Toward Recombinant Dialogue in Interactive Narrative

Prom Week is a social-simulation videogame driven by the artificial intelligence engine Comme il Faut (CiF). In each level of the game, the player selects social interactions between characters in an effort to achieve socially oriented goals. These social interactions are enacted with hand-authored natural-language dialogue exchanges, called instantiations, which also serve to render the underlying social considerations propelling the narrative at hand. While CiF’s merit is in its capacity to richly model a social space, constraints rooted in authorial burden hinder Prom Week’s ability to fully render CiF’s rich social representations. What is needed is more instantiations, specifically instantiations that can render uncommon or complex game states with greater fidelity. We propose a technique to procedurally generate new, felicitous instantiations by recombination of dialogue segments from existing instantiations that are annotated, using the story-encoding tool SCHEHERAZADE, for their transmissions about the story world and their various dependencies.