Emotional characters for automatic plot creation

The Virtual Storyteller is a multi-agent framework for automatic story generation. In this paper we describe how plots emerge from the actions of semi-autonomous character agents, focusing on the influence of the characters’ emotions on plot development

Affect and believability in game characters:a review of the use of affective computing in games

Virtual agents are important in many digital environments. Designing a character that highly engages users in terms of interaction is an intricate task constrained by many requirements. One aspect that has gained more attention recently is the effective dimension of the agent. Several studies have addressed the possibility of developing an affect-aware system for a better user experience. Particularly in games, including emotional and social features in NPCs adds depth to the characters, enriches interaction possibilities, and combined with the basic level of competence, creates a more appealing game. Design requirements for emotionally intelligent NPCs differ from general autonomous agents with the main goal being a stronger player-agent relationship as opposed to problem solving and goal assessment. Nevertheless, deploying an affective module into NPCs adds to the complexity of the architecture and constraints. In addition, using such composite NPC in games seems beyond current technology, despite some brave attempts. However, a MARPO-type modular architecture would seem a useful starting point for adding emotions

A Review of Agency Architectures in Interactive Drama Systems

This paper provides a review of the interactive drama field, attempting to create a taxonomy for classifying system affordances for emergence and authorial control, referred to in this paper as "agency architecture". The classification of interactive drama systems according to a spectrum of agency architectures, helps to identify open questions in the field, providing a better understanding of which architectures would benefit from greater attention from the research community. In this paper, several key interactive drama systems from the field's literature are categorised by agency architecture. This is followed by a summary and analysis of their architectural classifications, alongside justifications for their assigned categories. It is then concluded with the identification of a number of research gaps, revealed by the compiled classifications, that highlight potential future research questions

Orientações de design para Agentes Pedagógicos Animados

A área de agentes animados pedagógicos está relacionada ao desenvolvimento de aplicações que visam melhorar o processo de interação humano-computador (por humanos queremos dizer estudantes e professores) utilizando software de agentes representados por caracte- res ou figuras humanas. A fim de ajudar os pesquisado- res a projetar agentes pedagógicos que possam melhorar a usabilidade do agente humano, este trabalho vai discutir as diretrizes básicas para o design de Agentes Animados Pedagógicos, com base nos conceitos fornecidos pela In- formática na Educação, Inteligência Artificial e Interação Humano-Computador

Facilitating open plot structures in story driven video games using situation generation

Story driven video games are rising in popularity, along with the players desire to make meaningful choice within the plot and therefore become more involved and immersed within the experience. This paper investigates the problems which arise from implementing interactive narrative within video games and potential techniques to solve those problems. The main focus of the study was the situation generation technique, used to maintain the continuity within open, emergent plot structures, using behaviour trees as a means to implement and traverse plot sequences. The ISGEngine was developed during the course of this study in order to implement and evaluate the situation generation technique

Under the influence::Using natural language in interactive storytelling

Interacting in natural language with virtual actors is an important aspect of the development of future Interactive Storytelling systems. We describe a paradigm for speech interfaces in interactive storytelling based on the notion of influence. In this paradigm, the user is mainly a spectator who is however able to interfere with the course of action by issuing advice to the characters. This is achieved by recognising corresponding speech acts and mapping them to the plans which implement characters' behaviours in the story. We discuss some examples based on a preliminary, yet fully implemented, prototype

Planning formalisms and authoring in interactive storytelling

Interacting Storytelling systems integrate AI techniques such as planning with narrative representations to generate stories. In this paper, we discuss the use of planning formalisms in Interactive Storytelling from the perspective of story generation and authoring. We compare two different planning formalisms, Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning and Heuristic Search Planning (HSP). While HTN provide a strong basis for narrative coherence in the context of interactivity, HSP offer additional flexibility and the generation of stories and the mechanisms for generating comic situations

Sex, lies, and video games::An interactive storytelling prototype

The authors describe a first prototype of an Interactive Storytelling system, whose objective is to allow user intervention within a pre-defined storyline. The system is character-based rather than plot-based, each character’s role being dynamically computed using HTN planning. The interaction between characters creates various instantiations of the baseline narrative, with which the user can interfere at any time. After introducing the basic AI techniques used in the prototype, the authors discuss the modalities of user intervention and present an example story produced by the system

Automation of play:theorizing self-playing games and post-human ludic agents

This article offers a critical reflection on automation of play and its significance for the theoretical inquiries into digital games and play. Automation has become an ever more noticeable phenomenon in the domain of video games, expressed by self-playing game worlds, self-acting characters, and non-human agents traversing multiplayer spaces. On the following pages, the author explores various instances of automated non-human play and proposes a post-human theoretical lens, which may help to create a new framework for the understanding of videogames, renegotiate the current theories of interaction prevalent in game studies, and rethink the relationship between human players and digital games