Interactive storytelling

Interactive storytelling (also known as interactive drama) is a form of digital entertainment in which the storyline is not predetermined. The author creates the setting, characters, and situation which the narrative must address, but the user (also reader or player) experiences a unique story based on their interactions with the story world. All interactive storytelling systems must make use of artificial intelligence (AI) to some degree. The architecture of an interactive storytelling program includes a drama manager, user model, and agent model to control, respectively, aspects of narrative production, player uniqueness, and character knowledge and behavior. Together, these systems generate characters that act "human," alter the world in real-time reactions to the player, and ensure that new narrative events unfold comprehensibly.

The field of study surrounding interactive storytelling encompasses many disparate fields, including psychology, sociology, cognitive science, linguistics, natural language processing, user interface design, computer science, and emergent intelligence. They fall under the umbrella term of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), at the intersection of hard science and the humanities. The difficulty of producing an effective interactive storytelling system is attributed to the ideological division between professionals in each field: artists have trouble constraining themselves to logical and linear systems and programmers are disinclined to appreciate or incorporate the abstract and unproven concepts of the humanities.

What characteristics distinguish an interactive story from another form of interactive media is subject to much debate. Interactivity and storytelling are both polysemic terms, and the phrase "interactive storytelling" does not inherently distinguish it from other kinds of storytelling, many of which are already interactive to some extent. Some of the literature associated with the term "interactive storytelling" is actually about transmedia storytelling, which is not a form of entertainment, but a marketing strategy for building a compelling brand across digital platforms. Varying levels of interactivity are a function of the "relatedness of transmitted messages with previous exchanges of information where sender and receiver roles become interchangeable." Storytelling, in this case, refers to the process of active creation and authoring rather than the final product and its passive reception. Interactive storytelling by this definition can entail any media that allows the user to generate several unique dramatic narratives. Though its final goal is a fully unauthored AI environment with a comprehensive human-level understanding of narrative construction (ie, the Holodeck), projects that use branching stories and variable gates are considered experimental prototypes in the same genre.

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