Mediation in Mimesis Liquid Narratives

Films and novels effectively convey intriguing stories, powerful emotions, and meaningful messages to their audiences. Telling interactive stories in a virtual environment seems a natural progression of the narrative in light of modern technology. Unfortunately, current attempts often fail to engross the user by limiting his/her abilities to affect critical elements of the story. The Mimesis system attempts to tell liquid narratives that rewrite themselves as users take actions. In order to maintain the integrity of the story being told, Mimesis proposes a mediation system that arbitrates between the will of the user and the ends of the narrative. Speculative planning is utilized to determine actions the user could perform to threaten the worlds current storyline and how the storyline could be rewritten to accommodate those actions. If the storyline cannot be effectively rewritten or if intervention is preferred for a given action, the system is responsible for determining a realistic way of preventing the action. This is done by substituting one of the action's failure modes for the action. An advanced controller determines whether to handle user actions threatening the current moment in the story via accommodation or intervention. A precaching scheme inside the virtual world environment keeps track of the controllers decisions and accommodates or modifies user actions in real-time. Introduction Films and novels are only successful in relaying their intended message when they fully captivate the attention of their audience. This attention is easily broken by outside forces beyond the narrative's control. However, the narrative must be very careful not to produce such a force itself. An unbelievable plot twist or badly written passage can just as easily pull the audience from the context of the narrative as unwelcome music from the next room. This problem is even more prominent in interactive narratives. When an audience member is unable to take a desired action, that audience member is pulled from the context of the narrative. The audience member becomes frustrated, and the brunt of that frustration rests not with a character in the narrative, but with the narrative itself. The Liquid Narrative research group is a multidisciplinary group of faculty and students at North Carolina State University seeking to create successful interactive narrative environments. To do this, we are designing and building intelligent systems capable of creating structured interaction within virtual worlds. This structure works to eliminate narrative anomalies that may pull the audience member, or user in our case, out of a believable interactive narrative, and engross the user within a rewarding yet persistent virtual experience. The goal is to achieve the same kind of cognitive and affective responses to interactive stories as that seen in the participants of conventional narrative media such as the film or the novel. 2 The Mimesis project is the current focus of the Liquid Narrative group. The Mimesis system attempts to balance user control with narrative goals through a mediation process. A transparent mediator stands between the interactive narrative and each audience member. Audience members are allowed to take any action they please. Only when the audience member takes an action that jeopardizes the narrative's ends does the mediator step in and attempt to resolve the issue in a realistic manner that does not break the audience member's context.