Hyperscenarios: a framework for active narrative

• Authors: Reginald L. Hobbs;Colin Potts
• Venue: ACM-SE 38 Proceedings of the 38th annual on Southeast regional conference
• Year: 2000

Scenarios are narratives that illustrate future possibilities, such as proposed systems or plans, and help policy makers and designers choose among alternative courses of action. In view of the decision-making uses to which scenarios are put, it would be valuable to elaborate scenarios at multiple levels of detail or to substitute detailed eventualities by starting from a common core of narrative episodes and refining them differently. Although domain-specific techniques and computational environments exist for encoding simulating and manipulating scenarios, there exist no general-purpose scenario representations between the extremes of formality and informality provided by executable simulation programs at one extreme and free-form text or streaming media descriptions at the other. The challenge is to define a representation for scenarios that supports a wide range of discussion and comprehension activities while remaining independent of content and access mechanisms. Our approach is to define a representation based on the morphology of narratives and the activities of storytelling, an approach that separates what a narrative is from how scenarios are used to support decision making. This paper describes the representation, a markup implementation (SCML), and their use in the management of simulation experiments.