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Storytelling in Serious Games

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-46152-6_19

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 Storytelling in Serious Games

Antonia Kampa1(B) , Susanne Haake2 , and Paolo Burelli3

1
RheinMain University of Applied Sciences, Wiesbaden, Germany
[email protected]
2
University of Education Weingarten, Weingarten, Germany
[email protected]
3
Aalborg University Copenhagen and Tactile Entertainment APS,
Copenhagen, Germany
[email protected]

Abstract. This chapter about storytelling and interactivity in story-

telling first explains on various serious games examples foundations of
storytelling. Then storytelling in Interactive Media with regard to serious
games is described. Further the current state of the art on Interactive
Digital Storytelling is presented including example experiences, author-
ing tools and challenges in the field combined with examples of serious
games. This chapter closes concluding with open storytelling challenges
and opportunities in serious games development and recommending fur-
ther literature on the subject.

Keywords: Narrating techniques · Serious games · Interactive media ·

Interactive digital storytelling

1 Introduction
Nearly all nations formulate their identity by narrating stories [44]. Stories, firstly
being oral narrated, represent an important aspect of culture since the begin-
ning of human being. Stories help to connect cultural values and learning or
moral items in a meaningful correlation and they make them recountable and
understandable. Therefore, using storytelling means recording and distributing
histories, myths, and values of nations. Many types and different genres of nar-
rations exist today, from oral histories, literature, films to games. This opens
an interdisciplinary research field, from cultural and literature studies to media
science and game studies.
According to Henry Jenkins not all games tell stories, but many games have
narrative aspirations [34]. Particularly in a serious games context stories play
an important role. They help to connect serious context with playing games.
By using narrations the game designer is able to transport the ‘serious sense’
behind the play, mostly an educational sense or training items. But this must not
be a big linear story like an epos or a drama in literature. The original serious
text information has to be transformed to game action. For this narration helps
besides other didactic aspects to add serious context into games [34].

c Springer International Publishing AG 2016
R. Dörner et al. (Eds.): Entertainment Computing and Serious Games, LNCS 9970, pp. 521–539, 2016.
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-46152-6 19
522 A. Kampa et al.

“A discussion of the narrative potentials of games need not imply a privi-

leging of storytelling over all the other possible things games can do, even if we
might suggest that if game designers are going to tell stories, they should tell
them well. In order to do that, game designers, who are most often schooled in
computer science or graphic design, need to be retooled in the basic vocabulary
of narrative theory” [34]. To analyze narrating parts of serious games, it is nec-
essary to understand narrating techniques, the “basic vocabulary”, as Jenkins
emphasizes. Essential storytelling basics are significant in all kind of narrating
types, also in games. In Sect. 2, important storytelling basics, mostly linear told,
are presented: the narrative structure, the narrators perspective, time and place
of narration and characters. Furthermore, their meaning for serious games con-
text and significant characteristics are added.
While the basic principles of storytelling are fundamental to understand and
design narratives for serious games, the interactive natures of games rises further
challenges. Even if the story is not meant to change through the interaction,
the actions performed by the player have to be take into account for the story
presentation. Section 3 gives an overview of the challenges and the research work
performed on the presentation of a story in an interactive medium though the
lenses of discourse and user interaction.
Section 4 furthers the analysis of implications of storytelling in serious games
by analyzing the technical and design challenges of designing stories that dynam-
ically adapt to the player’s actions. A series of games examples and research
works are presented to report the state of the art of both interactive storytelling
experiences and of authoring tools, which allow designers to produce content for
the engines.
Lastly, Sect. 5 concludes the chapter with a short overview and an analysis
of the future of the field, with open research questions and potential research
directions.

2 Storytelling Basics

Narrative structure means a literary element and describes the structural frame-
work that shows the order and manner of a narrative. Two items are necessary to
distinguish: plot versus story. Plot contains the sequence of events inside a story,
connected by the principle of cause and effect. The story represents the meaning,
which the reader constructs behind the plot, a second-level-construct [7]. Liter-
ature about narrative structure has to be read carefully. There exist different
meanings and terminologies. In the structuralist terminology the what of the
narrative is called story, the how it is told is called discourse [14].
In game design not all story elements have to be written before a game
starts. This second item story is important to analyze in serious game context,
particularly to analyze the meaning behind constructed by the authors of games.
This could be demonstrated at the alternate reality game World without oil,
designed i.a. by Jane McGonnigal and settled for a few weeks in 2007 via a
website [25]. A serious game for a public good, could be read the official website.
 Storytelling in Serious Games 523

