The Chorus as Internalized Objects

This is a preliminary design document for narrative systems in which multiple users interact in a manner reminiscent of the chorus in ancient Greek theater. The work extends premises originally described in Working Notes of the 1995 AAAI Spring Symposium on Interactive Story Systems (held at Stanford University), and represented in a prototype for a single-user platform (Strohecker et al. 1999). The current work constitutes a "what-if?" sort of inquiry, considering multiple simultaneous interactors with a narrative system in which tangible or otherwise palpable computational objects both facilitate and reflect actions and conversation.