The Interactive Storyteller - A multi-user tabletop board game interface to support social interaction in AI-based interactive storytelling

This thesis presents the Interactive Storyteller, a ‘story domain’-independent multi-user interface for AI-based interactive storytelling. Up until now, users of our storytelling framework, which uses the emergent narrative approach, had no influence on how the storyline developed. In the current research we aim to offer users a social setting for AI-based interactive storytelling. Existing AIbased interactive storytelling systems do not offer its users a shared interface in a social setting. To support face-to-face contact and social interaction, we position users around a shared multi-touch table. This very much resembles the social setting of traditional tabletop board games. We analysed video recordings of interactions that pairs of children had with our system to determine what triggered cooperation and highly social behaviour and what caused players to have a different focus of attention. We also tried to find out whether the use of tangible playing pieces to reinforce the resemblance with traditional board games offered any advantages over touch-only interaction, but we could not find any differences. To our knowledge, the Interactive Storyteller is the first AI-based interactive storytelling system that combinines the emergent narrative approach with the social aspects of traditional tabletop board games.