Immersion in a Virtual World: Interactive Drama and Affective Sciences

Simon, Mayr; Mayr, Simon

Immersion in a Virtual World: Interactive Drama and Affective Sciences

Interactive Drama and Affective Sciences

by Mayr Simon (Author) Simon Mayr (Author)

Art - Art Theory, General

Summary

Interactive drama is more than just a new breed of entertainment software. As different research projects have shown, these systems can also be used for pedagogical and therapeutic purposes. The goal of these systems is to teach sophisticated problem solving skills by allowing the user to interact with compelling stories that have didactic purpose.One of the main attractions of narratives, independent of the medium in which they are presented, is that they elicit emotional response in their audiences. They have an affective impact and only engineers and authors who understand how the emotion system works can create an engaging story world. This work proposes that an interactive drama based on a model of the user’s affective state should be able to provide a truly immersive user experience.It becomes evident that research on interactive drama technology, especially with emphasis on affective modelling, is a highly interdisciplinary endeavour that draws - and has to draw - from many different disciplines.

Excerpt

interactive drama, based on a model of the user's affective state, should

be able to provide a truly immersive user experience.

1.1 Generative narrative

Writing any form of narrative is a creative process. Some works of nar-

rative are regarded as more creative than others but as long as the final

product is, at least to some degree, novel, we have to attribute creativity

to the author. The notion of novelity is important for generative systems,

systems that basically create new story content "on the fly". As Pablo

Gervás proposes, "whatever is generated must be somewhat unexpected

or different from what others might have produced." [22, p.49] Another

important aspect is the notion of a "creator", an agent which acts in a

creative way to create results that "can be perceived or evaluated." [22,

p.50] A fascinating pattern of clouds, even if new and unexpected, is

therefore not considered as a result of creativity because there is no cre-

ator. With the needs of being perceivable and evaluable another factor

comes to play: the audience. Gervás simply defines the audience as "the

particular person or persons for which the creative action is intended"

and henceforth I will stick to this definition for the audience of all kinds

of narrative. In interactive systems the audience is not a passive one, and

this is exactly what fuels my position that interactive narrative provides

exciting new possibilities, not available to non-interactive forms.

In Computational Approaches to Storytelling and Creativity [22] Pablo

Gervás provides an overview about the history of generative storytelling.

The first system Gervás introduces was developed in 1973 and was sim-

ply called Novel Writer [25] in [22]. It creates murder stories in a story-

world represented as a semantic network. The states of the storyworld

constantly change according to probability rules, yet the sequence of

scenes is hardwired. As Gervás explains, the set of rules is highly con-

straining and allows for the construction of only one very specific type

of story, the happening of a murder during a weekend party. While the

interplay between the characters is generative, the plot itself is not. Au-

thor [16] in [22], developed in 1981 tries a different approach. It is

based on the claim that storyworlds "are developed by authors as a post

hoc justification for events that the author has already decided have to be

part of the system." [22, p.53] Author tries to model the kind of knowl-

edge a real author needs to create a story and also the way this knowl-

edge is organised and accessed. According to Gervás the model has two

metagoals, namely to achieve the current narrative goal and to find bet-

ter narrative goals to follow. "It is this second metagoal [that allows] for

changes in direction when unforeseen opportunities arise." [22, p.54]

Instead of modelling the author's mind, Universe [27] in [22], devel-

oped in 1983, models the generation of scripts for soap opera episodes.

According to Gervás it is the first storytelling system to devote special

attention to the creation of characters. [22, p.54] However, Universe

cannot be considered as an autonomous system but rather as a tool to

aid human authors. Complex data structures are presented to represent

the characters but only a small amount is filled in automatically. Most

of the actual characterisation has to be done by the user. While Uni-

verse was the first storytelling system to devote special attention to the

creation of characters, Gervás explains, Minstrel [56] in [22], developed

in 1993, was the first storytelling system to address specifically issues

of creativity. [22, p.54] Minstrel constructs short King Arthur stories

in two stages, a planning stage and a problem-solving stage, the first

trying to break down author-level goals into smaller author-level goals,

the second trying to solve the goals by adding the required ingridients

to the story. According to Gervás there are two operations of particular

interest:

"One involves solving author-level goals, which takes

the form of instantiating a set of partially complete char-

acter schemas. This is done by querying episodic memory

with partially complete schemas and using the results to in-

stantiate the corresponding author-level goal. Another is

the way opportunistic goals are triggered. Each time a new

scene is created, Minstrel revises it to check whether it pro-

vides an opportunity to apply one of the author-level goals

that ensure consistency or introduces one of the desired lit-

erary motifs." [22, p.55]

While these systems are certainly interesting for their pioneering work

in generative narrative, they are lacking one important aspect: interac-

tivity. Their only purpose is to generate "new stories" at runtime but the

user, or in this case rather the reader, has no influence on this process.

