Although mass murder is a rare event in the United States—perhaps a dozen to a dozen and a half incidents a year in the recent decades—occurrences tend to overshadow the much greater number of other murders, because of the electrifying effect upon the public of so many lives being lost all at once. Much of the heightened frequency and greater death toll stems from the easier availability of sem...

This paper describes a system for generating murder mysteries for adventure games, using associations between real-world people mined from Wikipedia articles. A game is seeded with a real-world person, and the game discovers suitable suspects for the murder of a game character instantiated from that person. Moreover, the game discovers characteristics of the suspects which can act as clues for ...

Recent evidence suggests that grammatical aspect can bias how individuals perceive criminal intentionality during discourse comprehension. Given that criminal intentionality is a common criterion for legal definitions (e.g., first-degree murder), the present study explored whether grammatical aspect may also impact legal judgments. In a series of four experiments participants were provided with...

When creating interactive drama computer games then it is frequently useful to be able to generate a plot to use as a background for the drama and to use as a knowledge base for Non-Player Characters. In this article a new engine is proposed that dynamically creates new game plots for a murder mystery based game. The game engine uses Bayesian networks to create a new plot based on a probability...