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. 
                        more » 
                        « less   
                    
                            
                            Academical: A Dynamic Interactive Narrative Game for Responsible Conduct of Research Training
                        
                    
    
            Our demo showcases a choice-based interactive narrative game created to teach responsible conduct of research and research ethics. It re-imagines the experience of a game previously published in the literature, using a content-selection system that dynamically constructs dialogue choices during play. Our goal is to provide players with more opportunities to experience agency than they would have with the original game’s hand-authored branching narrative structure. Primarily, our system implements a conversation thread-switching mechanic that allows players to fluidly enter/exit conversation topics as one would in a real-life conversation. 
        more » 
        « less   
        
    
                            - Award ID(s):
- 2202521
- PAR ID:
- 10539227
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 979-8-3503-5067-8
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 2
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Education Training Ethics Responsible Conduct of Research Interactive Narrative AI
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Milan, Italy
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
- 
            
- 
            Digital learning games can help address gender disparities in math by promoting better learning experiences and outcomes for girls. However, there is a need for more research to understand why some digital learning games might be especially effective for girls studying mathematics. In this study, we assess two possible pathways: that girls might benefit from math games because they reduce the anxiety and evaluation apprehension that girls are more likely to experience when doing math; and that girls might benefit from math games when they enjoy the narrative and thus experience greater engagement. To evaluate these pathways, our work uses multiple dimensions of gender (e.g., gender identity and gender-typed interests, activities, and traits) and surveys of affective experiences to examine the impact of three learning systems with identical learning content: a digital learning game, Decimal Point, that has consistently led to better learning for girls over boys; a new masculine-typed game, Ocean Adventure, developed based on a survey of over 300 students; and a conventional tutoring system. We predicted that girls and students with stronger feminine-typed characteristics would experience less math anxiety in both Decimal Point and Ocean Adventure compared to the tutor. We also predicted that girls and students with stronger feminine-typed characteristics would experience greater engagement and learning with Decimal Point while boys and students with stronger masculine-typed characteristics would experience greater engagement and learning with Ocean Adventure. Consistent with predictions, students with stronger feminine-typed characteristics experienced less anxiety and evaluation apprehension in both games compared to the tutor. This suggests that math learning games may provide a way to address these negative affective experiences. In terms of our measures of engagement, we found that students with stronger masculine-typed characteristics reported greater experience of mastery in the masculine Ocean Adventure; however, this was the only indicator that the more masculine narrative of Ocean Adventure led to different experiences based on gender. This suggests that narrative alone may not have a strong enough effect on students based on gender, especially when other game features are kept constant. Contrary to our predictions, there were no effects of gender identity or condition on learning outcomes, although both masculine-typed and feminine-typed characteristics were negatively associated with learning. Overall, these results point to the value of a multi-dimensional model of gender in assessing learning with a game, the important role learning games can have in reducing math anxiety and evaluation apprehension for girls and students with feminine-typed characteristics, and the nuanced effects of game narratives on experiences with game-based learning.more » « less
- 
            In recent years, various mechanisms have been proposed to optimize players’ emotional experience. In this paper, we focus on suspense, one of the key emotions in gameplay. Most previous research on suspense management in games focused on narratives. Instead, we propose a new computational model of Suspense for Non-Narrative Gameplay (SNNG). SNNG is built around a Player Suspense Model (PSM) with three key factors: hope, fear, and uncertainty. These three factors are modeled as three sensors that can be triggered by particular game objects (e.g., NPCs) and game mechanics (e.g., health). A player’s feeling of suspense can be adjusted by altering the level of hope, fear, and uncertainty. Therefore, an SNNG-enhanced game engine could manage a player’s level of suspense by adding or removing game objects, diverting NPCs, adjusting game mechanics, and giving or withholding information. We tested our model by integrating SNNG into a Pacman game. Our preliminary experiment with nine subjects was encouraging.more » « less
- 
            Integrating narrative elements into a game is a key element in de- signing an immersive experience. Narrative has been hypothesized to improve engagement, motivation, and learning within educational environments. While empirical results have been produced to show that narrative enhances engagement and motivation, its effects on learning were shown to either be insignificant or negative. We, there- fore, aim to address the question of how to integrate narrative in a game to improve learning. We address this through the design of May’s Journey, an educational game that teaches basic programming concepts where a story is integrated. The game design seamlessly integrates learning goals, core mechanic and narrative elements. In this paper, we discuss the game design as well as a study we con- ducted to compare two game versions, one with rich narrative and the other with light narrative. Results demonstrate that participants who interacted with the rich narrative version had fewer program- ming errors and increased engagement within the game. We present our contributions in the form of educational design principles for narrative integration supported by our study and results.more » « less
- 
            The role of a Dungeon Master, or DM, in the game Dungeons & Dragons is to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. The DM must digest information about the game setting and monsters, synthesize scenes to present to other players, and respond to the players' interactions with the scene. Doing all of these tasks while maintaining consistency within the narrative and story world is no small feat of human cognition, making the task tiring and unapproachable to new players. Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3 and ChatGPT have shown remarkable abilities to generate coherent natural language text. In this paper, we conduct a formative evaluation with DMs to establish the use cases of LLMs in D&D and tabletop gaming generally. We introduce CALYPSO, a system of LLM-powered interfaces that support DMs with information and inspiration specific to their own scenario. CALYPSO distills game context into bite-sized prose and helps brainstorm ideas without distracting the DM from the game. When given access to CALYPSO, DMs reported that it generated high-fidelity text suitable for direct presentation to players, and low-fidelity ideas that the DM could develop further while maintaining their creative agency. We see CALYPSO as exemplifying a paradigm of AI-augmented tools that provide synchronous creative assistance within established game worlds, and tabletop gaming more broadly.more » « less
 An official website of the United States government
An official website of the United States government 
				
			 
					 
					
 
                                    