Robust and Authorable Multiplayer Storytelling Experiences

Interactive narrative systems attempt to tell stories to players capable of changing the direction and/or out-come of the story. Despite the growing importance of multiplayer social experiences in games, little research has focused on multiplayer interactive narrative expe-riences. We performed a preliminary study to deter-mine how human directors design and execute multi-player interactive story experiences in online and real world environments. Based on our observations, we de-veloped the Multiplayer Storytelling Engine that man-ages a story world at the individual and group levels. Our flexible story representation enables human authors to naturally model multiplayer narrative experiences. An intelligent execution algorithm detects when the au-thor’s story representation fails to account for player be-haviors and automatically generates a branch to restore the story to the authors ’ original intent, thus balancing authorability against robust multiplayer execution