Nicolas Szilas

University of Geneva | UNIGE · Technologies of Formation and Training Unit (TECFA)

Split screen is a cinematographic device in which the screen is divided into sub-sections representing different views. It is used only occasionally in films and narrative games, as it may be confusing and disrupts immersion. In this article, we propose to use split screen for learning purposes, and describe a fully implemented serious game based o...

The field of Interactive Digital Narration (IDN) is inherently interdisciplinary—since its inception, it has struggled to unite artistic and technical expertise. In this chapter, therefore, we reflect on the extent to which the interdisciplinarity at play in IDN is specific to the field and the implications this has for authoring research. To this...

The boundary between non-interactive and interactive narrative is a central focus in the debates regarding interactive media and narrative. Another boundary is highlighted in this article when interactivity is such that the audience lives the story offered to them. To represent this new boundary, we introduced a third narrative mode, in addition to...

Starting from the observation that a cognitive distance prevents human beings from taking the measure of the current climate crisis and adopting adequate behaviors, this article asks the question to what extent a narrative approach could help to reduce it. First, it proposes a narratological analysis of some of the scenarios of the future of the wo...

Narratological studies dealing with the story itself, the fabula, have become increasingly scarce in recent years, particularly the models describing the categories of action at work in the narrative. By taking up the classic narratological models, we extract the concept of narrative act, "action on an action", as a fundamental element of narrative...

From a use case concerning a master level course on pedagogical video games, this article describes how Project-Based Learning uses Internet-based services. Initially, Information services have been mostly used to facilitate communication between the students and the teacher, and to provide support in the project management. More recently, Internet...

IDtension is an Interactive Drama project initiated 10 years ago. It provides long term solutions to the problem of combining narrativity and interactivity. The demo consists of a playable text-based interactive drama called "The Mutiny". The user is given many possibilities of meaningful narrative actions (around 100 in the middle of the story), w...

Alzheimer Care Trainer (ACT) is an interactive narrative simulation for caregivers of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. It aims to support family caregivers by letting them practice difficult situations of daily life in a training environment. In order to ensure its accessibility to its target audience, which may be unfamiliar with new technologie...

Cet article expose la transposition en modalité à distance d’une activité de prototypage papier pour la conception de jeux vidéo se déroulant initialement en présentiel dans le cadre d’un cursus hybride. Le passage dans l’urgence au format numérique de cette activité nous a amenés à médiatiser la collaboration tangible et présentielle vers la modal...

Background: Family caregivers of people with Alzheimer's disease are the most important support in concrete personal and economic terms. Family dynamics play a fundamental role in the provision of informal caregiving benefits. Objective: This review aims to identify factors related to the family caregiving of relatives with Alzheimer's disease,...

In this article, we introduce the concept of narrative act which denotes a meta-action—an action on an action—that contributes to the narrative sequence. Narrative acts have been often described in narrative theories, in particular within structuralism, but never systematically studied. Examples of narrative acts include Ask, Order, or Forbid. More...

This article reports a study with the purpose of analyzing the Interactive Narrative Experience under different levels of interactivity: a “classic” Interactive Narrative constructed with a branching story structure, and a “generative” Interactive Narrative built on a narrative engine that integrates techniques of Artificial Intelligence. Three ele...

This work aims at capitalizing advances in the field of Process Mining applied to the domain of Interactive Digital Narratives (IDN), towards the understanding of user engagement, particularly, spotting when and what happened when engagement dropped. An online IDN system was adapted to implement an engagement sampling protocol, probing 74 users for...

In the context of assisting informal caregivers of Alzheimer Disease patients, this article presents the design and preliminary implementation of a serious game in which two agents -a user-controlled caregiver and a virtual patient- communicate via specifically-designed dialog acts, reflecting both pedagogically appropriate and inappropriate behavi...

DEAPEL est un dispositif de réalité augmentée spatiale visant à soutenir la compréhension conceptuelle des phénomènes de champs électriques et magnétiques. Nous présentons ici un cadre théorique liant l'étude de la réalité augmentée aux recherches en apprentissage multimédia, changement conceptuel et didactique des sciences ainsi que ses implicatio...

This article approaches the question of choice in interactive narratives and presents a multidimensional classification model based on a selection and characterization of 31 existing works. The methodology for establishing such a classification is detailed, which considers composing elements, functions, aesthetic considerations, and mechanics for c...

