Interactive Story Telling

Definition: Interactive story telling shifts the narrative form from linear to dialectical, creating new stories on the basis of discussions and using dialogue as a method of interactions.

Telling stories is one of the most ancient forms of human communication. Stories allow people to share life experiences through real or imaginary tales. Stories in a book have usually a fixed structure and a specific order. Rather, told stories are more flexible than read ones, while the storyteller can change order and content in response to the audience feedback. The need for playing games pretending to be immersed in fantastic tales has existed for thousand years, with both children and adults subject to this human rite. Interactive Story Telling (IST) represents a digital version of this habit. IST shifts the narrative form from linear to dialectical, creating new stories on the basis of discussions and using dialogue as a method of interactions. Integrating new technologies with traditional storytelling is pushing the development of this kind of narrative towards a direction where people may have a role on how the story progresses. Information technologies, ranging from ubiquitous networking to multimodal interfaces, provide support to augment the interactivity degree, thus enhancing user perception. IST has determined a significant change in forms of collective intelligence . This means that individuals can share their abilities and generate a more creative final product. Two kinds of IST applications exist, specifically: i) those ISTs that resemble traditional entertainment contents (e.g. movies, fiction, soap, music, etc.) yet give the possibility to users to modify fragments of the multimedia presentation, and ii) applications that involve users in playing a role in a story, composing the final plot through the interaction among them.

In the first category of IST applications, fragments of multimedia contents can be mixed together to create one or more sequences to be used as visual or auditory stories. Fragments are needed to be classified to support users during the composition of sequences composed of multimedia scraps. Further, this form of IST can support cooperative composition and orchestration through collaborative interfaces. As an evolution of this trend, tools exist that permit users to write a story at a virtually unlimited scale and distance. An example of this is Moblogs that creates anthologies of multimedia resources (text, photo, sounds or small videos) directly collected from people’s everyday life (by using mobile terminals).

The second class of IST applications involves users in playing a role within a story, a game, and a virtual environment. Also Mixed Reality environments can be merged with IST (MR-IST) with the aim of immersing real actors in virtual settings and deriving the final plot of the story from the interactions among users. As in games, authors have control on the story but its evolution may be influenced by external factors. To this aim, many Mixed Reality based technologies are exploited such as mobile devices, multimodal interfaces, 3D input/output systems and localization tools. Involving people in the story is frequently supported by telling well known stories, such as successful fictions or soaps by using VR artifices to improve sensorial experience.