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DINE is a platform for creating interactive narratives that allow for free-text player input.
In the style of the classic Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, DINE structures interactive narratives around the Page, a single situation where the player must decide what to do next.
Each page describes the situation, and is associated with a set of possible Outcomes, the possible results of a player's actions. Some of these outcomes may take the player to other Pages, while others simply elaborate on the current situation.
When playing a DINE narrative, the free-text input of the player is automatically mapped to the most appropriate outcome by the computer. The technical innovation of DINE is to use Narrative Language Models to do this mapping, rather than traditional supervised machine learning techniques for text classification.
DINE was designed to allow creative writers a means of quickly authoring and deploying interactive narratives without the need for computer programming or special technical skills.
To learn about authoring narratives for DINE, see our Writer's Guide.
DINE is also being used as a research platform for next-generation interactive narrative in Virtual Reality environments for training and entertainment.
DINE was built in the Summer of 2016 by Andrew S. Gordon, Jenna Bellassai, Meg Cychosz, Kayla Briët, Obiageli Odimegwu, Olivia Connolly, Cristian Guzman, Rob Fuchs, Melissa Roemmele, Christopher Wienberg, and Reid Swanson.
The Data-driven Interactive Narrative Engine was a research project led by Andrew S. Gordon (PI) at the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California.