturbed.

Admittedly, Marlinspike applies a slightly relaxed version of this definition in that only user actions of high import need to be made necessary to the unfolding story. Still, because the system tracks all the events--whether scenes or actions--and the threads of necessity between them, it can provide a number of measures of how well-formed the resulting story structure is.

The system measures of well-formed story structure include:

The existence of beginning, middle, and end scenes in a single main thread, which reveals whether the system was even able to form a complete story.
The story's length in terms of events, which reveals whether a particular session resulted in an unusually short or long tale.
The number of additional threads, which shows the degree to which the system failed to produce a unified story structure.

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