Embodied Reporting Agents as an Approach to Creating Narratives from Live Virtual Worlds

The most common approach to creating interactive narrative involves interactive experiences which take place within the constraints of a previously constructed story. In this paper we explore an alternative approach in which participants in a virtual world, e.g., a game, simulation or large online community improvise events. These events form the raw material for the subsequent creation of narrative sequences. Building on the theoretical concept of narrative voices — fictional personas that deliver information in narrative form — we suggest some new approaches to creating narratives from live events. We then present one such approach, embodied reporting agents, in which automated non-player characters inhabiting a virtual world report on ongoing events to editor agents. The editor agents, in turn, compile their information and pass it to presenter agents who ultimately narrate it to external viewers. We sketch how such ‘witness-narrators’ can be used to investigate creation of tension and drama in the interactive story world.