On the Use of Reincorporation in Interactive Drama

Abstract

Marlinspike is an interactive drama system. It produces a story by playing short pre-authored story components called scenes in response to the actions of a human player. Marlinspike selects the next scene to play so as to reincorporate — or narratively build upon — as much of the story-so-far as possible. In accordance with an Aristotelian definition of narrative unity, this reincorporation serves to make earlier events--particularly the player's actions--narratively necessary to the finished story. An evaluation with human players of Marlinspike's novel reincorporation feature produced mixed results. On the one hand, reincorporation does indeed produce internal story structures that are more unified and that include more of the players' significant actions. However, the players themselves did not report a correspondingly improved experience of either story quality or story-level agency.