Fig. 1. The official website world without oil

The big story behind this game with a strong serious context concludes a fictional
global oil crisis. The gamer have to find solutions to live without oil and save
the nature within their personal living conditions. The stories and ideas were
incorporated into an official narrative, posted daily. Gamer could post their
solutions as videos, images or blog entries. While playing the big story were
added by hundreds of personal narratives. These narratives were compressed to
a central paper with solutions how we can manage our lives without wasting
oil [48] (Fig. 1).
But how story and plot points could be structured? The most famous nar-
rative structure until today represents the drama structure originally developed
by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in 335 B.C [32]. The author emphasizes the
important role of plot or mythos for drama, particularly the type of tragedy.
He subdivided the tragedy in three different narrating parts: Exposition, middle
part including the climax and finally the resolution. The connection between the
three acts is called plot points or turning points.
The German writer Gutav Freytag expand the plot structure into five stages
in his developed Freytags pyramid in 1863. His theoretical work subdivides the
tragedy into: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, retarded moment
and denouement [27]. Both structures are compared in Fig. 2, referring to
Aristotle and Freytag [27,32].
524 A. Kampa et al.

Fig. 2. The drama structure by Aristotle and Freytag

Until today narrators, also in media field, refer to Aristotle three-act-

structure or Freytags pyramid, particularly the most famous American screen-
writer Syd Field. This is the structure of the Syd Field “Paradigm” in three
acts: Passing the first plot point in the first act the main character protagonist
is faced with a goal to achieve. The main conflict is settled. The second act is
named the “confrontation” and contains a midpoint. At this turning point the
character fortune changes dramatically. The last act includes a climatic struggle
to achieve the settled goal, or not [26].
Game Designer have been inspired by this drama structure by developing the
level structure until today. This does not mean simply copying this structure,
originally coming from literature. They have to find a way to install a suspense
line considering the nature of game playing. The interaction while playing influ-
ences the length of the different acts, for example. In many games a big challenge
can be found at the end, according to the climax of a traditional narrative struc-
ture. A good structured suspense line can increase users involvement, but have
to respect players freedom of choice. So game designer have to find the right
balance between reception of the story and playing.

2.1 The Time of Narration

The time of narration has to do with the relation between the narration and
the story. The time regulates the narrator’s temporal position relative to the
events being told. The French specialist of narratology Gerard Genette gave some
methodological choices referring the time to writers: they can vary (1) the order of
 Storytelling in Serious Games 525

the narrative, (2) the speed of the narrative and (3) the frequency of events [28].
Changing the order of a chronically narration often means to create suspense. The
most popular techniques of changing the order of time in narration are: previews or
flashbacks. The narrative speed means how detailed or abbreviated a passage of a
story is told and the frequency, how often a single or periodic detail is told. Gerard
Genette’s theoretical work based on studies about Marcel Prousts “In Remem-
brance of Things Past” [52]. It fits into the German and Anglo-Saxon academic
tradition and contains a culmination and a renewal of this school of narratologi-
cal criticism [52]. Flash backs and forecasts is also a famous film technique. Look-
ing back or forth in a stories increases the dramatic suspense line and because
of this the involvement of the audience. But changing the order of time in narra-
tion assumes a linear reception of a story. If it is possible to arrange a change of
order of time in games, has increased a discussion in game design: Using Quake
as an example, Jesper Juuls argues that flashbacks are impossible within games,
because the game play always occurs in real time [34]. Yet, this is to confuse story
and plot. Games are no more locked into an eternal present than films are always
linear. Many games contain moments of revelation or artifacts that shed light on
past actions. Carson suggests that part of the art of game design comes in find-
ing artful ways of embedding narrative information into the environment without
destroying its immersiveness and without giving the player a sensation of being
drug around by the neck [34]. Looking at the time in games, it seams to be difficult
to find similarities. Player could influence the time of narration via interaction.
But narrating clips or textual based fadings inside a game contain this technique
for increasing the motivation to play a game to the end. So you could see the kid-
napped princess at the beginning of Super Mario Land to demonstrate the mission
of the game at the intro [49]. At the field of serious games this narrating parts are
used to show the sense behind the game, often at the beginning or end of a level.

