Formal Models of Western Films for Interactive Narrative Technologies

Interactive narrative technologies have typically addressed the authoring bottleneck problem by focusing on authoring a tractable story space (i.e. the space of possible experiences for a user) coupled with an AI technology for mediating the user’s journey through this space. This article describes an alternative, potentially more general and expressive approach to interactive narrative that focuses on the procedural representation of story construction between an AI agent and a human interactor. This notion of procedural interaction relies on shared background knowledge between all actors involved; therefore, we have developed a body of background knowledge for improvising Western-style stories that includes the authoring of scripts (i.e. prototypical joint activities in Westerns). This article describes our methodology for the design and development of these scripts, the formal representation used for encoding them in our interactive narrative technology, and the lessons learned from this experience in regards to building a story corpus for interactive narrative research.