How to do dialogue in a fairy-tale world

The work presented in this paper is an endeavor to create a prototype of a computer game with spoken dialogue capabilities. Advanced spoken dialogue has the potential to considerably enrich computer games, where it for example would allow players to refer to past events and to objects currently not visible on the screen. It would also allaow users to interact socially and to negotiate solutions with the game characters. The game takes place in a fairy-tale world, and features two different fairy-tale characters, who can interact with the player and with each other using spoken dialogue. The fairy-tale characters are separate entities in the sense that each character has its own set of goals and its own perception of the world. This paper gives an overview of the functionality of the implemented dialogue manager in the NICE fairy-tale game system.