2.2 The Place of Narration Environmental Storytelling

Beyond the time the setting is essential to formulate a story. Environmental
storytelling uses techniques of architectural or exhibition design to tell stories.
Stories are told or established in particular spaces. The most famous author is
Jury Lotman, a Russian structuralist [42]. He subdivided a story environment
mostly in good and worse. In his opinion places have a profound meaning for the
storyline. Particularly in game design the environment is useful to settle narra-
tion parts into a game. In open world games this technique is often found today.
There are virtual environments in which computer games are played, which
are designed by computer game authors. The story isnt linear, it is being con-
structed by players interaction through the game environment. “Game designers
don’t simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces. It is no accident,
for example, that game design documents have historically been more interested
in issues of level design than plotting or character motivation. A prehistory of
video and computer games might take us through the evolution of paper mazes
or board games, both preoccupied with the design of spaces, even where they
also provided some narrative context” [34]. The serious game Global conflict
526 A. Kampa et al.

Palestine represents an example for this [56]. The user plays the character of a
freelance journalist. The goal is to write an article for a newspaper by collecting
quotes from the dialog during the game. The player has to act carefully respect-
ing both sides of the conflict. So important serious aspects are to take different
perspectives and learn more about the people within the conflict. The game is
used in educational context, including a teachers manual and further resources.
The storyline seems to be a didactic play by the German writer Berthold Brecht.
While playing it the people understand the didactic aspects.
So famous patterns of environmental storytelling can be discovered by analyz-
ing games. They “fit within a much older tradition of spatial stories, which have
often taken the form of hero’s odysseys, quest myths, or travel narratives” [34].
The American mythological researcher Joseph Campbell analyzed the structure
of mythological texts all over the world [12]. His results he formulated in the
heros journey, which includes basic stages every hero quests goes through. His
theoretical work influenced successful Hollywood filmmakers like George Lucas
writing the story for Star Wars, but also game designer. “The Star Wars game
may not simply retell the story of Star Wars, but it doesn’t have to in order to
enrich or expand our experience of the Star Wars saga. We already know the
story before we even buy the game and would be frustrated if all it offered us
was a regurgitation of the original film experience. Rather, the Star Wars game
exists in dialogue with the films, conveying new narrative experiences through its
creative manipulation of environmental details. One can imagine games taking
their place within a larger narrative system with story information communi-
cated through books, film, television, comics, and other media, each doing what
it does best, each relatively autonomous experience, but the richest understand-
ing of the story world coming to those who follow the narrative across the various
channels” [34].

2.3 Changing the Perspective

Mostly narrators present their story from one of the following three perspectives:
first-person, third-person limited or omniscient. They are also called narrative
modes. The Austrian expert of storytelling Franz Stanzel developed a circle of
narrators perspectives as a central point of writing a story [60].
In Stanzel’s typological circle contains “three typical narrative situations”,
including various possibilities of structuring narratives: “mode”, “person” and
“perspective”. These can be subdivided into three oppositions “narrator/
reflector”, “first person/third person” and “internal perspective/external per-
spective”. The first narrative situation is “authorial narrative situation”, which
can be described by the dominance of the external perspective. In the second
narrative situation “First-person narrative situation” the story is presented by
a “narrating I”, who is part of the action. The last narrative situation is “The
figural narrative situation” and it can be described by the dominance of the
reflector mode.
Learning social skills means to be able to change perspectives and this could
be done by serious games very easily. There are different characters, which can
 Storytelling in Serious Games 527

Fig. 3. Screen shot of the game “Re-Mission”

be chosen. Project Peacemaker is a government simulation game about the Israeli-

Palestinian conflict [33]. The player can choose the perspective of the leader of
Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The serious meaning of the game is a better
understanding of the long time conflict and promoting peace. The most popular
perspective in game design is the “narrating I” perspective, that contains a high
involvement by the player, well known in the Ego-Shooter-Games. Also serious
games use this perspective, for example the game Re-Mission. In the health game
player, often young ill children, fight against cancer and win. They flight in ego-
shooter-perspective through a human being body and kill cancer cells [54] (Fig. 3).

