Having one's cake and eating it too: Coherence of children's emergent narratives

Abstract

In the emergent narrative approach to Interactive Storytelling,
narratives arise from the interactions between player- or
computer-controlled characters in a simulated story world. This
approach offers much freedom to the players, but this freedom may come
at the cost of narrative structure. In this paper we study stories
created by children using a storytelling system based on the emergent
narrative approach. We investigate how coherent these stories actually
are and which types of character actions contribute the most to story
coherence, defined in terms of the causal connectedness of story
elements. We find that although the children do produce goal-directed
story lines, overall the stories are only partially coherent. This can
be explained by the improvisational nature of the children’s
storytelling with our system, where the interactive experience of the
players is more important than the production of a coherent narrative.
We also observe that the communication between the children, external
to the system, plays an important role in establishing coherence of
the created stories.