Interacting with Virtual Characters in Interactive Storytelling. In:

ABSTRACT In recent years, several paradigms have emerged for interactive storytelling. In character-based storytelling, plot generation is based on the behaviour of autonomous characters. In this paper, we describe user interaction in a fully-implemented prototype of an interactive storytelling system. We describe the planning techniques used to control autonomous characters, which derive from HTN planning. The hierarchical task network representing a characters' potential behaviour constitute a target for user intervention, both in terms of narrative goals and in terms of physical actions carried out on stage. We introduce two different mechanisms for user interaction: direct physical interaction with virtual objects and interaction with synthetic characters through speech understanding. Physical intervention exists for the user in on-stage interaction through an invisible avatar: this enables him to remove or displace objects of narrative significance that are resources for character's actions, thus causing these actions to fail. Through linguistic intervention, the user can influence the autonomous characters in various ways, by providing them with information that will solve some of their narrative goals, instructing them to take direct action, or giving advice on the most appropriate behaviour. We illustrate these functionalities with examples of system-generated behaviour and conclude with a discussion of scalability issues

A conceptual framework for interactive virtual storytelling

This paper presents a framework of an interactive storytelling system. It can integrate five components: management centre, evaluation centre, intelligent virtual agent, intelligent virtual environment, and users, making possible interactive solutions where the communication among these components is conducted in a rational and intelligent way. Environment plays an important role in providing heuristic information for agents through communicating with the management centre. The main idea is based on the principle of heuristic guiding of the behaviour of intelligent agents for guaranteeing the unexpectedness and consistent themes

Extending character-based storytelling with awareness and feelings

Most Interactive Storytelling systems developed to date have followed a task-based approach to story representation, using planning techniques to drive the story by generating a sequence of actions, which essentially "solve" the task to which the story is equated. One major limitation of this approach has been that it fails to incorporate characters' psychology, and as a consequence important aesthetic aspects of the narrative cannot be easily captured by Interactive Storytelling. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to Interactive Storytelling, which aims at reconciling narrative actions with the characters' attributed psychology as stated in the narrative. Our long-term goal is to be able to explore Interactive Storytelling for those narrative genres which are based on the characters' psychology rather than solely on their actions. We used as a starting point the formalisation by Flaubert himself of his novel Madame Bovary, which includes a detailed account of characters' desires and feelings. We describe a prototype in which characters' behaviour is driven by a real-time search-based planning system applying operators whose content is based on a specific inventory of feelings. Furthermore, the actual pattern of evolution of the character's plan, as measured through the variation of the search heuristic, is used to confer a sense of awareness to the characters, which can be used to generate feelings about its overall situation, from feelings of boredom to hope

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

Towards a generic framework for situated collaborative storytelling

How we assimilate stories into our common experiences and shape culture is the field of study known as narrative intelligence. By following these assumptions and investigating theories of conversation and rhetoric, this paper outlines a generic framework for a visual collaborative storytelling system that emphasises participatory narration and shared understanding in a situated context. © 2009 ACM

Natural Language Communication With Virtual Actor

The development of realistic virtual actors in many applications, from user interface to computer entertainment, creates expectations on the intelligence of these actors including their ability to understand natural language. Based on our research in that area over the past years, we highlight specific technical aspects in the development of language-enabled actors. The embodied nature of virtual agents lead to specific syntactic constructs that are not unlike sublanguages: these can be used to specify the parsing component of a natural language interface. However, the most specific aspects of interacting with virtual actors consist in mapping the semantic content of users’ input to the mechanisms that support agents’ behaviours. We suggest that a generalisation of speech acts can provide principles for this integration. Both aspects are illustrated by results obtained during the development of research prototypes.

Understanding speech in interactive narratives with crowd sourced data

Speech recognition failures and limited vocabulary coverage pose challenges for speech interactions with characters in games. We describe an end-to-end system for automating characters from a large corpus of recorded human game logs, and demonstrate that inferring utterance meaning through a combination of plan recognition and surface texts similarity compensates for recognition and understanding failures significantly better than relying on surface similarity alone.Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game La

Desarrollando agentes EBDI

En este trabajo se presenta el framework ABC-EDBI para el modelado afectivo de agentes inteligentes con comorptamiento BDI (Belief, Desire, Intention). El mismo integra afecto (emociones, estado de ánimo y personalidad) y capacidades afectivas (regulación del afecto), teniendo en cuenta la influencia de todos los aspectos afectivos en el proceso cognitivo del agente

Reaching Cognitive Consensus with Improvisational Agents

A common approach to interactive narrative involves imbuing the computer with all of the potential story pre- authored story experiences (e.g. as beats, plot points, planning operators, etc.). This has resulted in an accepted paradigm where stories are not created by or with the user; rather, the user is given piecemeal access to the story from the gatekeeper of story knowledge: the computer (e.g. as an AI drama manager). This article describes a formal process that provides for the equal co-creation of story-rich experiences, where neither the user nor computer is in a privileged position in an interactive narrative. It describes a new formal approach that acts as a first step for the realtime co-creation of narrative in games that rely on the negotiated shared mental model between a human actor and an AI improv agent