2.4 Characters and Archetypes The Role of Empathy

The importance of characters for a narration is very simple. Characters bring
action into the story. Their relationship is important for the development of a
story. Conflicts between characters, for example, cause an increasing suspense
line. Joseph Campbell did researches about famous archetypes often found in
myths, influenced by the Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung [12]. The central figure of
a myth are heros. Their antagonist represents so called shadows or enemies. In
some cases the enemy is within the protagonist, his dark site. Mentors guides the
hero through the challenges. Herald brings the call to adventure. This could be
also an event. Threshold guardians stand in the way at important turning points.
They inhibit like jealous enemies, professional gatekeepers the heros journey.
Sometimes they are inside the main character, representing the heros own fears
528 A. Kampa et al.

and doubts. Shapeshifters, creatures like vampires or werewolves, change shape.

Further tricksters are clowns and troublemakers. Allies help the hero throughout
the quest. And finally woman a temptress: This is a female character, a femme
fatale, which offers often danger to the hero.
These archetypes also can be found in serious games. Interesting characters
keep the gamer playing and a high involvement can be reached by identification
with the characters. Characters differ according to game genre. For example
in serious games for health context medical experts are needed as an intelli-
gent agent. Dealing with emotional items like cancer in a competent way causes
big challenges in character design. One famous character in health context is
Roxxi [54]. In the game Re-Mission gamer fight from a ego-shooter-perspective
against cancer by this nano-robot and learns besides more about this illness. The
narrators perspective is important in this kind of game, because ill children could
fight actively against their cancer. Studies proved an increasing self-powerness
of the gamer [44]. Roxxi has an friend as a learned guide inside, a Holographic
Guidance. This simulated holographic companion provides audio suggestions and
occasional guidance through a holographic navigational arrow. The interaction
between Roxxi and her holographic friend are also generating funny sequences.
Besides Roxxi and the Holographic Guidance there friendly and enemy char-
acters are settled in the game. So the characters install the classical narrating
structure of the fight between good and bad guys. For this, characters are a big
opportunity and also challenges for serious game designer.

3 Storytelling in Interactive Media

The idea of interactive narrative is not strictly bound to digital and interactive
media; however, with the advent of these technologies and the development of
fields such as artificial intelligence, computer graphics or sound synthesis a num-
ber of new forms of interactive narratives became possible (e.g. computer games
or training simulations). For instance, real-time computer graphics [2] allows the
generation and modification of the visual representation of the story in response
to story changes and user actions; techniques such as planning or machine learn-
ing can be used to automatise some narrative theories and and enable real-time
story generation [69].
One of the fundamental challenges in developing and in designing and devel-
oping interactive narratives using digital media is the contrast between the free-
dom of interaction of the user and the designer’s control of the principles of
drama. As pointed out by Szilas [62], these two aspects of interactive narrative
are often in conflict as the user has potentially the freedom to disrupt the prin-
ciples of drama by, for instance, not looking at a specific character in the virtual
world or by not triggering a specific event in a specific moment. The vast major-
ity of the research work in the area attempt to directly or indirectly addressing
this contrast by improving the freedom of interaction and, at the same time,
introduce more intelligent algorithms able to adapt the narrative so that it is
consistent with the both user actions an the principles of drama.
 Storytelling in Serious Games 529

This adaptation is implemented at different levels either handling the changes

in the story or the ones in the discourse [15,70]: in the first case the narrative
experience adapts to the user actions by changing the events composing the story,
while, in the second case, the adaptation is focused on the way the events are
presented to the user. This section focuses in the latter case, while the adaptation
of the story events is covered in Sect. 4.

