Planning characters' behaviour in interactive storytelling

2001

In this paper, we present the first results obtained with an interactive storytelling prototype. Our main objective is to develop flexible character-based systems, which nevertheless rely on narrative formalisms and representations. Characters' behaviours are generated from plan-based representations, whose content is derived from narrative formalisms.

Proceedings of the fourth …, 2005

2002

ABSTRACT In this paper we describe a fully implemented prototype for interactive storytelling using the Unreal™ engine. We describe the important mechanisms involved in the variability of plot instantiations, within a scenario of sitcom genre. We also provide an evaluation of the concepts of how the dynamic interactions between agents and/or the user influence the generation of story, with first results of examples

2001

Abstract We describe a fully implemented prototype for interactive storytelling using the Unreal TM engine. We describe the important mechanisms involved in the variability of plot instantiations, within a scenario of sitcom genre. We also provide an evaluation of the concepts of how the dynamic interactions between agents and/or the user influence the generation of story, with first results of examples

Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on AI and …, 2001

Goal of this research We aims at building a new genre of artistic expression, called interactive drama. An interactive drama is a drama (a narrative where the story is told by directly showing actions to the audience) where audience can act upon some events in the story. In this ...

Intelligent Systems, IEEE, 2002

2010

A lot of researches haven been done on the interactive storytelling authoring , e.g. by a director agent, or by interactions among a number of character agents. However, it is still difficult to construct the interactive storytelling for novice users, due to a need of various agents development and complex communication among the agents. We propose an agent-based interactive storytelling architecture, namely DIRACT (short of "Direct and Act"). It is composed of numerous atomic DIRACT agents, which are goal oriented and use an unified communication protocol. By removing the difference between the director and character, each DIRACT agent can either direct or act the story in real-time. As a result, it is scalable to story complexity, reusable for inheritance and makes the interactive storytelling authoring much easier.

2001

Abstract: In this paper, we describe how users of virtual storytelling environments can interact with the artificial actors by interfering with their plans, which determine plot orientation. We have developed a fully implemented prototype based on the UnrealTM game engine and carried experiments with a simple sitcom-like scenario. We first present our storyline, and follow previous work on AI planning formalisms to describe the techniques used for the implementation of the dynamic narrative.

2007

Interactive storytelling in the virtual environment attracts a lot of research interests in recent years. Story plot and character are two most important elements of a story. Based on these two elements, currently there are two research directions: plot-based and character-based interactive storytelling. However, plot-based approach lacks the refinement of character behaviors as character-based approach. On the other side, character-based approach does not follow a well organized story plot so that the moral of the story might be distorted. Therefore, there is a need to develop an integrated framework to achieve the balance between conveying story moral and enhancing the modeling of character behaviors. In this paper, we propose a hybrid system of the plot-based and character-based approaches. It is constructed as a multi-agent system (MAS), which involves a scriptwriter agent, a director agent, virtual actor agents and other support agents. Fuzzy Cognitive Goal Net (FCGN) is used by the scriptwriter agent to generate story plot, which includes various meaningful storylines. The director agent selects the storyline dynamically and dispatches the scenes to the virtual character agents as behaviors through the decomposing algorithms. With the system, dynamic storylines and character behaviors are generated in realtime based on the audience interactions and context changes. The audiences are able to experience different levels of interactions as an observer, a character or a director. A case study prototype called "Mystery Illness Investigation at Nanyang Town" has been implemented based on the proposed system.

In recent years, there has been significant progress in developing Interactive Storytelling systems, in particular in terms of the underlying AI techniques. There has been an emerging consensus on the AI approach, in particular the use of planning systems. However, these have concentrated on the generation of a sequence of narrative actions, staged through the behaviour of virtual actors. In order to achieve the long-term objective of implementing interactive media that would reproduce the aesthetic qualities of traditional films, most interactive storytelling systems are still missing the ability to generate dialogues between characters. We describe an extension of our Interactive Storytelling approach which integrates dialogue generation within narrative situations. Our unit of generation is the dialogue act (pair of utterances) and one main objective is to reproduce realistic dialogue phenomena based on implicit forms of expression. The emphasis is also on adopting a unified approach relating narrative representations to the linguistic form of the generated utterances. From a representation of active narrative goals and the emotional affinity between characters, our system is able to derive a set of parameters governing various aspects of the linguistic form to be generated. We illustrate this approach on several implemented examples.