Authoring for Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) requires reasoning in formal paradigms which has proven to be a difficult task. One of such paradigms is the narrative act, understood as “actions on actions”. We compiled a catalog of narrative acts and made it publicly available as an online interactive visualization tool. A preliminary evaluat...

The central notion of conflict in drama is well-acknowledged but not properly formalized. Computational models of conflict tend to target one specific type of conflict and consequently lose the global point of view on the story. Using a model of dramatic structure, this article specifies a number of conflict types within a unified model and propose...

This paper discusses the benefits, limits and specificities of communication modalities in online video games and proposes a corresponding taxonomy. This taxonomy could serve as a guideline for game designers who want to integrate communication into the game mechanics.

Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) enables users to influence the unfolding of a story at the plot level using Artificial Intelligence techniques for generating and balancing narrative paths on the fly. Despite their promise, most IDS systems are still unable to consistently deliver engaging user experiences. To further understand the character...

In the context of the Carezheimer project, the authors propose to personalize a narrative simulation to improve daily living abilities of people caring for relative with Alzheimer's disease. This personalization engages learners in a story offering adapted action possibilities. In this paper, after a brief description and definition of personalizat...

Introduction To compare online learning tools, looped, branch serious game (SG) and linear text-based scenario (TBS), among a sample of Belgian and Swiss pharmacy students. Methods Open randomized controlled study. The lesson was based on the case of a benign cough in a healthy child. A randomized sample of 117 students: only the Swiss students ha...

Nous positionnons ici la RA, non en tant que technologie mais en tant que concept permettant la superposition spatiale et temporelle de représentations multiples dans un contexte sémantiquement lié. La superposition sémantique d'un espace physique et numérique est une caractéristique IHM unique de la RA que nous pouvons exploiter pour concevoir des...

RÉSUMÉ • Nous avons développé un jeu vidéo pour l'apprentissage de l'algèbre élémentaire, à partir duquel nous étudions comment la motivation à apprendre et à s'engager dans l'activité est liée à la qualité de l'expérience et à l'aisance dans le jeu. Nous avons mis en évidence différents profils d'élèves à partir d'une méthode de classification. No...

Les travaux de recherche menés dans le domaine des environnements virtuels pour l'apprentissage humain permettent aujourd'hui d'envisager leur utilisation à des fins d'entraînement à la prise de décision en situation critique. Le problème de ce type d'application est qu'il nécessite pour les concepteurs et les programmeurs un travail d'écriture lou...

Nous avons développé un jeu vidéo pour l’apprentissage de l’algèbre élémentaire, à partir duquel nous étudions comment la motivation à apprendre et à s’engager dans l’activité est liée à la qualité de l’expérience et à l’aisance dans le jeu. Nous avons mis en évidence différents profils d’élèves à partir d’une méthode de classification. Nous montro...

Nous nous intéressons au soutien psychologique d’adolescents dont l’un des parents a été victime d’un traumatisme crânien. Nous proposons d’aider ces jeunes à acquérir certaines compétences sociales utiles dans leur quotidien à l’aide d’une simulation narrative, une solution innovante qui met l’apprenant dans une situation crédible et l’implique da...

Dramatic situations have long been studied in Drama Studies since they characterize tension and interestingness in a plot. In the field of Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS), integrating knowledge about dramatic situations is of great relevance in order to design improved systems that dynamically generate more narratively-relevant events. Howev...

This work in progress paper presents a story-based approach in a simulation-based learning environment in the context of crisis management. We offer a reflexive approach to learning for adults based on the uchronia. Our game design UCHRONIE offers two phases of simulation. During the scenario, the learner will explore several possible worlds. Durin...

Varying learning activities beyond existing LMS’s can improve the learning experience [1]. However, managing student interactions and productions across multiple platforms can be very time consuming. This contribution proposes a novel approach to monitor student productions on varied online platforms, such as social networks, Wiki pages, Google Doc...

The concept of dramatic situation is important in dramaturgy and narratology. In the domain of story generation and interactive digital storytelling, this concept is particularly powerful in creating meaningful story variations from a single core model. Nevertheless, dramatic situations and the related notion of deep narrative structures have been...

Background and Objective: Serious games (SG) in pharmacy education aim to actively teach students through forcing them to make decisions close to “real life” situations in a protected environment. However, the development of such games requires significant investment compared to other self-directed learning tools. This study aimed to explore the po...

