NILE 2008

Conference proceedings

The proceedings are now online:  Download nile_2008_conference_programme_final_draft.pdf .

More photos from NILE 2008

More great photos of NILE 2008, courtesy of Fareed Albayat. Unfortunately there's too many to post individually, but you can download the full set of 49 photos here (.rar, 44mb) as a zipped file - right click and select Save As to download. Thanks very much to Fareed for these.

Group photo

Thanks to Lisa for the picture!

NILE presentation slides

The slides from Katy Howland's talk are now available for download - thanks Katy. If anyone else wants to make their slides available, you can email them to adventure.author@googlemail.com  and I'll put them up.

Update: Lots more slides, thanks everybody.

• Katy Howland - A Game Creation Tool which Supports the Development of Writing Skills: Interface Design Considerations (2.4mb)
• Paul Hazel - Narrative and New Media (2.2mb)     
• Judy Robertson, Tessa Collins and Andrew Kelly - Tales of Adventure Author (2.0mb)  
• Sean Hammond: Children's Authoring with Propp's Morphology: An Exploratory Study (0.7mb) (pdf)
• Debbie Maxwell: Inspired Storytelling - The Digital Re-tellings of a Traditional Tale (online)

Judy will put slides which were left on the presenting laptop when she is back in the office (2 weeks time - yay!)

NILE 2008 photos - speakers

Finally, some pictures of the conference itself. Thanks to Pawel Orzerchowski and Lisa Gjedde for these.

Donald Smith:

Andrew Burn:

Andrew Stranieri:

Brian Lighthill:

Andrew Kelly:

Judy Robertson:

Judy Robertson, Andrew Kelly and Tessa Collins:

Lisa Gjedde:

Mel Gibson:

Pawel Orzechowski:

Ruth Aylett:

Ruth Aylett and Senga Munro:

NILE 2008:

Thus ends our coverage - thanks very much to all the organisers, speakers and attendees who made NILE 2008 such a pleasant experience.

NILE 2008 photos

To finish off, a few photos of NILE 2008 from different attendees.

This selection of dinner-based photography comes courtesy of Krystina S. Madej. Dinner is the most important part of any conference: attendees must ensure their brains have enough energy to process all the information they have learned that day.

The last picture is from Stac Polly on Dublin St. The rest are from the Sheep's Heid Inn on the Causeway, which is (allegedly) the oldest public house in Scotland.

 

Paul Oord: Storytelling as a Link between Formal Knowledge and Actual Performance in a Critical Transformative Design Environment

Paul opens by noting that he is a teacher, not a researcher, and often has to work with a small budget for projects, or rely on students.

One of Paul's projects was the idea of setting up a virtual company run by students - a constructivist approach to learning. Students would be employeers, customers or project managers, and would work with real customers, and real projects. This type of project was quite rare when he started running it in 2001.

This was a big change for students, who had to focus on a new, intensely practical way of learning. They had to act independently, occasionally complaining that "nobody tells us what to do!"

This created antagonism with their previous way of working and learning:

• Problems putting formal knowledge into practice
• A lack of discussion of methods and techniques
• No self-reflection (either individually or in teams)
• A desire to focus on technical areas to the detriment of others
• Problems learning to communicate well with customers, and each other

To attempt to improve this, Paul wants to implement a knowledge management process to aid communication and self-reflection. It was thought that the best way to do this would be to create a "critical transformative room... a space for a new shared understanding."

Paul took inspiration from the idea of 'story circles', and decided to use storytelling as the key to the knowledge management process. As with Oskana, Paul engaged in participatory design. The students developed their own procedure for storytelling and developed software to support it.

As a result, the student began to use this software to communicate in the form of stories. They would tell stories about their working process; their learning process; how they communicate; their roles in the workspace; even their life outside the university.

Stories could be published (so all students could see them) or kept private amongst friends. They could be submitted for review, and rejected or accepted for review by other students. They could also be retracted by the original authors. Any student could comment on anything that had been published. Some typical useful features were implemented, such as dynamic search and tagging stories with keywords.

The system supports the exchange of informal knowledge, and works well because it preserves the complexity and uncertainty of real life. Paul notes that this is an improvement over the standard learning environment, which can be too formal. It supports "negotiating constructed meanings".

