John Yearwood talked about ‘Interactive narrative by thematic connection of dramatic situations’. Given his material, I think he could have come up with a more user-friendly title. He described an approach to generating interactive narrative in a computer game by using an argument-based structure to work out the next event in the language sequence.
He used Polti’s 36 dramatic situations to help with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations In brief, Polti’s situations are a more detailed version of the view that there are only six plots in the world. One of his situations, for example, is the Daring Enterprise, which requires a bold leader, an object and an adversary.
I was interested in how many times this idea of codifying the narrative format came up during the conference and also in how often this conference seemed to focus on gaming.
After this, Rui Figueiredo talked about an interactive video developed as part of an anti-bullying project. Seemed an immense amount of programming work for very little reward.
It’s so wierd. I’ve recently got a book called something like “Use of Narratives in learning”. It’s an edited collection and some of the examples (like lego mindstorms) are quite interesting. Not sure if or how I can use this approach, but it’s interesting that we sometimes seem to follow parallel lines of thought.
Don’t even know where the book is – think I put it on my bookshelves at the OU for safekeeping during the house move. At least, I hope so 🙂