Failing Believably: Toward Drama Management with Autonomous Actors in Interactive Narratives

Interactive Narrative is an approach to interactive entertainment that enables the player to make decisions that directly affect the direction and/or outcome of the narrative experience being delivered by the computer system. One common interactive narrative technique is to use a drama manager to achieve a specific narrative experience. To achieve character believability, autonomous character agents can be used in conjunction with drama management. In this paper, we describe the problem of failing believably in which character believability and drama management come into conflict and character agents must intelligently produce behaviors that explain away schizophrenic behavior. We describe technologies for implementing semiautonomous believable agents that can fail believably.