Academic Production

Interactive narrative systems face the challenge of reconciling participant agency with authorial intention, particularly when human interventions depart from anticipated story paths. This thesis investigates whether Active Inference can provide a computational foundation for adaptive narrative control by framing narrative continuation as decision-making under uncertainty.

The research explores the relationship between computational narratology, generative models, and Expected Free Energy minimization, examining how learned event predictions and inferred latent states can contribute to the evaluation of narrative continuations within author-defined constraints.

A computational architecture is developed and examined through SEPHIROT®, a framework for participatory storytelling, using The Fox and the Crow as a bounded case study. The implementation integrates probabilistic inference, narrative-state representation, and validated continuation selection, supported by computational diagnostics and recorded participant interactions.

The thesis establishes an inspectable approach to inferential narrative control while identifying the conceptual and empirical challenges that remain in learning dramaturgical structures and evaluating their contribution to human–AI co-creation.

Based on Huizinga's theory of Homo Ludens, the case study I propose is SEPHIROT - IL GIOCO©, a method of creation for interactive performances I created in 2018, after a careful study of hypertextual narrative structures. The project is born to enhance the role of the audience as a “co-creator” of the show, making the use of recent technologies such as VR and AR on algorithmic textual structures possible, even through online streaming. My goal is to overturn the traditional composition of a performance, giving the audience a chance to actively change its form. The connection between theatre and games is not new, but there is still some reticence. The necessity to create interactive performances based on interactivity, hypermediality, hypertextuality and procedurality was born from these premises.