Playing with the Strings: Designing Puppitor as an Acting Interface for Digital Games

Interactive drama has focused on how to allow the player agency in influencing their experience through plot action. Interactive drama's preoccupation with changing plot structure bears little resemblance to theater's emphasis on character expression and dramatic play. Dramatic play allows the player to embody the character through actions, focusing on how characters express themselves and react rather than on how or even if that impacts the overarching sequence of events. In this paper, we present Puppitor, a system for character expression of emotion for interactive storytelling built using acting practice and fighting games as the foundation for its core design and describe its usage in conjunction with Ren'Py to facilitate a novel interactive narrative experience as a case study.