3.1 Computational Discourse

Game discourse plays a fundamental role in enabling serious games to correctly
engage the players and effectively achieve their purpose [54,68]. To achieve this
result all of its components have to be correctly designed an implemented.
El-Nasr [23,24] identifies three different aspects affecting the discourse in
games: camera shots, light effects and character movements. She further analyses
the challenges of designing an interactive narrative architecture in which story
generation is separated from story presentation, which is handled by a “Director
Agent” controlling the virtual camera, the lights and the characters.
Following similar architectures, many researchers have focused on different
aspects of discourse generation and their combination. One of the most developed
areas in this field are probably virtual cinematography and camera control [18],
in which researchers have been studying for many years the process of trans-
lating the cinematographic language to interactive media. Drucker et al. [21,22]
initially addressed this problem by defining a language to translate cinemato-
graphic shots into instructions processable by a machine; this involved defining
a domain specific language for the shot description and a series of algorithms
to interpret these descriptions and translate them to camera movements. Since
this initial work, research in virtual camera control has evolved mainly in two
directions. On one side, researchers focused on finding methods and algorithms
to allow computers to design the overall visual discourse, such as shot plans,
transitions and cuts [17,36,41]. On the other side, researchers have focused on
finding efficient algorithms to animate and accurately place the camera in real-
time in response to the given shot plans [6,10,53].
Tightly connected to virtual cinematography research are the studies on
automatic lighting of three-dimensional virtual scenes. One of the first works
in the area is CameraCreature by Tomlinson et al. [63]: in their work, they envi-
sion visual discourse as a multi-agent process, in which a team of ethologically-
inspired agents control cameras and lights according to their motivations and
their emotional state. El-Nasr [23], instead, proposes a more top-down architec-
ture in which a unified system controls the overall lighting of the scenes following
formalised principles of lighting such as the ones described in [64]. The process of
formalising such principles and automatising the light placement has itself been
focus of research works such as [57] or [31].
The third element of visual discourse identified by El-Nasr [23] is character
animation: good character animations are clearly a major contributor to the
visual quality of an interactive narrative and automatising the process of anima-
tion has been a major research topic in computer graphics for a long time [43].
530 A. Kampa et al.

Within the field of computer graphics, researchers have studied different prob-
lems problems connected to automatic character animation, such as the realistic
generation of facial expressions [13], body movements [5] or the synchronisa-
tion of realistic lips movements with the characters speech [8]. Many of these
technologies are now commonly employed in commercial animation products or
game engines (e.g. Autodesk Maya or Unity3D).
Beyond the aspects of discourse enlisted by El-Nasr [23], we can identify
many other aspects that contribute to the presentation of a story in a digital
audio-visual media: for instance, Jowel [35] proposed a system that generates
automatically a sound track given an annotated version of a cinematographic
animation. Another example of area related to story presentation is procedural
generation of virtual environments in games: a number of works in this area have
attempted a story-driven approach, in which the environment is generated to
support the completion of a number of quests composing the games story [3,20].

3.2 Discourse and Interaction

In a combination, the aforementioned technologies and methods can be used to
generate automatically full story visualisations and implementations such as [36,
41] are two examples of such visualisation based on slightly different approaches.
However, the idea that discourse and interaction are connected only by changes
of the storyline and that, therefore, the discourse can be directly generated from
a formal representation of the story is insufficient to capture the full extent of
an interactive narrative experience.
As shown by the studies conducted by Martinez et al. [45] and Burelli [9],
visual discourse in interactive experiences as a profound impact on the user expe-
rience; therefore, potentially affecting the ability of the user to interact with the
digital narrative and to perceive the story narrated [36]. Furthermore, examples
of adaptive visual discourse based player interaction and playing style [11] show
that interaction can be used to drive camera movements improving the quality
of the interactive experience.
The extents of the interplays between story, interaction and discourse
revealed by the aforementioned studies highlights even further the importance
of studying the relationship between the designer’s control of the narrative expe-
rience and the user’s freedom of interaction, not only at story level, but also at
discourse and interaction level. This would allow to envision interactive narra-
tives in which, not only the story itself, but the way in which the user interacts
with the story and the way the story is presented can evolve during the experi-
ence. For instance, due to a twist in the narrative a first-person perspective game
could switch to a third-person view while changing the color palette a lowering
the pace of interaction to support a more contemplative phase of the experience.

4 Interactive Digital Storytelling

Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) or Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) is
a diverse interdisciplinary research field. Various definitions for concepts of IDS
 Storytelling in Serious Games 531

Fig. 4. Left, Faade [46]: Trip and Grace arguing. Right, Prom Week [47]: decision result
forecast

