Meaningful choice has often been identified as a key component in a player’s engagement with an interactive narrative, but branching stories require tremendous amounts of hand-authored content, in amounts that increase exponentially rather than linearly as more choice points are added. Previous approaches to reducing authorial burden for computer RPGs have relied on creating better tools to man...

For more than a decade, Canadian poet Christian Bök has been toiling on a book of poems. But his is not the typical authorial angst: Bök intends his poems to outlast human civilization, and indeed the planet itself. And his authorial palette is not typical either: rather than inscribinghis poems on paper, he’s attempting to put them in a bacterium. Bök, a visiting artist at the Massachusetts In...

This research examines how identity-based interventions can improve consumer health. Results of laboratory and field experiments reveal that associating risky health behaviors with a social identity people do not want to signal can contaminate the behaviors and lead consumers to make healthier choices. College freshman reported consuming less alcohol (experiment 2), and restaurant patrons selec...