Drama Management Evaluation for Interactive Fiction Games

A growing research community is working towards employing drama management components in interactive story-based games. These components gently guide the story towards a narrative arc that improves the player’s experience. However, the success of drama management approaches has not been evaluated using human players in a real game implementation. In this paper, we evaluate our drama management approach deployed in our own implementation of an interactive fiction game Anchorhead. Our approach uses player’s feedback as a basis for guiding the personalization of the interaction. The results indicate that our Drama Manager (DM) aids in providing a better overall experience for the players while guiding them through their interaction. Based on this work, we suggest that the strategies employed by the DM should take into account the player’s previous playing experience with the current game as well as his general game-playing experience.