Tell Me a Story: Toward More Expressive and Coherent Computational Narratives (Invited Talk)

Since narrative is a foundational framework for the on-going co-evolution of human cognition and culture, the advent of computation as a new medium for representing narratives offers the promise of ratcheting up human understanding and expressive power, just as previous media of representation like language and writing have done. But digital representation often produces artifacts that are story-like but not really stories, leaving open the question of how we can make use of computational models of narrative to expand our capacity for shared meaning-making. I will address this problem by looking at the complementary strengths and weaknesses of simulation making, game design, and storytelling as cultural abstraction systems, and suggest some directions for incorporating richer story structures into research on computational narratives.