INSCAPE: emotion expression and experience in an authoring environment

Human emotions are known to play an important role in the users' engagement, namely by activating their attention, perception and memory skills, which in turn will help to understand the story – and hopefully perceive, or rather “feel” it as an entertaining experience. Despite the more and more realistic and immersive use of 3D computer graphics, multi-channel sound and sophisticated input devices – mainly forced by game applications – the emotional participation of users still seems a weak point in most interactive games and narrative systems. This paper describes methods and concepts on how to bring emotional experiencing and emotional expression into interactive storytelling systems. In particular, the Emotional Wizard is introduced, as an emerging module for authoring emotional expression and experiencing. Within the INSCAPE framework, this module is meant to improve elicited emotions as elements of style, which are used deliberately by an author within an integrated storytelling environment.