Making Stories Player-Specific: Delayed Authoring in Interactive Storytelling

Of all forms of storytelling, interactive storytelling presents authors with a unique opportunity: while knowledge of the story’s audience remains unavailable to traditional story authors, the nature of interactive stories to encourage player interaction allows information concerning the player’s state to be automatically inferred. Given access to such information, an author’s decision-making would become more informed, giving better chances of the story having the impact that the author intends. In this paper, we present an analysis of the decisionmaking process in interactive storytelling, and construct a method for characterizing storytelling systems based on features of their design. We demonstrate our method by characterizing three recently published systems, and review the related literature on inferring player information. Finally, we present Delayed Authoring, a new perspective on the design of interactive storytelling systems intended to take advantage of their opportunity to make stories player-specific.