Story management system

Software	OO language with good GUI tools, such as C#, or for a web interface PHP or JSP plus HTML and CSS.
Covers	Design and development of an interactive database system.
Skills Required	Programming, databases, interest in games or storytelling.
Challenge	Conceptual ?? Technical ?? Programming ??

Brief Description

The aim of this project is to develop a content management system for the construction and delivery of online stories. This will involve providing a clean interface for authors to create and connect pieces of story without writing their own HTML, and a mechanism for the system to show pieces of story to the readers and enable them to follow the connections between them. It will require some systematic approach to handling data persistence, which might or might not be a relational database.

Variants

The balance between research-based work and development-based work for this project will depend on the choice of primary application and the ambitions of the student. There is plenty of research to do on narratology (the scholarly study of stories and narratives), the psychology of storytelling and story understanding, and the practical needs of authors. Possibilities for the system itself range from something that is too simple to stand on its own as a degree-worthy project to a quite complex and sophisticated game engine.

Possibilities include:

Branching Stories. These are stories in which the reader needs to make choices on behalf of the protagonist on every page. Which page the story jumps to next depends on the choice. In adventure stories you can find yourself going around in circles, or quite likely, dead. This style of narrative is ideally suited to delivery via the web, which makes following the right connections between parts of the narrative easy and siphoning money into the author's pocket rather more difficult.
Educational Stories. A variant of the branching story structure, where progressing to the next piece of story, or unlocking some feature like a new piece of equipment, depends on answering one or more questions. The questions may require knowledge that some course is trying to impart.
Exploration Games. A variant of the branching story structure in which what bits of the narrative you see and what you can do depend on your previous experiences and accomplishments and/or what you have brought with you. At what point you start thinking of this as a game rather than a story is not obvious.
Author's Toolkit. Instead of a delivery system for a story, a development environment for a story that will eventually find its way into a conventional book with linear text and no choices. This would enable the author to create and then keep track of the relationship between pieces of story, pieces of plot outline, and background notes on characters, places and events.

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