In Paul's experience, the storytelling software has been accepted by students because they designed and made it themselves. It has been a useful way for students to divulge information they might be reticent to talk about via other means.

Question and answer session:

Krystina works with engineering students who do not always communicate well, and she thinks that this sort of thing is a very good way to provide a common platform of communication, through a familiar medium.

Andrew Stranieri: A Web-based Narrative Construction Environment

Andrew's key question for this talk was 'Can interactive narrative users be dynamically presented with choices that enhance the narrative?'

For a choice to genuinely enhance the narrative, it is important that it be dramatic, and both plausible and thematically consistent within the work it takes place in. Can we generate choices like this in real time for many simultaneous users?

The example used was Robin Hood. One example of a choice is, 'Does Robin enter the archery competition?' The next choice would be 'Does he fire an arrow?'

Andrew thinks that In an interactive narrative, there are three ways to provide the next choice:

1. Branching story lines, in which every choice is explicity defined. This is rigid, limited and expensive in development terms.
2. AI planners - but they rapidly become very complex, and it's difficult to see them scaling effectively to work with real-time multiplayer environments. Is there a third way?
3. You could collect possible 'next events' from a community of players, and store them in a database. At run-time, you could fetch plausible 'next events' from the database and supplement existing choices with them. This is the subject of Andrew's research.

So how do you collect next events from a community of players? They have a website at http://phoebe.ballarat.edu.au/collection/ which you can visit to contribute. At this site, you'll be presented with a scenario that can occur in the interactive narrative, and you'll be able to offer additional possibilities of what could happen next. This was found to be a very user-friendly way of collecting data, to the point that children also found it easy to work with.

This lets you build up a database of events, but it doesn't help create drama. 'Polti's dramatic situation' was used as a convenient and simple frame for drama, and the data gathered was cast in these terms.

So how do you receive the next event that is most closely matched to what is required? There are various ways (case-based reasoning; neural networks; decision tree induction; data mining) - Andrew thinks any of these would be suitable, though neural networks would perhaps be a good choice.

How do you ensure plausibility?

Maintain a 'Nonsense Filter', using simple rules to ensure that (for example) Robin can't be dead in one event and then alive in the next. Depending on the context, there may not be many of these rules - interactive narratives may be set in different contexts which have different ideas of what is plausible.

You can play the game at http://phoebe.ballart.edu.au/NarGame - while playing, you can contribute to the story. If there's something you would like to do but can't, add it as a next event. Andrew notes that you can also create a story generator by getting the computer to choose which action occurs next.

With this approach, agency is not diminished. The choices seem to be 'dramatic', though this has not been empirically researched. Plausibility is ensured by the nonsense filter, and users tend to enter thematically consistent next events, presumably because they are aware of the scenario when suggesting them.

Question and answer sessions:

"How can you ensure that thematically inconsistent next events don't appear?" This not yet implemented, but the idea is that whenever someone actually follows a particular branch, it becomes more popular, and thus more likely to occur according to the logic used to retrieve next events.

Michael Kriegel asks whether this is simply a branching narrative that is collaboratively defined. Andrew seems to agree that this is essentially the case, but believes that the idea of using machine learning to pick possible next events is new. Michael also asks what happens when a user reaches a dead end, if a new next event has been defined but not followed up on. Andrew essentially suggests that the user would simply keep writing the story themselves.

"Have you considered getting users to give a particular route through a story an overall rating?" Andrew agrees that this could be valuable.

A question is raised about whether the data gathered from users about next events could be abstracted to give you a more general model for next events. (For example, if you suggest 'Robin offers to join forces with the Sheriff', you could abstract this to 'Hero appears to change sides', or something similar.) Andrew thinks that the way they're representing the data in terms of agents, subjects etc. gives them the possibility to generalise like this in future.

Monica Alexrad: Author-centered approach to Interactive Drama

Monica begins by discussing the famous interactive drama Façade. Façade is a great example of the medium, but it's not very easy to take the same software that was used to create it and use it to tell a different story. Monica is interested in taking the tools that are used to create interactive drama and 'put the author first'. Her paper is conceptual - she is exploring a possible design for a tool that will allow authors to write their own interactive dramas, and to define the animations that the characters will use.

