The child behind the character

This paper presents a research approach for guidance and control of story characters by young children. We show that it is possible for a child to be at the same time an actor, performing a role in the story, and an engaged and empathic spectator of the overall story. To illustrate the approach, we describe Teatrix: a collaborative virtual environment for story creation by young children. In Teatrix, children control the actions of their story characters, which are implemented as intelligent agents in order to perform a certain chosen role, i.e., a villain or an hero. During the acting, children control their characters at different levels: at motor level, at behavioral level, at emotional level, and at reflection-level. In order to combine these different types of control, we introduce the concept of time-freeze in the story creation, combined with a tool for reflection, called "hot seating". In this way, children are able to control their characters more deeply while, at the same time, feel like part of the audience of a play.