Adaptive Narrative: How Autonomous Agents, Hollywood, and Multiprocessing Operating Systems Can Live Happily Ever After

Creating dramatic narratives for real-time virtual reality environments is complicated by the lack of temporal distance between the occurrence of an event and its telling in the narrative. This paper describes the application of a multiprocessing operating system architecture to the creation of adaptive narratives, narratives that use autonomous actors or agents to create real-time dramatic experiences for human interactors. We also introduce the notion of dramatic acts and dramatic functions and indicate their use in constructing this real-time drama.