Interactive narratives balance player freedom and story control with formal models
Analysing the Narrative Paradox through Formal Models and Properties in Interactive Narrative
Artificial IntelligenceHuman-Computer Interaction
Summary
Stories in interactive games face a big challenge: letting players influence the story while keeping the story clear and enjoyable. The authors created a formal way to model this challenge, called the narrative paradox, by describing how the game world changes with player actions and system events. They also developed measures to compare different ways the game manages the story, balancing player freedom and author control. They tested their approach by comparing different story management styles and showed how this helps to find good compromises between keeping the story engaging and letting players explore.
What this means in practice
- •For game developers: Use formal models to design story managers that balance player choice and coherent narratives in interactive games.
- •For interactive media designers: Evaluate and compare different storytelling strategies for interactive experiences to improve user engagement and narrative satisfaction.
Authors
Jules Clerc, Mohamed Sallak, Domitile Lourdeaux, Marc Ravaine
Abstract
Interactive narratives aim to let players influence the unfolding of a story while preserving a coherent and satisfying narrative progression. This creates a central tension, commonly described as the narrative paradox, between player autonomy and narrative control. Experience Managers (EMs) manage the story by determining how the narrative progresses in response to player behaviour. Although this paradox is widely discussed, it is rarely modelled in a way that supports systematic analysis, simulation, and comparison across management strategies. This paper proposes a formal framework for modelling and analysing the narrative paradox as a trade-off between interdependent properties shaped by EM decisions. We represent interactive narrative behaviour through an extended state-transition system in which world states are connected by player actions and system events. From this model, we formalize key properties involved in the paradox such as the player agency, EM controllability, author intent, and robustness, and define quantitative indicators derived from simulated plans. These indicators make it possible to compare EM strategies according to their ability to balance freedom, control, and narrative satisfaction. A case study compares different EM policies, showing how simulations can reveal correlations and conflicts between properties and identify compromise zones in the design space. This work contributes a reusable modelling and analysis framework for studying the narrative paradox and evaluating heterogeneous interactive narratives on shared formal grounds, with a focus on supporting the comparison and testing of EM strategies.