Argax Project:: Dissertation: A Rough Draft Node

Node Status: ROUGH

Experimental Setup

Reincorporation

The Marlinspike prototype was implemented to allow both author imperative and reincorporation to be turned on and off. Turning off reincorporation has two effects.

The first change is to the scene selection process. As described in Chapter III, when Marlinspike wishes to play a scene, it first establishes the set of scenes that have their preconditions met. From this set of possible scenes, it then normally selects the scene that will splice the most un-reincorporated material into the story. When reincorporation is turned off, this second stage of the selection process is skipped. That is, Marlinspike does not apply any of its normal scene weightings. Instead, it simply selects the next scene randomly from those that can currently play.

The second change is to how scenes play. As described previously, many scenes include hooks that can optionally refer back to certain earlier events. When reincorporation is turned off, these hooks are ignored. Without these hooks, fewer earlier events will be reincorporated in both the system's internal model of the story and in the resulting scene narration. The specific Demeter scene hooks affected by this change are listed in Appendix 2.

Even when the general reincorporation feature is turned off, Marlinspike still forms threads based solely on the reincorporation of each scene's precondition events. This means Marlinspike can still report the same measures of story structure and agency as when reincorporation is turned on.

Reincorporation is significant as most existing scene-based interactive drama architectures do not use it. Instead, they simply determine which scenes can be played, and then select one at random--as Marlinspike does with threading turned off. For instance, my previous system design, Eudaemon, worked precisely this way (Tomaszewski & Binsted 2007). In particular, scene pre-conditions included the player's current location, recent actions, and whether the scene filled the next Propp function in the story. The perceived limitations of the Eudaemon system were due to adhering to Propp's requirements, not to the random selection of next scenes.

GEIST, which shares much is common with Eudaemon, also works in a manner very similar to that of Marlinspike when reincorporation is turned off (Grasbon & Braun 2001).

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Works Cited

Grasbon, Dieter, and Norbert Braun. "A Morphological Approach to Interactive Storytelling." Proceedings of cast01//Living in Mixed Realities, 2001. <http://netzspannung.org/version1/extensions/cast01-proceedings/pdf/by_name/Grasbon.pdf>
Tomaszewski, Zach, and Kim Binsted. "The Limitations of a Propp-based Approach to Interactive Drama." Intelligent Narrative Technologies: Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium. Technical Report FS-07-05. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 2007. <http://www.zach.tomaszewski.name/argax/pubs/2007-TomaszewskiBinsted-ProppLimitations.pdf>

ToDo

Add Facade as an example? They use some weighting during scene selection, which may act like implicit threading? But mostly uses tension measure, which involves looking forward.