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Master's Thesis: Mediating User Interaction in Narrative-Structured Virtual Environments
Films and novels effectively convey intriguing stories, powerful emotions, and meaningful messages to their audiences. Telling interactive stories in a virtual environment seems a natural progression of the narrative. While users find virtual environments more engaging when they perceive that they have agency within them, current attempts at interactive narrative environments often limit a user’s sense of agency by restricting his ability to affect critical elements of the story. The process of mediation is designed to give users as great a sense of agency in an unfolding narrative as possible while still maintaining the narrative’s coherence and goals. This is accomplished by making the system, user, and author collaborators in the production of the storyline. The collaboration takes the form of a mediation system using a combination of speculative and narrative planning techniques to constantly rewrite the narrative within the confines of the author’s goals as the user interacts with the virtual world. User actions are accommodated when possible and prevented when they threaten narrative coherence. Thus mediation frees users from the limitations of a system’s author’s ability to predict all combinations of actions a user may wish to perform in a virtual environment while maintaining the author’s narrative intentions.
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