A social network interface to an interactive narrative

Regular viewers of serial dramas tend to construct a model of the social relationships between characters as a main determinant for the narrative events that constitute each episode. We have developed a novel approach to interactive narrative in which this dependency is made explicit and can be used to control the generation of various episodes for a baseline drama. This is implemented in our demonstration system, NetworkING (social Network for Interactive Narrative Generation), which provides an interface that enables users to set the social relationships between virtual characters in order to create an episode of their choosing which they can watch as it is visualised as a 3D animation. The domain for the interactive narrative is a medical drama with a cast of virtual characters, such as doctors, nurses and patients. The use of the social network makes the relationships between characters visible and hence leads to the generation of narratives featuring shenanigans within the context of medical story lines.