Driving Interactive Drama Research through Building Complete systems

Interactive drama presents one of the most challenging applications of autonomous characters, requiring characters to simultaneously engage in moment-by-moment personality-rich physical behavior, exhibit conversational competencies, and participate in a dynamically developing story arc. One way to advance the field and continue to make exciting progress is to develop building blocks needed for creating these interactive experiences that are situated in a complete system. Our research goals presented in this paper are driven by this perspective of developing a complete interactive drama architecture. Specifically, we discuss the different research challenges that we are interested in pursuing at the different building blocks required to build a complete interactive drama. We also discuss the interactive drama domain we are developing and present our initial steps in handling the research challenges.