Interactive Narrative Intervention Alibis through Domain Revision

Interactive narrative systems produce branching story experiences for a human user using an interactive world. A class of interactive narrative systems, called strong story systems, manage a user’s experience by manipulating the interactive world and its characters according to a formal story model. In these systems, a human user may place the world into a state such that the formal story model can no longer control interaction. One solution to this problem, called intervention, is to exchange the undesirable outcomes of a player’s action for a set that do not violate the story model. However, the player may become aware that their intended action is being intervened against by a context-sensitive, meta-narrative process. In this paper we describe a method of ensuring game world alibis for interventions through domain modification of world mechanics.