The Ant Writer Improvisational Writing System: Visualizing And Coordinating Upcoming Actions

Improvisational storytelling requires participants to be aware of collaborators' actions, and to anticipate each other's upcoming actions so as to create a coherent story. This paper describes the Ant Writer improvisational writing system, a computer-based shared workspace for collaborative storytelling. Our system uses a "temporal window" to provide a visualization of a short slice of time where participants can coordinate their upcoming actions during real-time text-based storytelling performances. By providing a concrete, manipulable representation of upcoming actions, Ant Writer aims to support anticipation of collaborators' upcoming actions as a means to encourage extremely short-term planning and coordination within real-time collaboration, without losing the immediacy and spontaneity of improvisational storytelling.