While also still lacking the immersive experience we want to achieve

in interactive drama, the next system I will present brings us one step

closer to the idea of having the user engage in the story generation pro-

cess.

1.2 Tale-Spin

Tale-Spin was a landmark project that has been carried out at Yale Uni-

versity in the mid 1970s as part of James Meehan's dissertation [32].

The idea behind Tale-Spin was to create a system that brings us closer

to what Meehan calls a "Metanovel". The idea behind such a metanovel,

as presented in Meehan's dissertation goes like this:

"A metanovel is a computer program that tells stories

that only a computer can tell, stories of such complexity

of detail that only a computer could handle, stories with

more flexibility--even reversibility--of events and charac-

ters than a human could manage. A metanovel time-sharing

system tells a story to many people at once, no two of whom

read the same thing, because they have each expressed dif-

ferent interests in the events and characters they want to

hear about, and because they may each desire a different

style of storytelling. And yet, among all these readers, there

is but one story--the metanovel itself--and each reader is

only following those threads of the story that interest him."

[32, p.ii]

There have been attempts in digital narrative where users could decide

between different paths to continue, similar to "Pick your path"-stories

in children books (Figure 1.1); but in these books, and systems, the user

just makes a local choice that leads to the next pre-written chunk of

narrative instead of having real impact on the narrative stucture itself.

Figure 1.1: Meanwhile:

Pick Any Path [47]

Tale-Spin is quite different to these approaches and in a way brings us

closer to what we want to achieve in interactive drama. The difference,

Wardrip-Fruin explains, is due to the granularity of story processes and

data: The system models story as "a relatively fine-grained set of pro-

cesses and data that are used to generate story events. In the case of

Tale-Spin, this is accomplished by creating a simulated world, and char-

acters and objects that populate the world." [57, p.116] Therefore the

slightest changes can lead to very different stories. The architecture is

based on the AI concepts of plans and goals, which are, along with ob-

stacles, also essential elements of narrative structure but it is important

to understand that stories produced by Tale-Spin are far from the literary

quality of stories a capable human author can produce. Furthermore, we

should not mistake Tale-Spin for something it was not meant to be: an

interactive drama system like the ones I will discuss later on. Neverthe-

less, understanding the way Tale-Spin generates stories can teach us a

lot about generative narrative.

The storyworlds in Tale-Spin are rather simple, containing only some

animals (like a bear and a bird) and some objects (like honey, berries or

a worm) and dependencies between them. A basic story would then for

example be about a hungry bear, named Arthur, who wants to get some

honey, however, only the bird, named George, knows where honey can

be found and he only tells Arthur about the location in exchange for a

worm. The user who interacts with Tale-Spin does not take part in the

storyworld by controlling a character but rather by answering questions

the system asks. For the story above, the system would have asked for

example who the main character is (Arthur) and what his problem is (he

is hungry). The possible answers are provided by the system and the

user has to pick one. In this simple world, possible answers to the first

question would have been either George or Arthur and to the second

hungry, tired, thirsty or horny, respectively.

Tale-Spin stories, like most narrative, are about a main character who

has to overcome some obstacles to reach a desired goal and to overcome

these obstacles they need a plan. The plan always depends on the given

circumstances. If Arthur knows where to find honey he only has to go

to that location but if he does not know he has to try something else,

like asking George for help. The control structure of Tale-Spin is shown

in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2: Control

structure of Tale-Spin's

simulator [57, p.128,

Figure 5.1]

In the example scenario presented, the user selected "hungry" as Arthur's

problem. From this selection Tale-Spin creates a socalled dependency

expression "Arthur knows that he is hungry". Without going into too

much detail on the control structure, the process resulting from Arthur

realising that he is hungry can be summed up like this:

1. The assertion mechanism (top right) adds the information that

Arthur is hungry to the memory (bottom left) and is indexed as

something Arthur knows.

2. The information is passed on to the inference mechanism (bottom

right) which leads to an expression like "Arthur knows that Arthur

intends not to be hungry". This information is again asserted.

3. The problem solver (top left) is invoked and the planning process

is started. It checks the memory if Arthur knows where food can

be found.

