It is argued that comics have several advantages over previous methods of designing interactive stories due to their inherent structural compatibility with visualising hierarchies of abstraction of story content. Consequently, this thesis contributes a process for employing branching comics to design and visualise interactive stories informed by previous approaches to stories, interactive stories and visualisations. However, there is a lack of theory or evidence upon which an informed approach can be based. The potential for comics to be employed in the representation of interactive story-driven material has been identified in previous work.

This thesis presents the case for adopting comics in the design, visualisation and evaluation of interactive stories. Luigi Pirandello, Sei personnagi in cerca d'autore Further work will be dedicated to developing more complex narrative representations and investigating the relations between natural lan- guage semantics and narrative structures in the context of interactive storytel- ling. We then describe into greater detail a short episode generated by the system, which il- lustrates both high-level results and technical aspects, such as re-planning and user intervention. We suggest that search based planning can satisfy the real-time requirements of interactive storytelling, while still being compatible with the narrative formalisation we are pursuing. Characters' behaviours are generated from plan-based representations, whose content is derived from narrative formalisms.

Our main objective is to develop flexible character-based systems, which nevertheless rely on narrative formalisms and representations. In this paper, we present the first results obtained with an interactive storytelling prototype.

Characters in search of an author