exist so far. Spierling [58] assumes for her working definition of interactive sto-
rytelling that “during the interactive experience of a story, members of the audi-
ence become participants in a storyworld that enables the resulting story. They
take a more or less active role right within that storyworld that grants them
some degree of influence on the plot as one possible outcome.” [38] states that
in Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) “digital means enable interactive forms
of narrative.” [38] An IDS experience only exists by the time the user in expe-
riencing. On the other hand there is Emergent Narrative which was called an
improvisation by [4] that is interpreted as a plot based on the users life experi-
ence, also see Heider and Simmel Film from 19441 . Two notable IDS experiences
are Faade [46] and PromWeek [47] providing non-linear storytelling through con-
versation. Faade Fig. 4 was the first non-linear IDS experience giving users free
input choice by providing free text input. Prom Week Fig. 4 is a game providing
complex non-linear IDS experience by letting the user choose conversation com-
ponents and for the first time providing end result forecasts for the user to base
decision-making on. Chris Crawford [19] states that in games the user interacts
mainly with object while in IDS experiences users interact with other characters.
We can conclude there are various approaches on interactivity in narratives
shaped by the audiences experience where (A) in IDS the audience actively
enables the experienced story and (B) in Emergent Narrative the audience where
the narrative emerges from abstract storytelling based on users life experience.
Its necessary to mention that in IDS a story does not exist as one finished
product to be consumed by the user like movie or a book but a reactive media
form like games or serious games and the users choices produce a story with
in the system, meaning every user can experience a different story. Some seri-
ous games implemented IDS [29,55]. Different stories in IDS consist of different
actions, characters and events shaping each individual story. The sequence of
actions is called a plot. Changing the plot will not change the story. Opposite
to serious games IDS experiences have no additional goal adding to entertaining
1
Film available online, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTNmLt7QX8E.
532 A. Kampa et al.

the end-user. IDS is a feature that can be implemented in serious games. As in

games an engine enables the experience. In IDS the engine mostly is called story
or storytelling engine.
Koenitz [38] writes: “Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) connects artistic
vision with technology.” In IDS information and methods are coming from dif-
ferent domains following different ontology of highly creative fields such as of
film writers, film directors or pedagogues. Thats also the case in serious game
development where all content apart from program code comes from experts
of other domains such as pedagogy (E-Learning), health experts (Exergames)
or hydraulic engineers as in project SECOM2 This interdisciplinary constella-
tion produces a collaboration problem tackled by authoring models and their
implementation called authoring tools or authoring systems [59].

4.1 Authoring

Spierling [58] states: “the situation for story creators approaching highly-
interactive storytelling is complex. There is a gap between the available technol-
ogy, which requires programming and prior knowledge in Artificial Intelligence,
and established models of storytelling, which are too linear to have the potential
to be highly interactive.” Producing IDS experiences needs process structures of
interdisciplinary development. So far several approaches deal with creative input
of content and non-linear stories structures by non-programmers [58,61] called
authors weather they are technical and content producing [1] or narrative [58]
or other authors who are non-expert in software engineering [1]. Some author-
ing tools enable children to input stories like the Heider and Simmel Interactive
Theater [30] and the Wayang Authoring Tool [67] both evaluated with under-
graduates. The question of who is an author and what skills an author should
possess and if this must be taken into account when designing authoring tools [1]
is still undefined for IDS [58,59]. Opposite to that authors can learn how to pro-
gram and implement their own idea of an IDS experience but this approach
excludes authoring by non-programmers and is therefore not discussed here.
The process of authors entering data or narrative structures into the IDS sys-
tem tailored for a storytelling engine to run on is called authoring. Producing a
game with storytelling and especially with interactive storytelling characteristics
involves various steps of designing, authoring, capturing, media production and
programming [50]. Researching and writing stories for the game comes before
dramatically rendering and translating content into visual content, which then
is produced renders the production to an interdisciplinary task. With regard to
expensive production costs many prior steps must be prototyped, which makes
the interdisciplinary task an iterative process argues [59]. As authors expertise
and skills vary, input models called authoring models vary as well as authoring
methods implemented in authoring tools. In many systems XML and dialects of
it describe non-linear story structures [16,39,40,65,66].Entering XML structures
is a task included in the authoring model and can be implemented by using a text
2
https://www.secom20.eu/.
 Storytelling in Serious Games 533

editor or a graphical user interface [66]. In all cases a XML experienced author
can fall back on a text editor entering XML structures. But graphical user inter-
faces open a window for non-expert authors widening the target group of authors
for an IDS system. That is the wide-spread goal of authoring tools [1,40,66].
The concept of authoring is determining “the relationships between gener-
ative technologies underlying Interactive Storytelling engines, and the actual
description of narrative content”[51]. Entering other creative content and infor-
mation for a storytelling engine creates a bottleneck [51,59] in production
process. So far approaches like generating input [58] and output by input combi-
nation using Artificial Intelligence based on discourse analysis in conversational
systems as well as game-and simulation design [58], as well as component-based
approaches [1] did not solve this bottleneck. While using different approaches
and models for authoring IDS experiences all works on authoring tools agree
on the necessity for all authors including programmers and non-programmers of
instant testing of entered content [1,66].