4. If he knows where honey can be found the control to get it is

invoked, if he does not the memory is checked if Arthur knows

who knows where honey can be found.

5. These processes are continued until the problem is solved or until

there is nothing left to check and reaching the goal fails. Failed

goals are kept in memory.

Whether Arthur asks George about the location of the honey depends on

whether Arthur thinks that George is his friend. Tale-Spin asks the au-

dience if this is the case: "Does Arthur think George likes him?" Again

the audience can select an answer from four possibilities (a lot, a little,

not much, not at all). Actually Tale-Spin keeps four different states like

that in memory, namely whether Arthur thinks that George likes him,

whether Arthur thinks he likes George, whether George thinks Arthur

likes him and whether George thinks he likes Arthur. The same hap-

pens for the relationship variables trust, dominate and feeling indebted.

These relationships are used for developing different plans and creating

somewhat believable character behaviour. The user does not interact

with the storyworld as a character but rather defines how they want

the story to evolve. Later on I show that there already exist interac-

tive drama systems, especially for therapeutic use, that pursue a similar

strategy.

While Tale-Spin creates interesting behaviours, a problem of the sys-

tem is that a lot of the interesting behaviours happen at system level

but never reach the audience. This problem has become known as the

Tale-Spin effect [57, p.115] which means that, for a layperson, a sys-

tem appears to be very simple but is actually based on very complex

technology. In contrast, there are systems that seem to be very sophisti-

cated but are based on rather simple mechanism.This phenomenon has

become known as the Eliza Effect [57, p.23] after Joseph Weizenbaum's

famous computer system. [58]

1.3 Computer games

When talking about interactive drama one question inevitably arises:

"Isn't that just like a computer game?" The idea behind interactive drama

is to provide the player, who interacts with the system, with a feeling

of freedom, by providing a high number of different choices and dif-

ferent outcomes and still maintaining a cohesive story structure. Those

familiar with computer games, when reading this description, will most

likely think of roleplaying games, or RPGs. After all, as Noah Wardrip-

Fruin explains in his book Expressive Processing , this is the most

story-ambitious genre of computer games. [57, p.44] As we will see,

the high number of possible choices in interactive drama as well as in

computer games has its share of problems. While it is true that they

provide the feeling of freedom, the problem is that the impact of most

of these choices on the structure of the narrative is minimal. Therefore,

sooner or later, the player will realise that this feeling of freedom is just

an illusion. The ultimate goal of interactive drama systems has to be

providing choices that "really matter". There is another downside of

providing a large amount of user choices, namely the possibility that

the user, who is usually not an experienced author, destroys the struc-

ture of the narrative. This is a problem far more relevant for interactive

drama than for computer games, simply because in games the player

does not really interact with the structure of the narrative itself. In an

RPG the player character rather interacts with objects and characters in

a fictional world while the execution of the game rules, the presentation

of the game world and the actions of the none-player characters (NPCs)

are controlled by the computer system via quest flags and dialogue trees,

which will be discussed in a moment.

In modern RPGs the premises are often similar. The player character

starts in a fictional world, may that be a medieval fantasy world, the

post-apocalyptic future or a far away galaxy, without much knowledge

of the characters' past (amnesia is quite common) and the future ahead.

Then it is up to the player to discover the storyworld, solve some early

quests and usually find out that the fate of the whole land or galaxy

depends on them. The player engages in many different activities like

exploration, dialog, puzzle solving, and, in most cases armed combat.

For example the official synopsis of Fallout: New Vegas, one of the last

years' most successful RPGs, goes like that:

Welcome to Vegas. New Vegas.

It's the kind of town where you dig your own grave

prior to being shot in the head and left for dead... and that's

before things really get ugly. It's a town of dreamers and

desperados being torn apart by warring factions vying for

complete control of this desert oasis. It's a place where the

right kind of person with the right kind of weaponry can

really make a name for themselves, and make more than an

enemy or two along the way.

As you battle your way across the heat-blasted Mo-

jave Wasteland, the colossal Hoover Dam, and the neon

drenched Vegas Strip, you'll be introduced to a colorful cast

of characters, power-hungry factions, special weapons, mu-

tated creatures and much more. Choose sides in the upcom-

ing war or declare "winner takes all" and crown yourself the

King of New Vegas. [7]

What is especially interesting for our approach is that "many RPGs give

the sense that the story itself is playable by offering the player freedom

to roam across a world infused by quests that operate on many scales,

can sometimes be completed in different ways, and are often optional or

available for partial completion. As each player chooses which quests

to accept--as well as how, whether, and when to complete them--this

creates a different story structure for each playing." [57, p.47] As we

will see this is quite similar to what we want to achieve in interactive

drama: to truly interact not only with objects in a storyworld but with

the structure of the narrative itself. But is this really the case in RPGs?