Background and Objective: Serious games (SG) in pharmacy education aim to actively teach students by forcing them to make decisions closed to “real life” situations in a protected environment. However, the development of such games requires significant time, money and staff investment compared to other self-directed learning tools. This study aimed...

This article focuses on highly interactive narrative, an emerging genre which has concentrated advanced research in computing since the early nineties. The goal of these researches — if not their “Grail” — is to produce narratives in which the audience determines by their actions the course of events in the story. Much has been written regarding th...

This paper presents a system that generates cinematic replays for dialogue-based 3D video games. The system exploits the narrative and geometric information present in these games and automatically computes camera framings and edits to build a coherent cinematic replay of the gaming session. We propose a novel importance-driven approach to cinemati...

This paper describes, implements and assesses a series of user-log indicators for automatic interactive narrative evaluation. The indicators include length and duration, diversity, renewal, choice range, choice frequency, and choice variety. Based on a laboratory experiment with players, a significant positive correlation has been observed between...

Story generation (including interactive narrative) consists of creating a narrative experience on computer by generating narrative events. It requires building an abstract computational model that can generate a variety of narrative events from a limited set of authored content. These models implement a story logic, as they formalize the occurrence...

Cet article traite de la co-construction de la croyance mise en jeu par le récit interactif, dans lequel l'utilisateur exerce une influence sur le cours de l'histoire. Les questions de répartition des pouvoirs dans ce type d'écriture et de lecture seront discutées en détail, selon le type d'œuvre envisagée.

Brief statement: Nicolas Szilas is a doctor in Cognitive Science who has been researching in interactive narrative for the last 15 years. He is the creator of IDtension, a system for Interactive Drama, based on computational models of narrative. Since 2006, he is working on games and interactive narrative for learning. He is particularly interested...

One of the approaches to generate narrative consists in modeling narrative in terms of a deep structure, as introduced by narrative theories in the middle of the 20th century. This papers revisits this computational approach, and raises the central issue of dramatic tension: Would it be possible to build a computational model of dramatic tension, w...

This paper describes the current state of a pedagogical immersive 3D story TBI-SIM and the changes that have been made to it. The system is a narrative simulation in a fully immersive 3D world in which the user controls a character that can interact with non-player characters (NPCs). The users achieve goals and make decisions that have an impact on...

Computer-based highly interactive drama involves different authoring approaches, compared to linear media. Underlying design principles needs to be understood in order to guide the authoring process, to teach authors and to design better systems. This paper identifies a fundamental design principle termed Structural Writing that underlies some of t...

Simulations of social situations have great potential to be applied to many of the social problems that we find in society and organisations. Social simulations can do more than provide experience and transfer current best practice; they may be used to transform current social realities. As many educationalists, organizations and researchers are fi...

Based on previous research conducted concerning eTandem or telecollaboration Foreign Language education, especially a detailed analysis of the "failed" experiences of related courses, an original pedagogical design of an eTandem course is proposed. This smallscale pilot design-based research project involved 6 students from two very different langu...

In the context of "serious games", this article aims to lay the foundations for a narrative and cognitive writing by using “metalepsis” to deliver more effectively certain pedagogical comments. Following an introduction on the concept of narrative metalepsis, the article describes theoretically its possible roles in learning, which is based first o...

This paper takes a look at narrative forms as of yet unexplored in the field of digital interactive storytelling, and proposes methods for how they can be used in engaging ways for the user. Digital Interactive Storytelling, while nearly two decades old as a field of research, has yet to produce a tool capable of producing masses of narratively int...

This article introduces OPARIS, an OPen ARchitecture for Interactive Storytelling, which aims at facilitating and fostering the integration of various and heterogeneous Interactive Storytelling components. It is based on a modular decomposition of functionalities and a specification of the various messages that different modules exchange with each...

The Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) field has produced numerous research prototypes over the last years. These prototypes cover several different technological domains, including: drama management; human-computer interaction; language understanding and generation; behavioural modelling; 3D rendering, modelling and animation. Research in the...

This paper presents a demonstration of a pedagogical highly interactive drama, which provides the user with many choices on the course of the narrative, by controlling a character in an immersive 3D story.