4.2 Authoring Tools as Technical Challenges in IDS Production

Authoring for IDS systems follows various models depending on the execut-
ing system delivering the interactive experience depending on the storytelling
engine [51] used. An authoring tool should not only support the presentation
of the used technology states [1], but also allow for authors with different back-
grounds to create IDS experiences. The author himself should not need to create
the underlying structure from scratch, but can fall back on a story template
provided by the authoring tool. An authoring tool can also be an authoring
toolkit MR Toolkit, [66] The relevant tasks that the author has to fulfill are
then reduced to his core domain and competencies, which include selecting and
combining components, adapting multimedia content, and calibrating visual rep-
resentations of components with the appropriate real world objects. says [1].
But there are problems with visualizations of programming structures for
non-programmers as [65] states: “The limitations of a single graph to model a
complex non-linear scenario are obvious, because an author is forced to define
all possible paths through the story in detail.” Describing a fallback to pro-
gramming structures opposite to creative methods creating narratives. The goal
of an authoring tool is to provide communication interfaces between technol-
ogy experts, storytelling experts and application domain-experts [1]. Szilas and
Spierling [59] describe a vicious circle in the process of creating authoring tools
between listening to authors and adjusting the authoring tool suggesting that
the creation of an authoring tool is rather an iterative building process than
a nonrecurring process. Easy to use interfaces are needed for defining complex
structures. “The Heider-Simmel Interactive Theater3 [30] allows novice users
to easily author movies intended to convey rich narratives that involve various
physical, social, and psychological concerns.” Gordon2014 states. This authoring
tool can be used by undergraduates as well as the Wayang Authoring Tool [67]
3
Heider Simmel Interactive Theater: http://hsit.ict.usc.edu/.
534 A. Kampa et al.

but both authoring tools produce no IDS system operated by storytelling engines
but a complete product to watch by the audience though non-expert input by
graphical user interfaces are provided by these authoring tools.
StoryTec environment [29] is an example of an authoring tool in the serious
game domain where non-programmers like “medical doctors, fitness coaches or
members of other user groups can either define fitness programs and game-
based applications for sports and health from scratch or retrieve preconfigured
programs and templates from the database (repository) and customize those to
the needs and characteristics of individuals and groups.” Ergo Active, Y-Move
and SunSports Go are serious games developed with StoryTec [29].
Apart from enabling input for non-programmers authoring tools are mainly
developed for specialized storytelling engines. StoryNet [55] using hypertext for
IDS and HTML browsers as storytelling engines. This is the only project using
standardized software and markup language for IDS. Most IDS projects use
XML or a self-made XML dialect for describing story structures and content [66],
MR Toolkit. [40] and use specialized storytelling engines implementing several
planning algorithms [61]. We conclude authoring tool development is a diversified
research field of different authoring models and methods providing access to non-
expert authors of various domains and an interdisciplinary task with the goal of
tackling the authoring bottleneck [59].

5 Conclusions and Outlook

In Summary, this article draws a line from linear told stories to highly non-linear
stories in Interactive Media and Interactive Storytelling by showing their impor-
tance for serious games. Beginning with the storytelling basics, fundamental nar-
rative techniques are presented, corresponding to traditional and mostly linear
told stories. Narrative techniques like narrator perspective, dramatic structures
and Character Design are also important for Game Design. Further the chapter
“Storytellung in Interactive Media” includes interactive theories related to nar-
rative aspects. The interferences between story, interaction and discourse has
to be researched, considering the relationship between the designer’s control of
the narrative experience and the user’s freedom of interaction. This has to be
done in three levels, the story level, but also at discourse and interaction level.
In addition to this, Interactive Digital Storytelling is presented. Various defini-
tions exist today. Working definitions of Interactive Digital Storytelling had been
published [38,58], some incorporating specialized authoring methods [58,61] and
some implemented Authoring Tools like Scenejo, Heider Simmel Interactive The-
atre and MR Authoring Tool [1,30,66] according to authoring models and spe-
cific authoring processes. A general definition is missed until now. According to
Interactive Digital Storytelling also authoring tools and their particular items
are illustrated.
Using storytelling in serious games context opens challenges and opportu-
nities. According to Jenkins not all games tell stories, but many games have
narrative aspirations. [Jenkins] First of all, narrative techniques particularly in
 Storytelling in Serious Games 535