Despite the variety of experiences that players can have with quests,

Wardrip-Fruin explains, it is commonly observed by players and au-

thors that there are a limited number of types of quests. In RPGs what

you do when solving a quest is basically going through a checklist that

represents states of the game world. (see Figure 1.3)

Figure 1.3: Part of the

storyworld in Fallout: New

Vegas [7]

This checklist is normally directly available to the player via a journal

or quest log. In Fallout: New Vegas the quest log is accessible through

a computer devise the player character wears on their arm. Figure 1.4

shows this log for one example quest called The Advance Scouts. As

you can see the main task is to deal with the White Legs camp. The

White Legs are a hostile tribe that is about to attack a friendly tribe

to which the player character has offered help. Along with the task

itself the log presents two different ways of solving the problem. The

player could either simply kill the enemy tribe or they could choose to

sneak into the camp and steal the tribe's war totem which causes them

to retreat.

Figure 1.4: Quest log in

Fallout: New Vegas [7]

In my opinion, this has nothing to do with interaction with the narra-

tive. Granted, between starting the quest and finishing it the player can

choose between two different paths to reach the goal and get some re-

ward (money and experience points), but both paths are basically a sim-

ple interaction with objects in the game world. The player can choose

to interact with the members of the enemy tribe (by shooting them) or

with the totem (by stealing it) but this is not where the narrative unfolds

or makes any progress at all. Progress of the narrative happens during

scripted scenes before and after the quest - during the non-interactive

parts of the game. Wardrip-Fruin comes to a similar conclusion:

"Yet given the goal of the audience feeling able to play

within the fictional world - not just in areas such as com-

bat but also in terms of the stories being told - the quest

flag structure quickly brings game authors to a limit point

of complexity, holding back the future development of the

form." [57, p.51]

Computers are not particularly good in understanding free form dialog.

There are systems that try to implement free form dialog, one of which

I will discuss in Chapter 4.1, but the results are very limited to say the

least. A more common way of dialog in RPGs (and some other genres)

is the socalled dialogue tree. The user can for example choose one

out of five different dialogue options (see Figure 1.5 for an example in

Fallout: New Vegas) and the system selects an appropriate response (see

Figure 1.6) by traversing a hierarchically organised data structure.

Wardrip-Fruin cites Chris Bateman who is rather skeptical about this

approach:

"Despite the name, dialogue trees are seldom true trees

but rather converging and diverging chains of conversation.

They can be a nightmare to work with, and the benefits they

provide are somewhat minimal. Nonetheless, some players

greatly appreciate the illusion that they have control over

what their character can say, with the consequence that di-

alogue trees remain important, especially in cRPG games."

[5, p.277] in [57, p.55]

Figure 1.5: A question

from the dialogue tree in

Fallout: New Vegas [7]

However Wardrip-Fruin disagrees with Bateman on the notion of "illu-

sion of control". While a system like that might be an illusion of real

conversation, it is still an important method of decision making. Even

though we are dealing basically with simple menu selection the choices

matter in the game world and the different outcomes can be vast. This

is also be important aspect of interactive drama.

These quests and dialogue trees described above are essential for an en-

gaging user experience. As Wardrip-Fruin writes, an RPG uses them

"to reward and sustain engagement with its fictional world; establish

patterns that, when altered, produce small moments of surprise and

pleasure; and direct the audience's attention to a series of things that

must be accomplished through play." [57, p.59] So what makes a game

compelling enough to keep players continuing for endless hours and

even replay the game multiple times after they have finished it? The

narrative itself is most likely an important aspect. The player wants to

know how the story unfolds and how it ends. However, most players

of RPGs do not just follow the main storyline but rather engage in nu-

Figure 1.6: An answer

given by an NPC in

Fallout: New Vegas [7]

merous optional quests which do not really add much to the narrative

itself. So there have to be other reasons for the player to keep exploring

the storyworld. The player has to be rewarded for their engagement. In

most RPGs these rewards are similar: money, more powerful weapons

and items and experience. The latter can be used to "level-up" the player

character which means they become more powerful, which again allows

them to solve harder tasks which provide even more money, items and

experience. Wardrip-Fruin calls this the "just one more thing" mindset

that keeps players going for hours upon hours.

