Integrating Plot, Character and Natural Language Processing in the Interactive Drama Façade

Façade is an artificial intelligence-based art/research experiment in electronic narrative – an attempt to move beyond traditional branching or hyper-linked narrative to create a fully-realized, one-act interactive drama. We are completing a three year collaboration to engineer a novel architecture that integrates emotional, interactive character behavior, drama-managed plot and shallow natural language processing. In this architecture, authors can organize hierarchies of reactive behaviors and natural-language discourse contexts into entities called story beats, achieving rich, robust local interaction; a drama manager globally sequences beats chosen from a large pool in order to make story tension rise and fall to match an Aristotelian arc. Within this architecture we are building a dramatically interesting, real-time 3D virtual world inhabited by computer-controlled characters, in which the user experiences a theatrical drama from a first-person perspective. Façade will be publicly released as a free download in 2003.