The infinite research

During this week I’ve conducted my research for the thesis project, the places where I’ve centered research were:

  • NYU Digital Catalogue for books
  • Internet search for reference work from other artists
  • ACM Digital Library for papers
  • Miscellaneous podcasts, books, movies and articles for inspiration

The topics I’ve researched for were plenty but, the ones I feel are more oriented to what my thesis begins to look like are:

  • Interactive storytelling
  • Ergodic literature
  • Interfaces in virtual systems
  • Sound interactive systems

All my findigs are being stored on Zotero and my thesis Mural.

The article I’ve chosed for this post is called Interactive storytelling: from AI experiment to New Media by Marc Cavazza, Fred Charles and Steven J. Mead.

First of all is noteworthy the article is from 2003 and many of the research made on the field may be outdated, but I still find interesting to my thesis some of them claims.

At the introduction the authors mention there is a latent controversy between interactive and storytelling, and as a consequence of this there are many technical implementations of systems capable of adapting narrative actions depending on user input but still have some complexities which is adapting AI systems to interpret correctly narrative formalisms and designing new ways for authoring.

Planning AI systems seems to be a good  methodology for taking over this problem, because they allow setting a goal and will choose between different sequences of actions how to achieve it, also the system proposed by the authors makes decisions by establishing a hiearchical model for give privileges during the story development to certain actions.

I still don’t know how to incorporate all my research within a project, I know some aspects of this paper wil help me conceptually but it feels like sometimes the topic just keep growing without an specific direction. Other times it feels like just restricting it’s scope.

For this article I’ve found interesting translating a formal language into something an AI can interpret for creating narratives which not only are coherent and cohesive but interesting and exciting, maybe I just need to search for new articles about the topic for having the updated information and contrast with this article, just to check if the initial problems they listed are still something can’t be figured out.

I still want to find some articles which approach interactive storytelling from a experimental perspective and a little bit departed to traditional videogame making, I don’t know by now if the final output will be a completely virtual experience or will have an inmersive installation form.