Considering Authorial Liberty in Adaptive Interactive Narratives

This article addresses the question of how much freedom an author (or a system) could be given to adapt a narrative in real-time to a potential recipient (i.e. the degrees of freedom of the author/system). While one focus in current research on adaptive storytelling is automation using artificial intelligence, we argue that the core concept of adaptive storytelling needs further development before it can be suitably implemented in an automated system. As such, we present the idea of the Authorial Liberty Continuum, as an authoring tool to help specify the degrees, and form, of adaptability to be provided to an Author (be it a person or a system) of a given adaptive narrative. The continuum ranges from a very limited freedom (e.g. very deterministic possibilities of change – resembling the capabilities of a drama manager), to full freedom (e.g. full control to adapt everything – resembling the power of a game master). To explore the capabilities of this model as a framework for designing adaptive real-time interactive narratives, an exemplary system of such has been implemented, which allows a human agent (aka the Author) to insert elements into the experience in real-time, and thus execute small changes to the narrative. This working novel prototype showed that the perception of the events in an adaptive real-time interactive narrative varies from the real-time Author to the Recipient. This makes it difficult to foresee which elements an Author should be able to adapt, to attain a specific position on the continuum. We believe that these results warrant further exploration of the Authorial Liberty Continuum, in order to determine how varying points on this continuum might be classified.