Abstract
The field of Emergent Narrative in digital narrative studies has seen a lot of research since its inception in 1999, and a lot of it is helpful, but also there has been confusion in terms and a lack of focus on the specifics of how the narrative is shaped in the mind of the player. The term itself has been used to both describe the ensuing field, the concept, the process, and the resulting narrative experience. This paper aims to clarify these misunderstandings by investigating the field and defining the term “afterstory” to help solidify the relationship between the differing aspects of Emergent Narrative. Afterstory is specifically defined as the virtual, mental story that exists in the player’s mind after play and informed by the interactions and their perspective on them. Then, using previous work on retellings, the paper will relate afterstory to how people retell their afterstories, and what we can use those retellings for in relation to the system that helped form them. In conclusion, some examples will be brought forth that showcase the difficult nature of extrapolating a retelling’s quality to its interactive narrative system’s quality, but how it can still be done with careful, purposeful analysis.
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Notes
- 1.
We say often attributed because an older source is Galyean III, who coined the term in their PhD thesis on Narrative Guidance of Interactivity, from 1995 [8]. However, while their use and definition is interesting, they do not have a focus on emergence the same way Aylett had.
- 2.
This inherently assumes that the system is capable of creating emergent behaviour.
- 3.
An argument can be made that a more involved (or elaborate, or deep) discourse shows an effort to want to tell a story well because it is an interesting story, but one can still tell a bad story well.
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Larsen, B.A., Bruni, L.E., Schoenau-Fog, H. (2019). The Story We Cannot See: On How a Retelling Relates to Its Afterstory. In: Cardona-Rivera, R., Sullivan, A., Young, R. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11869. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33894-7_21
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