Experience Management Using Storyline Adaptation Strategies

The central problem of creating interactive drama is structuring a media experience for participants such that a good story is presented while enabling a high degree of meaningful interactivity. This paper presents a new approach to interactive drama, where pre-authored storylines are made interactive by adapting them at run-time by applying strategies that react to unexpected user behavior. The approach, called Experience Management, relies heavily on the explication of a broad range of adaptation strategies and a means of selecting which strategy is most appropriate given a particular story context. We describe a formal approach to storyline representation to enable the selection of applicable strategies, and a strategy formalization that allows for storyline modification. Finally, we discuss the application of this approach in the context of a story-based training system for military leadership skills, and the direction for continuing research.