Proactive Authoring for Interactive Drama: An Author's Assistant

Interactive drama allows people to participate actively in a dynamically unfolding story, by playing a character or by exerting directorial control. One of the central challenges faced in the design of interactive dramas is how to ensure that the author’s goals for the user’s narrative experience are achieved in the face of the user’s actions in the story. This challenge is especially significant when a variety of users are expected. To address this challenge, we present an extension to Thespian, an authoring and simulating framework for interactive dramas. Each virtual character is controlled by a decision-theoretic goal driven agent. In our previous work on Thespian, we provided a semi-automated authoring approach that allows authors to configure virtual characters’ goals through specifying story paths. In this work, we extend Thespian into a more proactive authoring framework to further reduce authoring effort. The approach works by simulating potential users’ behaviors...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: IVA
• Authors: Mei Si, Stacy Marsella, David V. Pynadath
• Keywords: Interactive Drama, IVA 2007, Story Paths, Virtual Characters