Argax Project

Dissertation Proposal Outline

1. Introduction: Interactive Narrative
   1. Interactive Narrative Domains and Examples.
      1. Non-digital Examples.
      2. Digital Examples.
      3. Conclusion
   2. Interactive Drama
   3. Early Visions
   4. Motivations.
2. Theory: A Poetics of Interactive Narrative
   1. The Structure of Narrative.
      1. Evolution of the Current Poetics.
         1. Aristotle.
         2. Smiley.
         3. Laurel.
         4. Mateas.
         5. Problems within the Current Poetics.
      2. A Reconstructed Poetics.
         1. Medium.
         2. Object.
         3. Manner.
         4. Placement of User Interaction.
         5. Application to System Architectures.
         6. Parallels to Traditional Narratology.
      3. Conclusion: A New Poetics of Interactive Narrative.
   2. The Structure of Action.
      1. Aristotle.
      2. Freytag.
      3. Freytag's Triangle
      4. Propp and Story Morphology.
      5. Chatman.
      6. Conclusion.
   3. Conclusion.
3. Producing the Action: Previous Approaches to ID
   1. Intro: Modeling author, character, or story.
   2. Improvised Approaches
      1. Improv rules
      2. RPGs
   3. Simple Story Systems
      1. Linear
      2. False Branching
      3. Branching
      4. Open
      5. Supportive
      6. Combinations
      7. Examples
      8. Conclusion
   4. Rule-based

      Story-grammars. (good for story generation)

   5. Emergent: Bottom-up

      Modeling characters. Complex world simulations.

   6. Directed: Top-down
      1. Assembled scenes
         1. Grasbon & Braun's Geist
         2. Tomaszewski & Binsted's Eudaemon
         3. Mateas & Stern's Facade
         4. Crawford's Erasmatron
      2. Case-Based Reasoning
         1. Fairclough's OPIATE
         2. Peinado
      3. Planning
         1. Young (Reidl? Magerko??)
      4. Commonalities: story atoms, drama manager, rules/story form
4. Proposed Architecture: Marlinspike.
   1. Marlinspike Design.
      1. Story World.
      2. World-level Verbs.
      3. Story-level Actions.
      4. Scenes.
      5. Roles.
      6. Threads.
   2. Marlinspike Foundations
      1. Theoretical Foundations.
      2. Previous Work.
   3. Conclusion.
5. Prototype Game.
6. Evaluation
   1. Claims to be Tested
      1. Narrative
      2. Interactivity
      3. User Experience
      4. Hypothesis
   2. Experimental Setup
      1. Threading
      2. Generated Baseline Cases
      3. Experiment Execution
      4. Concerns and Biases [Temporary Section]
   3. Pilot Study
   4. Results
7. Conclusions.
   1. Contributions
   2. Future Work

• Appendix 1: Participant Consent Form
• Appendix 2: Pre-Evaluation Questionnaire
• Appendix 3: Post-Evaluation Questionnaire

Argax Project : Dissertation : Outline http://www2.hawaii.edu/~ztomasze/argax

Last Edited: 27 Dec 2007 ©2006 by Z. Tomaszewski.