Quel est le moment le plus approprié pour susciter l'émergence d'une prise de conscience du contenu d'apprentissage dans le cadre de l'utilisation d'un jeu pédagogique ? Peut-on préserver l'engagement et l'immersion des joueurs et en même temps amener les apprenants à une réflexion sur leurs apprentissages ? Dans le cadre de cette étude, un jeu de...

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a leading cause of long-term disability and death worldwide. This article describes an ongoing research project to design, develop, and evaluate interactive learning simulations that integrate educational materials for uninjured teenagers who have a parent with a TBI. By immersing players in an interactive environmen...

In the IRIS network of excellence [1], one work package ("Authoring Tools and Creation Methods") has been tackling accessibility issues of highly-interactive and generative Interactive Storytelling (IS) systems for story creators. While one problem is a current lack of well-designed tools, which needs improvement, the other side of the medal is tha...

The last 10 years of research in the domain of Interactive Digital Storytelling have led to several advanced systems [1], often based on Artificial Intelligence, which have been demonstrated on stories usually created by the systems’ inventors themselves. To leverage the potential of these systems and to create more and particularly more compelling...

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a leading cause of disability and has a devastating impact on all family members. The goal of our project is to design, develop, and evaluate a pedagogical interactive drama to support uninjured youths aged 12 to 19 years who have a parent or sibling with a TBI. We used IDtension, a highly interactive drama engine, t...

The aim of this paper is to revisit the fundamental requirements for bulding computational models for Interactive Narrative. We express the need for broader computational models of narrative and underline the fundamental difference between models for story generation and models for Interactive Narrative. Research directions are finally sketched to...

The ICIDS 2009 post-conference workshop on authoring methods and conception takes up open issues that were identified at previous conference workshops on authoring. The emphasis is on the abstraction processes that are involved when interactive story ideas are adapted to certain IS systems.

Authoring is still considered a bottleneck in successful Interactive Storytelling and Drama. The claim for intuitive authoring tools is high, especially for tools that allow storytellers and artists to define dynamic content that can be run with an AI-based story engine. We explored two concrete authoring processes in depth, using various Interacti...

In this paper we investigate a new way to represent the narrative structure in interactive drama models. It consists in explicitly defining generic links between actions, rather than relying on states, as it is the case for other interactive narrative approaches. This new approach is especially promising in terms of authoring.

This papers presents Edushare, a web-based learning environment that has been designed for cognitive remediation applied to autistic children. While existing learning platforms integrate various services in a web-based environment, they meet limitation where specific software must be integrated. Their role is then mostly confined to hosting the ext...

Interactive Storytelling is a major endeavour to develop new media which could offer a radically new user experience, with a potential to revolutionise digital entertainment. European research in Interactive Storytelling has played a leading role in the development of the field, and this creates a unique opportunity to strengthen its position even...

Having found it difficult for authors to be creative with current interactive drama systems, we propose an alternative author-centered approach allowing authors of nonlinear media to express themselves easily and smoothly. At the level of character animation, a bottleneck in Interactive Drama, our idea is to build authoring tools and author-centere...

Mutiny is a piece of entertainment developed with IDtension, an Interactive Drama project initiated 10 years ago [1]. It is a major attempt to provide the user with a deep influence on the story, while maintaining some narrative quality.

We present in this paper a framework for interactive narrative authoring. This framework is based on a generalized notion of section that we name hypersection. We present a graphical editor and discuss reader softwares for interactive narratives based on hypersections.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2008, held in Erfurt, Germany, in November 2008. The 19 revised full papers, 5 revised short papers, and 5 poster papers presented together with 3 invited lectures and 8 demo papers were carefully reviewed and select...

Virtual agents, to be expressive, not only need algorithms for displaying the subtleties of human behaviour, but also require environments and tools so that people can author them. Because powerful algorithms are sometimes difficult to author, a compromise has to be found between algorithmic sophistication and authorability. Our approach for provid...

One goal of interactive narrative and drama is to create an experience while utilizing the computer where the user is one main character in the story. This goal raises a set of practical and theoretical challenges to artificial intelligence. In particular, an intelligent narrator has to dynamically maintain a satisfactory storyline and adapt to the...

Interactive fiction and adventure video games are narrative genres which provide the player with the option of acting as the main character of the story. However these genres do not fully match the expectations of their authors and readers because the player cannot deeply affect the storyline. This article describes a system integrating highly inte...

Simulations offer a safe, repeatable and controlled way of providing training to humans and for evaluating the value of the training. This paper describes a simulation system that we are developing for the purposes of training customs officers to identify risk situations. The work brings together research from virtual environments; narrative intell...