1.4 Interactive drama

Interactive drama is a recent form of experiencing narrative. One of the

central goals for every interactive drama system is to provide the user

with the feeling of agency. Agency is the power to take meaningful

actions and to see the results of the decisions and choices made. An

interactive drama offers a world in which the participant can have a real

effect on the drama which they is experiencing. It is important to un-

derstand that a linear or multi-linear story as found in computer games

is clearly not an interactive drama. As we have seen, game genres like

roleplaying games provide a large amount of interactivity and story vari-

ance but the point here is that in these games the player interacts with

objects and characters while following a predetermined story. Even if

these games provide different story branches and different endings, each

of these branches and ending is pre-written by the story authors. The

player does not interact with the structure of the narrative itself. Each

time the user participates in an interactive drama they should identify

the story as being essentially a new story. To achieve this, the main sto-

ryline will need to significantly differ every time the user participates.

Insignificant changes, such as only the ending differing or characters

having a different trivial conversation will not be sufficient.

The Oz Project, led by Joseph Bates at Carnegie Mellon, started un-

der a rather unusual premise. As Wardrip-Fruin puts it, "the Oz Project

may be the only computer science research project most famous for an

experiment that did not require computers." [57, p.317] What they ini-

tially did was creating interactive drama, but quite different from the

others I will discuss in this book. Instead of using computer simula-

tions, they decided to equip real actors with headsets and guide their

actions, when required, by instruction by a human director. Brenda

Laurel, one of the pioneers in the research field of interactive drama,

defines interactive drama as "[...] a first-person experience within a fan-

tasy world, in which the user may create, enact, and observe a character

whose choices and actions affect the course of events just as they might

in play." [26, p.6] in [57, p.318] The first Oz experiment matched this

definition. The first-person interactor was a test-person who was asked

to enter a simple theatre set, representing a bus station, to buy a ticket.

On this set there were also three actors, the clerk from whom the test-

person should buy a ticket, another passenger and a young punk, and

they all had the goal to make the test-persons task as hard as possi-

ble. They acted autonomously, like in an improvisational theatre, but as

mentioned above they had headsets to get directions from a director to

intervene if things got out of hand. Along with the experimenters, there

was also additional audience to watch the play. It turned out, and this is

essential for interactive drama, that while the test-person reported an in-

credibly engaging experience, the additional audience were less excited

and sometimes even bored. So obviously the experience in interactive

media is quite different to the experience in other forms of media like

novels or film. The basic design philosophy of interactive drama was

born:

"[P]lacing the audience member as an interacting char-

acter within the drama (as an interactor), creating expres-

sive and relatively independent non-player characters (NPCs)

within the same environment, and guiding the higher level

actions of the NPCs through the interventions of a drama

manager tasked with adjusting pacing for the interactor and

guiding the story to a successful conclusion." [57, p.319]

Following these guidelines, Joseph Bates led the first effort in applying

agent technology to entertainment software in the early 1990s. They

developed technology for dramatic virtual worlds and the first of these

worlds was called "Edge of intention". (see Figure 1.7)

The creatures inhabiting this world were called "Woggles". The Wog-

gles' behaviour was guided by an agent architecture that integrated re-

activity, goal-directed behaviour, and emotions. Three of the four Wog-

gles were controlled by this architecture and one was controlled by the

user who interacted with the storyworld. As Wardrip-Fruin explains,

"these characters needed to have both long-term and short term behav-

Figure 1.7: The Edge of

Intention [6]

iors, with some behaviors supporting others, multiple behaviors able

to take place simultaneously, and some reasonable method of what to

do at any given time." [57, p.320] In their graphical representation the

Woggles were ball-like creatures with eyes that could move around their

environment by bouncing. The user, who controlled their Woggle with

a mouse, could engage in simple activities like for example a game

of catch. Goal success, failure, prospective failure, and decisions that

other Woggles made gave rise to happiness, sadness, fear, gratitude, and

anger to varying degrees. The authoring language for the agent's be-

haviour was called Hap. "Instead of visual appearance, it was focused

on characters that could act appropriately and autonomously in a fic-

tional world, and do so based on goals and behaviors crafted by authors

for that character." [57, p.322] Goals and sub-goals are organized in a

tree-like structure and each goal has an author-defined set of possible

behaviours that would satisfy it. The problem here is the same as the

one I mentioned when discussing Tale-Spin: most of the interesting pro-

cesses happen on the inside and never reach the audience. The audience

sees only the successful outcomes of the internal "reasoning" processes

but all the failures that happened before would be--at least--equally

interesting.

