What is Interactive Storytelling?
Imagine a world where your favourite film isn’t just something you watch but something you are a part of, where your favourite character on screen talks to you and responds to your choices. Films could even adapt to your choices in real-time, creating a different story every time. This is no longer an idea that exists in the realm of science fiction; it's the near future for today's film entertainment, evolving rapidly through the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is the vision behind interactive storytelling, a blend of AI-driven narrative generation and advanced video processing. It creates storylines influenced by user interaction, ranging across various media including text, audio, video, and virtual reality. Interactive Storytelling combines humanities and technical fields, utilising AI for narrative generation and various forms of user interaction. This interdisciplinary approach aims to revolutionise media entertainment, blending aspects of video games and traditional movie narratives.
In recent years, interactive films have emerged as a groundbreaking genre, blurring the lines between traditional cinema and video games. For instance, the interactive movie ‘Black Mirror: Bandersnatch' (2018) provided multiple storylines based on choices selected by the viewer. This feature was a key factor in the film's success, offering an immersive experience where viewers could influence the storyline through their selections. This offers viewers a chance to influence the storyline, turning passive viewership into an active, engaging experience. With advancements in AI technology, the landscape of interactive films is undergoing a transformative shift. AI's integration into this domain promises to heighten the viewing experience to unprecedented levels of personalisation and immersion. In this article, we will delve into the innovative use of AI-driven chatbots in the interactive film ‘The Juniper Tree’. We will analyse how AI chatbots have redefined storytelling within the film, examine their role in enhancing viewer engagement, and contemplate the broader implications of AI's burgeoning role in the future of film entertainment and gaming.
The AI Revolution in Interactive Films and other Media
Within cinema, the wave of interactive films has been a game-changer, offering viewers a role in the storytelling process. As mentioned previously, 'Black Mirror: Bandersnatch' is a pioneer of this genre, allowing viewers to make key decisions at specific, predetermined junctures. These choices directly impacted the plot, leading to various narrative branches and endings. While innovative, this model often presents a linear, decision-tree style of interaction, where the viewer's engagement is limited to selecting from predefined options at set intervals.
There are other films to consider when evaluating the impact of interactive films in the media. ‘The Story of Alquist’ (2018), an experimental short film, symbolised a significant milestone of the integration of conversational AI within the film industry by breaking traditional cinematography rules as viewers were able to directly interact with the characters on screen. The narrator of the film is a conversational AI named ‘Alquist’ who discusses the movie's events. By using conversational AI as the narrator, the film introduces a new level of interactivity in movies, providing viewers with the opportunity to actively participate by asking questions during the film. This film is delivered through a mobile app, leveraging voice recognition and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies. To avoid the costs of cloud infrastructure, the AI was designed to operate within the constraints of mobile hardware, which created challenges in relation to memory management and model loading times. To overcome issues with memory management, the game AI utilises Sent2Vec word embeddings, quantisation, and dictionary reduction.
Another example of interactive storytelling is the video game 'Façade' (2003), a real-time 3D animated experience where player interaction influences the storyline. The game is designed to create a 20-minute, emotionally intense experience, unlike traditional lengthy game narratives. Set in a simulated world, the player influences the storyline by interacting with two main characters, Grace and Trip. The game focuses on psychological dynamics and offers open-ended dialogues, allowing players to shape the story organically through their actions and choices. The architecture behind ‘Façade’ is innovative, combining natural language, gesture, and physical action to drive the drama. However, it cannot process sentences in the way chatbots today can, and instead focuses on context-specific phrases. The project aims to blend gameplay with user interactions to create a unique storyline.
'The Juniper Tree' (2021), a short animated film was created by the University of Calgary, as part of a study about interactive films with emotion-profiling chatbots. Diverging from the traditional path, where the audience's influence is limited, this film allows for continuous engagement. The AI chatbots, representing the film's characters, engage in real-time, open-ended conversations with the viewers based on whether they interact positively, negatively or neutrally. This allows for a more nuanced and organic form of interaction, where viewers can influence the storyline, beyond being limited to making binary or very few choices. In this setup, the viewers' inputs are not just decisions but conversations, leading to a deeper, more personal connection with the narrative. The AI chatbots, equipped with advanced language processing capabilities, respond contextually, making each viewing experience unique. The study found that the chatbot increased the enjoyment of the film, with over 85% of the users reporting they felt that the chatbots improved their story interest, and that they would like to talk to such chatbots in other media.
User Autonomy and Narrative Flexibility
The introduction of chatbots in film marks a significant change in user autonomy compared to existing interactive films. In 'Black Mirror: Bandersnatch,' the user choice was limited to certain decision points, restricting the changes they could make. This has the potential to lead to a predictable and rigid narrative flow. However, using AI-driven chatbots, users are able to engage in free-form, open-ended dialogues with the characters in the film. Users are no longer selectors of pre-written paths; they become active co-creators of the story, leading to a more personalised and varied storytelling experience.
The current capabilities of AI, particularly in understanding and generating natural language, play a crucial role in this. While there may be limitations in terms of understanding nuances or emotional subtleties, the technology is sufficiently advanced to maintain a convincing and engaging dialogue, fostering a more immersive and realistic viewing experience. Another key aspect that chatbots bring to film authorial control. Traditional film and other media are often tightly scripted, with authors meticulously planning each potential path and outcome. The results from the study of 'The Juniper Tree' suggests that films and video games may benefit from utilising AI.
This raises the question around how films can maintain their narrative integrity and coherence if viewers are able to shape the storyline. The balance is achieved by setting boundaries within which AI operates. While the chatbots allow for diverse user interactions, they are designed to guide the story within the overarching narrative framework set by the authors. For example, in ’The Juniper Tree’, as viewers interacted with the film, their choices determined which node (or story event) they were navigated to next. This allowed the story to move and branch in different directions, leading to a multitude of potential storylines and endings. Each node was designed with specific attributes such as the setting, the characters involved, and the potential situations and results. The designers of ’The Juniper Tree’ recognised that for the film to be satisfying to the viewer, they needed to establish the best path through the film. Therefore, nodes and character affinity were considered to determine the most suitable route and ending for the viewer. This example demonstrates that AI should allow viewers to have the freedom to explore and influence the story, while ensuring the core narrative and thematic essence of the film remain intact. The AI's role, therefore, is not to override the authorial vision but to enhance it by providing a medium through which viewers can explore the narrative in a more engaged and personal manner.