Interactive Storytelling

What really makes a video game story interactive? What's the best way to create an interactive story? How much control should players be given? Do they really want that control in the first place? Do they even know what they want-or are their stated desires at odds with the unconscious preferences? All of these questions and more are examined in this definitive book on interactive storytelling for video games. You'll get detailed descriptions of all major types of interactive stories, case studies of popular games (including Bioshock, Fallout 3, Final Fantasy XIII, Heavy Rain, and Metal Gear Solid), and how players interact with them, and an in-depth analysis of the results of a national survey on player storytelling preferences in games. You'll get the expert advice you need to generate compelling and original game concepts and narratives.With Interactive Storytelling for Video Games, you'll:

We are on the verge of creating an exciting new kind of interactive story form that will involve audiences as active participants. This book provides a solid foundation in the fundamentals of classical story structure and classical game structure and explains why it has been surprisingly difficult to bring these two activities together. With this foundation in place, the book presents several ideas for ways to move forward in this appealing quest. The author has a conversational and friendly style, making reading a pleasure.

An invaluable collection of essays and interviews exploring the business of interactive storytelling, this highly accessible guide offers invaluable insight into an ever-evolving field that is utilizing new spatial and interactive narrative forms to tell stories. This includes new media filmmaking and content creation, a huge variety of analog story world design, eXtended realities, game design, and virtual reality (VR) design. The book contains essays written by and interviews with working game designers, producers, 360-degree filmmakers, immersive theatre creators, and media professors, exploring the business side of interactive storytelling – where art meets business. Contributors to this book share their perspectives on how to break into the field; how to develop, nurture, and navigate business relationships; expectations in terms of business etiquette; strategies for contending with the emotional highs and lows of interactive storytelling; how to do creative work under pressure; the realities of working with partners in the field of new media narrative design; prepping for prototyping; writing analog and digital. This is an ideal resource for students of filmmaking, screenwriting, media studies, RTVF, game design, VR and AR design, theater, and journalism who are interested in navigating a career pathway in the exciting field of interactive storytelling.

As a game designer or new media storyteller, you know that the story is critical to the success of your project. Telling that story interactively is an even greater challenge, one that involves approaching the story from many angles. Here to help you navigate and open your mind to more creative ways of producing your stories is the authority on interactive design and a longtime game development guru, Chris Crawford. To help you in your quest for the truly interactive story, Crawford provides a solid sampling of what works and doesn't work, and how to apply the lessons to your own storytelling projects. After laying out the fundamental ideas behind interactive storytelling and explaining some of the misconceptions that have crippled past efforts, the book delves into all the major systems that go into interactive storytelling: personality models, actors, props, stages, fate, verbs, history books, and more. Crawford also covers the Storytron technology he has been working on for several years, an engine that runs interactive electonic storyworlds, giving readers a first-hand look into practical storytelling methods.

In 1979, Nam Le's family left Vietnam for Australia, an experience that inspires the first and last stories in The Boat. In between, however, Le's imagination lays claim to the world. The Boat takes us from a tourist in Tehran to a teenage hit man in Colombia; from an ageing New York artist to a boy coming of age in a small Victorian fishing tow...

The rich programme of ICIDS 2009, comprising invited talks, technical pres- tations and posters, demonstrations, and co-located post-conference workshops clearly underscores the event’s status as premier international meeting in the domain. It thereby con?rms the decision taken by the Constituting Committee of the conference series to take the step forward: out of the national cocoons of its precursors, ICVS and TIDSE, and towards an itinerant platform re?ecting its global constituency. This move re?ects the desire and the will to take on the challenge to stay on the lookout, critically re?ect upon and integrate views and ideas,?ndingsandexperiences,andtopromoteinterdisciplinaryexchange,while ensuring overall coherence and maintaining a sense of direction. This is a signi?cant enterprise: The challenges sought are multifarious and must be addressed consistently at all levels. The desire to involve all research communitiesandstakeholdersmustbematchedbyacknowledgingthedi?erences in established practises and by providing suitable means of guidance and int- duction, exposition and direct interaction at the event itself and of lasting (and increasingly:living) documentation, of which the present proceedings are but an important part.

Digital Storytelling shows you how to create immersive, interactive narratives across a multitude of platforms, devices, and media. From age-old storytelling techniques to cutting-edge development processes, this book covers creating stories for all forms of New Media, including transmedia storytelling, video games, mobile apps, and second screen experiences. The way a story is told, a message is delivered, or a narrative is navigated has changed dramatically over the last few years. Stories are told through video games, interactive books, and social media. Stories are told on all sorts of different platforms and through all sorts of different devices. They’re immersive, letting the user interact with the story and letting the user enter the story and shape it themselves. This book features case studies that cover a great spectrum of platforms and different story genres. It also shows you how to plan processes for developing interactive narratives for all forms of entertainment and non-fiction purposes: education, training, information and promotion. Digital Storytelling features interviews with some of the industry’s biggest names, showing you how they build and tell their stories.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2018, held in Dublin, Ireland, in December 2018. The 20 revised full papers and 16 short papers presented together with 17 posters, 11 demos, and 4 workshops were carefully reviewed and selected from 56, respectively 29, submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: the future of the discipline; theory and analysis; practices and games; virtual reality; theater and performance; generative and assistive tools and techniques; development and analysis of authoring tools; and impact in culture and society.