Scribe: A Tool for Authoring Event Driven Interactive Drama

Creating an interactive drama requires authors to produce large quantities of story content. A programmer or knowledge expert typically creates this content because they have experience with the story environment. By using an authoring tool someone with less experience with the story environment can organize and create story content. The Scribe Authoring Tool is an authoring tool that will be used to create interactive dramas. The tool will follow certain requirements to make it relevant to any story environment and will be usable enough for someone not familiar with the environment to author story content for interactive dramas. 1 Introduction Authoring an interactive drama requires the author to generate a large amount of story content [9, 13]. However, the creative process of authoring content for an interactive drama typically requires an author that is both an artist (to generate the creative content) and a programmer (to encode that content in the logical representation being used, such as a partial­order plan [19], ABL [12], or plot points [9]). The creation of tools to aid in the authoring process is a necessity to make this task both more efficient and easier for authors who may not be computer programmers. Other authoring tools have been made for interactive dramas such as DraMachine [6], Art­ E­Fact [8], and Scenejo [18]. These tools are lacking in encompassing everything needed for an interactive drama. Authoring tools must be robust and usable enough for them to encode their creative vision. It is for this purpose that we are creating a new authoring tool that will be independent of both game environments and story content and increase the scope of the available authoring functions for an interactive drama creator. The Scribe Authoring Tool is the new authoring tool being used for the Interactive Storytelling Architecture for Training (ISAT). ISAT is a training architecture that combines elements of the interactive drama architecture IDA [10] and intelligent tutoring within a game environment [11]. The current instantiation of ISAT is being