Emotion-Based Interactive Storytelling with Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have been widely used in video games to control non-playable characters. More recently, AI has been applied to automated story generation and game-mastering: managing the player’s experience in an interactive narrative on-the-fly. Such methods allow the narrative to be generated dynamically, in response to the player’s in-game actions. As a result, it is more difficult for the human game designers to ensure that each possible narrative trajectory will elicit desired emotional response from the player. We tackle this problem by computationally predicting the player’s emotional response to a narrative segment. We use the predictions within an AI experience manager to shape the narrative dynamically during the game to keep the player on an author-supplied target emotional curve.