Proactive Authoring for Interactive Drama: An Author’s Assistant

Interactive drama allows people to participate actively in a dynamically unfolding story, by playing a character or by exerting directorial control. One of the central challenges faced in the design of interactive dramas is how to ensure that the author’s goals for the user’s narrative experience are achieved in the face of the user’s actions in the story. This challenge is especially significant when a variety of users are expected. To address this challenge, we present an extension to Thespian, an authoring and simulating framework for interactive dramas. Each virtual character is controlled by a decision-theoretic goal driven agent. In our previous work on Thespian, we provided a semi-automated authoring approach that allows authors to configure virtual characters’ goals through specifying story paths. In this work, we extend Thespian into a more proactive authoring framework to further reduce authoring effort. The approach works by simulating potential users’ behaviors, generating corresponding story paths, filtering the generated paths to identify those that seem problematic and prompting the author to verify virtual characters’ behaviors in them. The author can correct virtual characters’ behaviors by modifying story paths. As new story paths are designed by the author, the system incrementally adjusts virtual characters’ configurations to reflect the author’s design ideas. Overall, this enables interactive testing and refinement of an interactive drama. The details of this approach will be presented in this paper, followed by preliminary results of applying it in authoring an interactive drama.