Such a system would require several key features:

• A modular approach that would separate the authoring tools from the underlying tools, giving the author freedom from the complicated programming tasks that they are unlikely to be skilled in.
• The tool would have to be highly stable.
• Animation is a crucial part of interactive drama, yet it's a bottleneck in development, as writers have to wait on artists and programmers. This tool would get around this problem by encompassing an animation system which would be greatly simplified and not focused on realism, yet which would still create highly expressive animations.

To justify the focus on expressiveness over realism, Monica notes how successful the cartoonish FearNot! characters are, as well as playing the famous Pixar lamp video. The lamps are obviously not realistic representations of people, yet they are clearly expressive.

She demonstrates a screenshot of their suggested graphics system - two characters, each made up of a single coloured polygon with two black circles for eyes. They will have very simple animations that are already linked with emotions. This will foster the creativity of the author, because they can experiment with their ideas and get immediate feedback, rather than waiting for complex art resources to be created. They could also easily prototype their ideas for demonstration.

From a technical point of view, the tool would act like a debugger - i.e. you could immediately run whatever was ready, and monitor what's going on behind the scenes. You would also have the ability to modify the program while staying in run-time mode.

Question and answers session:

Michael Kriegel wonders why not simply use a text interface, given how difficult the 3D animation side of things is. Monica explains that animating the story is important for conveying the story emotionally.

Michael Kriegel: ORIENT - An Intercultural Role-playing game

Michael presents a summary of design ideas for the game they are currently developing.

ORIENT stands for Overcoming Refugee Integration with Empathic Novel Technology, and is part of a large European project called eCircus. It uses virtual drama and interactive narratives to teach social narratives, similar to the anti-bullying application FearNot! which was previously mentioned by Ruth Aylett - Michael previously worked on this, and it is part of the same eCircus project. ORIENT builds on some of the team's findings from FearNot!.

The project aims to enhance intercultural sensitivity by changing negative attitudes and actions towards people from other cultures. Its target audience is 14 year olds from the host culture.

Users can interact with characters that are similar to the members of this target group, and stories that are in some way familiar to their culture. The idea is that they will learn appropriate behaviour from their interactions with these characters.

The interactive narrative takes place on a planet inhabited by an alien race, Sprytes. The team spent a lot of time developing the alien culture in detail, before they began work on the story. Their culture is distinct from typical Western culture in some ways - they are strongly hierarchical, with a focus on respect and age; they are collectivistic; they dislike uncertainty; they are highly militaristic. In the game, a group of teenage users have to work together, playing astronauts who have to stop a meteor crashing into the planet.

Each Spryte is an agent, as was the case in FearNot! However, in the earlier application the agents fit into very specific roles, e.g. bully or victim, whereas ORIENT agents are not clearly cast in roles.

The project intends to blend computer role-play with real-life roleplay - the kids have to act the part with each other as well as with the software. Each of the three active users has a different user interface, to facilitate role separation:

• The Wiimote can be used to perform gestures, to communicate with Sprytes in different ways (e.g. gesturing a greeting or apology).
• The Dance Mat is used to navigate the game world.
• The mobile phone is used to select objects, which physically exist and are embedded with RFID tags.

Role-play in a virtual context gives you a safe environment to act out situations in, and can provide automated, personalised feedback to users. Players will interact with the game world and the game characters, and in so doing learn to adapt to the customs of another culture.

The team are now beginning development of an initial software prototype.

Question and answers session:

Someone brings up a comparable game which aims to promote understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The author of that game felt that although he had successfully created empathy in players for the situation, he was concerned that this attitude would not transfer to other situations - to account for this he created specific exercises to encourage this transference.

Michael responds that there were initial discussions about using a real-life cultural conflict as the basis for the game, but as they ultimately chose a sci-fi setting transference is indeed essential. This is a key research question, and they intend to evaluate it. Ruth notes that the project psychologists are still working on exactly how this evaluation will work, but there is the idea that users will have to keep diaries and report to 'space command' at the end, encouraging reflection.