Ravi: A formal framework for authoring interactive narratives

In interactive narratives, the progress of the story is not pre-determined by the author. In other words, the player takes an active role in deciding how the story should unfold. To design an immersive interactive narrative, authors have to deal with an inevitable degree of complexity. Therefore, developing authoring tools to help authors create more complex interactive narratives is valuable. In this regard, different authoring systems have been proposed in the past. However, only a few of them are designed atop a rigorous formal foundation. One of the less explored potentials of such a foundation is improving narrative validation capabilities. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for authoring interactive narratives. This framework provides a formal foundation for modelling and validating interactive narratives. We report on two case studies to show the capacity of the proposed framework. Also, we conducted a user study to examine the proposed framework with regard to narrative debugging and validation. Case studies demonstrated the capacity of the proposed framework for modelling different types of narratives. Moreover, the user study showed that the proposed framework facilitates assertion checking and debugging.