Proceedings ACM Multimedia 96, pp.317-28.
1996.

Writers of stories for both print and screen have a deeply ingrained tendency to construct stories for an audience to experience the finished work in a fixed linear fashion. Although there are starting to be some examples of fixed non-linear multimedia works, viewing a cinematic story must always be linear, as a linear sequence of pictures and sounds conveying some meaning. However, it should be possible to structure a story non-sequentially for the purpose of providing many different sequential playouts. Computational processes can assist and affect both production and viewing. With this purpose in mind, this paper examines cinematic story construction through the use of computer based storytelling systems. Questions guiding this research are:

1) How can computational processes assist in the development and presentation of stories?

2) What computational processes can meaningfully affect different presentations of a story, and therefore, different experiences of it?

3) How can user input feed into these processes?

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