Towards Design Principles for Humor in Interactive Emergent Narrative

Abstract

Humor is an essential part of storytelling, but it has not been studied in the field of interactive emergent narrative. We begin with an overview of various theories of humor and use them to examine examples of humor within the digital media field. This juxtaposition aims to bring together concepts from both fields in order to find a feasible direction. We hope to contribute a framework of humor that can be used in the near future for an interactive emergent narrative project. Our conceptualization of humor frames it in terms of “pleasant surprises” which enable players and other emergent AI actors to stretch the boundaries between plot and discourse.