Employing Fuzzy Concept for Digital Improvisational Theatre

This paper describes the creation of a digital improvisational theatre game, called Party Quirks, that allows a human user to improvise a scene with synthetic actors according to the rules of the real-world Party Quirks improv game. The AI actor behaviors are based on our study of communication strategies between real-life actors on stage and the fuzzy concepts that they employ to define and portray characters. This paper describes the underlying fuzzy concepts used to enable reasoning in ambiguous environments, like improv theatre. It also details the development of content for the system, which involved the creation of a system for animation authoring, design for efficient data reuse, and a work flow centered on Google Docs enabling parallel data entry and rapid iteration.