Tuesday 22 December 2015

ICIDS and Interactive Fiction

ICIDS The International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) has been held annually since 2008, or 2001 if you count the two conferences it was formed from (ICVS and TIDSE).

The papers from each conference have been collected into a set of PDF (and physical) books. These are quite expensive to download, but working at a university means I have free access to them at the moment.

Topics include things unrelated to IF such as animation and virtual interfaces, but there are many subjects related to IF: narrative theory, story generation, agency, player emotions, drama management, autonomous characters, emergent narrative and natural language.

I haven’t been to an ICIDS conference, but you can read a first hand account from Juhana Leinonen who attended in 2015 and Emily Short who was invited to talk about Versu in 2014.

Here are the papers I’ve come across that are relevant to this blog, along with links where I could find them.

Saturday 5 December 2015

NPC Relationships

What are the different ways one character can feel about another? Many video games use a scale like the following:

love > like > neutral > dislike > hate

This doesn’t leave much room for subtlety. A courtier might be openly friendly but inwardly envious of another member of the court, unwilling to betray their secrets because their rival could just as easily give away theirs, grudgingly admiring their drive and ambition while despising their family pedigree. Summarising this relationship as “dislike” loses a lot of interesting detail about how the characters relate to one other.

In this follow up to NPC Emotions part one and two, we take a look at how relationships form, what influences their quality and what might be possible in an advanced IF system.

courtiers