Curveship’s Automatic Narrative Style
Name
Montfort curveship_fdg_camera_ready.pdf
Size
371.13 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
382a322c64c0c40c2612d7da891657f7
Author(s)
Montfort, Nick
Date Issued
June 2011
Journal
FDG'11 Foundations of Digital Games, ACM
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Citation
Montfort, Nick. "Curveship’s Automatic Narrative Style." The 6th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG'11), June 28-July 1, Bordeaux, France.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Curveship, a Python framework for developing interactive fiction
(IF) with narrative style, is described. The system simulates a
world with locations, characters, and objects, providing the
typical facilities of an IF development system. To these it adds the
ability to generate text and to change the telling of events and
description of items using high-level narrative parameters, so that,
for instance, different actors can be focalized and events can be
told out of order. By assigning a character to be narrator or
moving the narrator in time, the system can determine
grammatical specifics and render the text in a new narrative style.
Curveship offers those interested in narrative systems a way to
experiment with changes in the narrative discourse; for
interactive fiction authors and those who wish to use of the
system as a component of their own, it is a way to create powerful
new types of narrative experiences. The templates used for
language generation in Curveship, the string-with-slots
representation, shows that there is a compromise between highly
flexible but extremely difficult-to-author abstract syntax
representations and simple strings, which are easy to write but
extremely inflexible. The development of the system has
suggested ways to refine narrative theory, offering new
understandings of how narrative distance can be understood as
being composed of lower-level changes in narrative and how the
order of events is better represented as an ordered tree than a
simple sequence.
MIT Department
Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2159365
