Designing cinematic compositions, which involves moving cameras through a scene, is essential yet challenging in filmmaking. Machinima filmmaking provides real-time virtual environments for exploring different compositions flexibly and efficiently. However, producing high-quality cinematic compositions in such environments still requires significant cinematography skills and creativity. This paper presents Cinemassist, a tool designed to support and enhance this creative process by generating a variety of cinematic composition proposals at both keyframe and scene levels, which users can incorporate into their workflows and achieve more creative results. At the crux of our system is a deep generative model trained on real movie data, which can generate plausible, diverse camera poses conditioned on 3D animations and additional input semantics. Our model enables an interactive cinematic composition design workflow where users can co-design with the model by being inspired by model-generated suggestions while having control over the generation process. Our user study and expert rating find Cinemassist can facilitate the design process for users of different backgrounds and enhance the design quality especially for users with animation expertise, demonstrating its potential as an invaluable tool in the context of digital filmmaking.

This paper examines the unique set-up of two concurrent opposite ideologies in narrative-driven games both as a structure and as a technique for game narrative design. Through close analysis of two distinct games – Ghost of Tsushima and Red Dead Redemption 2, both with a strikingly similar dual ideology design, we observe a range of narrative design strategies that allow the player to build her player character's ideology with agency at both local and global levels. Among them focalization, specifically internal focalization, has stood out as a prominent approach. Our analysis contributes to the broader theoretical discussion of how narrative perspective exits in games, with detailed findings on techniques of ideological perspective design and the use of focalization in games.

Digital tangible interfaces have been used to present or embed interactive stories for decades. While many researchers explored different ways of creating engaging interactive experiences, they focused more on the novelty of the interface and the new experience it brought for users, rather than the exploration of tangible interfaces as a language, or a medium, for storytelling. Through a visual journey of our creative explorations, this pictorial reflects upon the design and making of Letters to José, a tangible narrative built during a three-year practice-led research project. Located in the intersection of tangible interaction design and interactive storytelling, our work characterizes the relationships between the artifact, other artifacts, the body, and the space with respect to supporting the narrative experience. The outcome is an annotated visual typology of artifacts for storytelling in the context of tangible narrative, as a design category and toolbox for researchers and creators of tangible stories.

This paper presents the design rationale and concept development behind MemoryReel, a tangibly interactive desktop device that records special moments of online social interactions, between couples and friends over a long distance, and supports later reminiscence. In a human-centered design process started with a two-act design inquiry, we developed the design concept and implemented a medium-to-high-fidelity interactive prototype. We then invited 20 participants to experience the prototype and give comments. The design rationale together with the analysis of the exploratory user study findings provides insights on the dimensions and strategies of a design space for digital memories and long-distance relationships, with an emphasis on reminiscence support.

This pictorial presents ECT (Emotion-Centric Timeline) -- a visual schema that visualizes the progression of emotion and narrative driven games. The visualization aims to equip analysts and designers in their learning and creative processes of emotional design for games. We illustrate how the visual schema can be used to reveal the dynamics of various design elements with the example game Journey and its comparisons with two other games. We also demonstrate with three student game design examples that the schema can serve as a creativity support tool for designers, especially novices, to conceptualize and plan a game that is driven by emotion and narrative.