We approach creating an interactive drama from the viewpoint that having a human author involved in the creation of the drama is a valuable component. Given that there is this author, we suddenly find opposing forces inherent to the system: the amount of interaction we desire to give the User of the system vs. the amount of dramatic control we wish to give the Writer. In this paper, we propose ...

Creating an interactive drama requires authors to produce large quantities of story content. A programmer or knowledge expert typically creates this content because they have experience with the story environment. By using an authoring tool someone with less experience with the story environment can organize and create story content. The Scribe Authoring Tool is an authoring tool that will be u...

Introduction: Clinical practice includes expressing empathy and understanding key features of humanity, such as mortality and illness. The Stanislavski "System" of actor training negotiates a journey from the unconscious via feeling, will and intellect to a proposed supertask. This study explored these areas during collaborative learning amongst undergraduate medical and drama students. Materia...

Drama, theater and role-playing methods are commonly used in health promotion programs, but evidence of their effectiveness is limited. This paper describes the development, implementation and evaluation of a school-based drama program to enhance social relationships and decrease bullying at school in children in grades 4-5 (mean age of 10.4 years). Students (n = 190) were recruited from two pr...

In mammals, the neurotransmitter dopamine (DA) modulates a variety of behaviours, although DA function is mostly associated with motor control and reward. In insects such as the fruitfly, Drosophila melanogaster, DA also modulates a wide array of behaviours, ranging from sleep and locomotion to courtship and learning. How can a single molecule play so many different roles? Adaptive changes with...

A friend of mine recently questioned my interest in the "Baby Jessica" saga. "Why are you always so fascinated by those stories?" he asked. "They have nothing to do with Black people." By "those stories," he meant the myriad of disputes occupying the headlines that involve biological claims to children. These custody battles test the importance in American law and culture of the genetic tie bet...

Young people can be valuable motivational resources for health promotion. A project implemented from 2009 through 2013 in a small American Indian community in northwest Arizona recruited American Indian young people aged 10 to 21 as agents of change for health promotion through radio programming. Thirty-seven participants were recruited and trained in broadcasting and creative writing technique...

Recently, both living and deceased organ donation rates have hit a plateau, despite increases in need for viable organs. One approach to improve donation rate is public education and policy; thus, it is necessary to understand the information the public is receiving regarding organ donation. We hypothesized that primetime medical dramas portray organ donation and transplantation in a negative m...

Opinion There has been increasing interest in the field of medicine and in the social life of patients as well as health care providers in the realm of the media, namely, films and television shows. Table 1 lists some popular television series that are based on events germane to the medical field [1–7]. These shows constitute a genre in television, the ''medical drama. " A medical drama can be ...