Liquid Narrative Group Technical Report Number 03-000 Actor Conference: Character-focused Narrative Planning

The ability to generate narrative can be applied to entertainment and educational applications to the benefit of both. In this paper, I informally evaluate several narrative generation systems. Automated narrative generation systems can be classified as character-centric and author-centric techniques. Character-centric systems tend to develop narratives with strong character believability but weak coherent plot lines. Author-centric systems tend to develop narratives with strong plot coherence but weak character believability. I then describe an alternative narrative generation system, the Actor Conference, which benefits from both techniques. The Actor Conference system uses a blackboard architecture to coordinate the efforts of many autonomous agents, each representing a single character in the story world, to generate a single, coherent narrative plan.