In story-based games or other interactive story systems, a Drama Manager is an omniscient agent that acts to bring about a particular sequence of plot points for the user to experience. We present a Drama Manager that uses player modeling to personalize the user’s story according to his or her storytelling preferences. In order to deliver personalized stories, a Drama Manager must make decision...

Drama managers guide a user through a story experience by modifying the experience in reaction to the user’s actions. Search-based drama management (SBDM) casts the dramamanagement problem as a search problem: Given a set of plot points, a set of actions the drama manager can take, and an evaluation of story quality, search can be used to optimize the user’s experience. SBDM was first investiga...

Like Hollywood cinema, gong’an drama seizes upon the dramatic and narrative potential of legal trials. Yet, while Hollywood trial films turn viewers into jurors, pushing them back and forth between the competing stories that emerge from the adversarial process, gong’an drama eschews any recognition of opposing narratives, instead centering on the punishment of decidedly guilty criminals. The mo...

A drama manager is an omniscient agent responsible for guiding players through the story space and delivering an enjoyable experience to the players. Most drama managers only consider the designer’s intent. We present a drama manager that can provide personalized guidance while giving players the appearance of full agency. Our system is evaluated on an interactive storytelling game built with C...

Demeter is a text-based prototype game that demonstrates the Marlinspike architecture for producing computer-based interactive dramas. Marlinspike uses a top-down, directed approach to generating stories: a central drama manager agent responds to story-significant user actions by selecting the next scene to play from a pre-authored collection. This drama manager strives to explicitly reincorpor...

This paper describes implementation research of an intervention in a complex HIV prevention randomised trial in southern Africa. Researchers collected stories of change attributed by 106 community members to an audio-drama edutainment intervention in 41 sites in Botswana, Namibia and Swaziland. The team analysed themes in the stories following a behaviour change model of conscious knowledge, at...

We present the design of a system for coaching caregivers on techniques for having social conversations with persons with Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Through an avatar in a virtual world, the caregiver practices interventions by eliciting autobiographical stories from a virtual character. Our system extends previous AI research in interactive drama and conversational agents in two areas: generati...

Let us consider the presentation by computers of rich, highly interactive worlds that are inhabited by dynamic and complex characters, and shaped by aesthetically pleasing stories. We shall call this interactive drama, and we believe that it requires strong characters, aesthetic presentation, and long-term dramatic structure. This paper describes an experiment designed to help us understand how...

A common problem in creating interactive drama is the authoring bottleneck. If pre-authored stories are directly incorporated into an interactive virtual environment then there is a need to consider all possible interactions and story twists, which for a sizeable drama is infeasible. One proposed solution to this problem is to use search and planning algorithms along with narrative structures. ...

The limits of current forms of interactive drama have been now clearly identified: interactive character based stories are poorly interactive, the plot remaining nearly linear; interactive virtual worlds are poorly dramatic, with no plot at all; the role of the user is confuse. This paper will give guidelines on how those problems should be tackled, by putting Artificial Intelligence (AI) in th...