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Interactive narrative in games utilize a combination of dynamic adaptability and predefined story elements to support player agency and enhance player engagement. However, crafting such narratives requires significant manual authoring and coding effort to translate scripts to playable game levels. Advances in pretrained large language models (LLMs) have introduced the opportunity to procedurally generate narratives. This paper presents NarrativeGenie, a framework to generate narrative beats as a cohesive, partially ordered sequence of events that shapes narrative progressions from brief natural language instructions. By leveraging LLMs for reasoning and generation, NarrativeGenie, translates a designer’s story overview into a partially ordered event graph to enable player-driven narrative beat sequencing. Our findings indicate that NarrativeGenie can provide an easy and effective way for designers to generate an interactive game episode with narrative events that align with the intended story arc while at the same time granting players agency in their game experience. We extend our framework to dynamically direct the narrative flow by adapting real-time narrative interactions based on the current game state and player actions. Results demonstrate that NarrativeGenie generates narratives that are coherent and aligned with the designer’s vision.
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Perception of “This is Not a Game”: Definition and Measurement
Participatory narratives are compelling, at least partly because of their ability to help players suspend disbelief in the fictional world in which they engage. Game makers have used the phrase “This is Not a Game” (TINAG) to capture the willingness of players to buy into such narratives in ways that promote productive roleplaying and authentic engagement. Although TINAG has permeated the academic and popular literature on gaming and immersive narratives for decades, there has not been a scientific grounding for the term that provides researchers support for a more rigorous study of the topic. This article makes two primary contributions. First, it provides a definition of the Perception of TINAG based on a systematic literature review of 50 articles that define or describe critical characteristics of TINAG: The Perception of TINAG is a player’s acceptance that they are embedded in and able to influence a fictional story woven into the real world. Second, the paper develops and validates a survey instrument that researchers can use to measure the Perception of TINAG and its three unique components: (1) the player accepts that they are embedded in a fictional story, (2) the player believes their actions influence the narrative, and (3) the player perceives that the story is woven into the real world. We evaluated the instrument using exploratory factor analysis using expert reviewers and game players. We include a table of the articles describing TINAG and our final scale to facilitate future research.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1915620
- PAR ID:
- 10537755
- Publisher / Repository:
- Taylor & Francis
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction
- Volume:
- 40
- Issue:
- 17
- ISSN:
- 1044-7318
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 4725 to 4744
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- “This is not a game” TINAG alternative reality games participatory narratives pervasive games virtual environments PRISMA methodology survey validation
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2023.2221598
