Novice-oriented Authoring Interfaces for Plan-driven Interactive Stories

The authoring of interactive, generative narrative is a task that typically requires an extensive multi-disciplinary background in computational and narrative theory. With the increased popularity of large story-driven interactive games, the demand for truly dynamic narrative systems has grown, while the number of cross-disciplinary experts that can both design compelling plots and utilize the underlying computational power has stayed relatively small. This work aims to develop a series of complete, publicly releasable authoring interfaces that allow novice, nontechnical writers and game designers to easily author plan-based interactive stories, and thereby more closely connect these creative minds to concrete implementation of their ideas. Through a process of iterative development driven by constant evaluation and lessons learned from each subsequent system, we hope to develop a series of truly usable, writer-friendly, and powerful interactive story authoring environments, and at the same time gather valuable and widely applicable insight into the requirements of interfaces aimed at novice-oriented authoring.