Wacky Pirate Hijinks - Causing and Resolving Conflict between Autonomous Agents in a Virtual Storyworld

The Virtual Storyteller is a story generation system based on emergent narrative. Emergent narrative is a method in story generation in which the characters all have their own goals, desires and motivations upon which they base their actions within the story. This way, the story is formed around the characters, instead of the characters adapting themselves to the story. While this does increase the believability, it makes it harder to generate an interesting story; the characters choose their actions based on what is best for them, instead of what makes a story interesting. In this thesis, it is tried to remedy this, and make the stories generated by the Virtual Storyteller more interesting. This is done by following Freytag's dramatic structure, which describes how the conflicts in a story develop. Therefore, this thesis focuses on introducing and resolving these conflicts within the Virtual Storyteller, while trying not to impact the characters' autonomy significantly. The conflicts are described by so called plot threads, that describe requirements the story world must meet in order to place two characters into conflict with each other. By making sure the world meets these requirements, the environment of the characters can be changed to instigate the conflict between them. This conflict can then be resolved by giving the story's protagonist access to slightly better abilities than his antagonist, that appear to make him just a bit better or luckier, thus giving him enough of an advantage in the conflict to allow him to win it. By controlling when new conflicts are introduced, and when the protagonist gains access to his better abilities, it becomes possible to direct enough to allow the action to rise, reach a climax, and then fall, and thus follow a dramatic structure. Preface Finally, after far too many months, I managed to finalize my thesis. The experience was ranging from frustrating (" *sob* Why won't your fire that cannon, Guybrush?! ") to really weird (" Hmmz, technically you do win by blowing up your own ship. "), to just plain awesome (" Both ships are destroyed, everybody loses! Yay! "). Overall it was very enjoyable because, well, writing about wacky pirate hijinks just is. A lot of gratitude goes out to Ivo and Mariët, for being understanding about my RSI-related problems, as well as their invaluable advice and guidance. Also, thanks go out to my parents, for their support and for not …