Phoebe Sengers, who at that time did her PhD as member of the Oz

Project, saw this problem. She built a set of extensions, inspired by

narrative psychology, which she called the Expressivator. Michele L.

Crossley describes narrative psychology as an approach that was formu-

lated "as an alternative to dominant quantitative approaches which, in

their attempt to numerically categorize experience through quantifica-

tion and statistical procedures, failed radically to incorporate or address

these hermeneutic dimensions of experience and thus lost any sense of

the 'lived' nature of human reality and identity." [15, p.361] The cen-

tral premise of narrative psychology is, as Crossley explains, the exis-

tence of an essential and fundamental link between experience of self,

temporality, relationships with others, and morality which are "[...] the

kinds of stories and narratives through which we make sense of our lives

[...]." [15, p.361] If these links are not understood, simply because they

are not communicated, the audience fails to interpret why behaviour

changes occur, and the behaviour of the Woggles often seems--in Sen-

gers term--schizophrenic. Therefore the idea of the Expressivator is to

communicate why changes are being made. Communicating why things

happen is an essential step in creating an engaging interactive drama.

A sample story in

interactive drama

There are many different interactive drama architectures under develop-

ment by a growing number of research groups. The system I am most

familiar with is called IDtension [53], and most of the considerations

presented in this book are a result of an in-depth investigation of this

system. IDtension is a playable interactive drama that aims at produc-

ing meaningful events while allowing users to deeply interact with the

narrative structure and furthermore at creating essentially new stories at

each play through. It was developed by Nicolas Szilas at the University

of Geneva and has been continuously improved for many years now.

2.1 IDtension

One of the main strengths of this system is that it offers a very high

range of possible actions. IDtension is based on theories of narrative

and the storyworld is based on five fundamental elements, namely goals,

tasks, segments, obstacles and values. These elements are not only

important for the player-character itself but for each character in the

drama. Each character is represented by an autonomous agent with its

own goals and values and they interact with each other's and with the

player character to achieve these goals. Additionally there is an agent

called the drama manager which should ensure that the drama is consis-

tent and believable. IDtension's architecture consists of five modules,

namely the World of the Story, the Narrative Logic, the Sequencer, the

Model of the User and the Theatre. The Theatre is the interface which

presents the story to the user. The important aspect here is that the The-

atre is strictly separated from the rest of the architecture. This allows

for many different possibilities to present the story. At the moment a

simple text based user interface is used with the main purpose of testing

the underlying system. While a text based interface is not necessarily

a bad solution there are many aspects of the current way of presenting

the story that need improvements to enhance the user experience. The

problem with most of these systems is, that most effort has been put into

creating the interactive drama architecture itself. Now that it is time to

start thinking of ways how to present the storyworld in a satisfying way

for the user, it becomes evident that this separated approach leads to

some significant difficulties because many of the design decisions for

presenting the story evidently feed back to the very basics of the drama

engine. In the next section I will discuss a sample story that has been

implemented in IDtension called "The mutiny".

2.2 The mutiny

Upon starting the IDtension engine and entering the storyworld the user

is presented with a short backstory that describe some previous events

and the role the user plays in the storyworld. Figure 2.1 shows this

introduction.

Details

Pages
Type of Edition: Erstauflage
Year: 2014
ISBN (eBook): 9783954891962
ISBN (Softcover): 9783954896967
File size: 3.6 MB
Language: English
Publication date: 2014 (February)
Keywords: Interactive Drama Affective Sciences User Modelling Interdisciplinary Research Emotion System

Authors

Mayr Simon (Author)
Simon Mayr (Author)

Simon Mayr (born September 16, 1982) is an Austrian researcher specialised in developing interactive tools and serious games for psychotherapy. After earning his master’s degree in Cognitive Science, he continued his doctoral research at the Sigmund Freud Private University Vienna, working on a serious game to support the treatment of children suffering from trauma. He is an external lecturer at the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna and co-founder and head of research of ISGinnovations, a company that brings together excellent researchers and developers to accelerate progress in serious games and related fields. To find out more about his work visit www.isginnovations.com.

Immersion in a Virtual World: Interactive Drama and Affective Sciences

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Authors

Mayr Simon (Author)

Simon Mayr (Author)