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the use of multi-agent systems to develop virtual reality training systems. We first review these systems and then investigate the architectures used. We demonstrate an example of our own (RiskMan) and then discuss the advantages and drawbacks of using multi-agent agent approaches in the development of virt...

We are interested in using game technology to provide an engaging and immersive environment for experiential learning of workplace situations. Narrative intelligence will be used to provide the adventure. For authoring we provide an adaptive interface that allows the direct capture of the workplace situations and the knowledge driving the interacti...

In this paper, we describe a controlled interface for Interactive Drama, PastMaster@Storytelling. PastMaster is used for interacting with an Interactive Drama engine. The paper discusses the test results regarding the usability of the interface.

This paper describes how conversational expressive agents can be used in the context of Interactive Drama. This integration requires some auto­ matic tagging of the generated text, according to the current dramatic situation. Experimental results of the implemented prototype are presented.

Interactive Drama is the ultimate challenge of digital entertainment. In this paper, from our seven year experience in Interactive Drama, we try to shape the history of the field and envision what will be (or should be) the future of this history. Two main directions in particular are stressed, because we feel that the success of Interactive Drama...

Our research on Interactive Drama aims at conciliating interaction and story at the deepest level, the level of action. From a given story representation formalism, a set of elementary narrative structures is derived in order to capture the minimal requirements for providing a narrative and interactive experience to a user. Some of these structures...

Achieving a successful Interactive Drama where the user can act as a character in the story requires not only finding an algorithmic solution for combining interactivity and narrativity, but also interfacing those algorithms with the user. This paper focuses on the way in which the user can choose the actions of the character. Three specific issues...

Authoring non linear narratives is a difficult and challenging issue. In this paper we focus on the process of authoring with the IDtension system, an interactive drama system designed by one of the authors. We report an experiment of realizing a real-size scenario and start from this point to think about nonlinear narratives and the possibilities...

We are designing computer programs for Interactive Drama, where the audience can act to modify the story while the computer responds to these acts and maintains the narrative nature of the experience. Such computer based Interactive Drama requires narrative models able to both simulate the narrative on a deep level, and allow the user to interact w...

The limits of current forms of interactive drama have been now clearly identified: - interactive character based stories are poorly interactive, the plot remaining nearly linear

This study aims to design a new kind of interactive drama, where the user interacts in depth with the course of the narrative, while the dramatic intensity is retained. Based on various theoretical sources on narrative and drama, a model is put forward. This model is used to build a computer system of interactive drama. Introduction Definitions For...

This paper presents an original link between neural networks theory and mechanical modeling networks. The problem is to find the parameters characterizing mechanical structures in order to reproduce given mechanical behaviors. Replacing “neural” units with mechanically based units and applying classical learning algorithms dedicated to supervised d...

Clark & Thornton present the well-established principle that recoding inputs can make learning easier. A useful goal would be to make such recoding automatic. We discuss some ways in which incrementality and transfer in connectionist networks could attain this goal.

L'utilisation classique des réseaux connexionnistes, qu'il s'agisse de modélisation ou d'ingénierie, concerne l'apprentissage d'une et une seule tâche. Apprendre dans le temps, c'est au contraire considérer une succession temporelle de tâches auxquelles le réseau est confronté. Nous tentons de montrer l'importance de cette temporalité à grande éche...

In this paper is proposed an analysis method for Physical Model networks, based on connectionist learning algorithms. The first experimental results, obtained on limited cases, are quite encouraging and suggest some improvements, using the interactivity of Physical Models. 1 From synthesis to analysis Synthesis and analysis form a pair of two symme...

Issus d'une analogie avec les réseaux de neurones biologiques du cerveau, les réseaux récurrents sont utilisés pour modéliser des comportements dynamiques complexes et pour reproduire - apprendre - ces comportements. Les propriétés adaptatives de ces réseaux peuvent être exploitées par les réseaux de modélisation physique de phénomènes vibratoires...

Issus d'une analogie avec les réseaux de neurones biologiques du cerveau, les réseaux récurrents sont utilisés pour modéliser des comportements dynamiques complexes et pour reproduire - apprendre - ces comportements. Les propriétés adaptatives de ces réseaux peuvent être exploitées par les réseaux de modélisation physique de phénomènes vibratoires...