serious games design have to be defined. The presented storytelling basics have
to be examined in game context. In the serious game context narratives are
essential to transport the serious sense behind the game. There exist different
ways to work with narrating parts in serious games. Not all parts have to be told
by the author. The serious game World without oil, in which the user tell their
own stories how to deal with the oil crisis, is a good example for that. But how
correspond this with the immersion, game designer want to reach? This opens
a new research field: How influence dramatic storylines or character design the
immersion level of the player? And how could we measure this?
Further, interference between interaction and reception in serious games have
to be analyzed in detail, considering the players freedom of choice. This also
means the mixture between linear and nonlinear elements. Balancing the recep-
tion of the story with the interaction with game elements is an important chal-
lenge in designing games, but an opportunity as well. New forms of storytelling
according to Interactive Digital Storytelling opens prospects for learning. Self-
determined learning needs a freedom of choice, given by Interactive Storytelling.
So, gamer learn serious content as a coauthor by active doing and trying it out.
This is represented for example by roleplaying in the highly interactive game
Faade or discovering the Saalburgs spirit on players own ways with the mobile
location-based serious game Spirit. This opens an important research field: How
narrative parts and the freedom of choice influence the learning aspects in serious
games? It has to be analyzed, how much a guidance is useful for transporting
serious sense.
Further, authoring tools are often specialized on certain IDS systems and
authoring methods producing different IDS experiences from other authoring
tools. Today there is no comprehensive media format for IDS experiences but
many IDS approaches mostly implemented as prototypes. Unlike HTML as for-
mat for Hyperfiction a IDS format of the 80 s and 90 s [39] today formats diverge
seemingly according to different technologies like mobile gaming, theater per-
formances, location based technology, HMDs, Google glass and desktop PCs
used for IDS experiences. The question here is weather these diversions are only
technical diversions or is there a mutual core of IDS in those models, authoring
methods and authoring tools and if yes what is this core? Also, authoring in
a game design process opens new challenges: How to visualize realize the con-
cept of interactive storytelling in a game to the author to enable the authoring
process in the interdisciplinary team?
Many years of research and discussion have passed, but the coupling of narra-
tion and interaction can still spark provocative debates requiring our attention.
Therefore further work on the practical and ontological analogies and differ-
ences between interactivity and narration is necessary. [38] In Interactive Digital
Storytelling the authoring bottleneck up to this point is still left unsolved [59].
Last but not least, Learning, Gaming and Storytelling have to be examined
as an unity. A big challenge is how to evaluate learning aspects transported
by narration in prospect. Single evaluations already exist, particularly in heal
care. The 2008 study by Kato, Cole, Bradlyn and Pollock [37] about the serious
536 A. Kampa et al.

game Re-Mission represents a good example for this. But there is no focus on
narration parts. It is a common sense that serious games using storytelling can
help to understand in a learning context, but their is no general method to
evaluate this connection.

Further Readings

We recommend Lee Sheldon’s 2013 book “Character Development and Story-

telling for Games” for game designing and writing because the highlights the
fundamental importance of characters and storytelling for all types of games.
“The hero with a thousand faces” (Vol. 17) by 2008 by Joseph Campbell, New
World Library combines the insights of modern psychology with Joseph Camp-
bells unique understanding of comparative mythology and is a good book with
many insights into storytelling as well as Henry Jenkins’s book “Game Design
as Narrative” in Computer, 44 from 2004. On Interactive Digital Storytelling
we recommend two books: “Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling” [19] by
Chris Crawford is a second edition from 2012 in New Riders updating his fun-
damental thesis and understanding of Interactive Storytelling. Koenitz’s 2015
book “Interactive Digital Narrative: History, Theory and Practice” [38] in Rout-
ledge provides a broad overview of current issues and future directions in the
multi-disciplinary field of Interactive Digital Storytelling, it covers history, theo-
retical perspectives and varieties of practice including narrative game design and
it assembles the voices of leading researchers and practitioners in the research
field.

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