Interactive Drama, Art and Artificial Intelligence
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Interactive Drama, Art and Artificial Intelligence Michael Mateas December 2002 CMU-CS-02-206 School of Computer Science Computer Science Department Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh PA 15213 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Thesis Committee: Joseph Bates (co-chair) Jaime Carbonell (co-chair) Ian Horswill, Northwestern University Janet Murray, Georgia Tech Simon Penny, University of California, Irvine © 2002 Michael Joseph Mateas All rights reserved This research was funded in part through fellowships from the Litton and Intel Corporations. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the sponsors. Keywords: artificial intelligence, art, entertainment, believable agents, interactive drama, interactive characters, interactive story i Abstract Artificial intelligence methods open up new possibilities in art and entertainment, enabling rich and deeply interactive experiences. At the same time as AI opens up new fields of artistic expression, AI-based art itself becomes a fundamental research agenda, posing and answering novel research questions that would not be raised unless doing AI research in the context of art and entertainment. I call this agenda, in which AI research and art mutually inform each other, Expressive AI. Expressive AI takes seriously the problem of building intelligences that robustly function outside of the lab, engaging human participants in intellectually and aesthetically satisfying interactions, which, hopefully, teach us something about ourselves. This thesis describes a specific AI-based art piece, an interactive drama called Façade, and describes the practice of Expressive AI, using Façade, as well as additional AI-based artwork described in the appendices, as case studies. An interactive drama is a dramatically interesting virtual world inhabited by computer-controlled characters, within which the player experiences a story from a first person perspective. Over the past decade, there has been a fair amount of research into believable agents, that is, autonomous characters exhibiting rich personalities, emotions, and social interactions. There has been comparatively little work, however, exploring how the local, reactive behavior of believable agents can be integrated with the more global, deliberative nature of a story plot, so as to build interactive, dramatic worlds. This thesis presents Façade, the first published interactive drama system that integrates character (believable agents), story (drama management) and shallow natural language processing into a complete system. Façade will be publicly released as a free download in 2003. In the Façade architecture, the unit of plot/character integration is the dramatic beat. In the theory of dramatic writing, beats are the smallest unit of dramatic action, consisting of a short dialog exchange or small amount of physical action. As architectural entities, beats organize both the procedural knowledge to accomplish the beat’s dramatic action, and the declarative knowledge to sequence the beat in an evolving plot. Instead of conceiving of the characters as strongly autonomous entities that coordinate to accomplish dramatic action through purely local decision-making, characters are instead weakly autonomous – the character’s behavioral repertoire dynamically changes as beats are sequenced. The Façade architecture includes ABL (A Behavior Language), a new reactive planning language for authoring characters that provides language support for joint action, and a drama manager consisting of both a language for authoring the declarative knowledge associated with beats and a runtime system that dynamically sequences beats. Façade is a collaboration with independent artist and researcher Andrew Stern. Expressive AI is not the “mere” application of off-the-shelf AI techniques to art and entertainment applications. Rather, Expressive AI is a critical technical practice, a way of doing AI research that reflects on the foundations of AI and changes the way AI is done. AI has always been in the business of knowing-by-making, exploring what it means to be human by building systems. Expressive AI just makes this explicit, combining the thought experiments of the AI researcher with the conceptual and aesthetic experiments of the artist. As demonstrated through Façade and the other systems/artworks described in the appendices, combining art and AI, both ways of knowing-by-making, opens up new research questions, provides a novel perspective on old questions, and enables new modes of artistic expression. The firm boundary normally separating “art” and “science” is blurred, becoming two components of a single, integrated practice. ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my committee, Joseph Bates, Jaime Carbonell, Ian Horswill, Janet Murray, and Simon Penny, for their comments, suggestions, and guidance through the process of finishing this dissertation. My various office mates during my years at CMU, namely Adam, Karen, Kamal, Bryan, Andrew, Eric, Rune, and Alex, provided stimulating and entertaining discussions. Thanks to my fellow interdisciplinarians Phoebe Sengers and Belinda Thom for their intellectual and emotional companionship. Working at the boundaries between fields is a lonely and difficult endeavor – Phoebe and Belinda provided much needed intellectual stimulation, as well as moral support when The Man would get me down. Though my discussions with previous Oz Project members Bryan Loyall, Scott Neal Reilly and Peter Weyhrauch, have unfortunately been infrequent, I have always found these discussions deeply stimulating. I have learned an incredible amount from my collaborators: Marc Böhlen (Office Plant #1), Steffi Domike and Paul Vanouse (Terminal Time), and Andrew Stern (Façade). These collaborations have provided some of my most stimulating and rewarding experiences at CMU. I spent many long hours working in the congenial atmosphere of the Squirrel Hill coffee shops 61C and Coffee Tree. Thanks to both establishments for providing good coffee, a nice work environment, and needed distraction. Many other people have made my time both at CMU and in Pittsburgh entertaining and rewarding. Thanks to all of our friends in Pittsburgh for making it a fun place to live. My parents, Bob and Jackie, and my sister, Kathleen, have always provided me with love and support. We adopted our first cat, Monongahela, while in Pittsburgh. Thanks to her for being so cute and fuzzy. Many more people in my life have ultimately contributed to this work than I can name here. If you feel left out of these acknowledgements, consider yourself acknowledged. And finally, I thank Anne for her constant love and companionship, and for providing much needed balance in my life. iii iv Contents CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................1 STRUCTURE AND CONTRIBUTIONS ................................................................................2 Interactive Drama ...................................................................................................3 Expressive AI...........................................................................................................5 INTERACTIVE DRAMA AND THE OZ PROJECT.................................................................6 Drama = Character + Story....................................................................................7 Believable Agents....................................................................................................8 Drama Management................................................................................................9 Presentation .......................................................................................................... 10 Oz Research Philosophy........................................................................................ 10 ADDITIONAL SYSTEMS ............................................................................................... 12 Subjective Avatars................................................................................................. 12 Office Plant #1 ...................................................................................................... 12 Terminal Time....................................................................................................... 13 FAÇADE COLLABORATION .......................................................................................... 14 DISSERTATION OUTLINE............................................................................................. 15 CHAPTER 2 INTERACTION AND NARRATIVE.................................................. 19 APPROACHES ............................................................................................................. 19 Commercial Computer Games............................................................................... 19 Emergent and Player Constructed Narrative ......................................................... 20 Narrative and New Media Art................................................................................ 20 Electronic Literature ............................................................................................. 21 Interactive Drama ................................................................................................. 22 A NEO-ARISTOTELIAN THEORY OF INTERACTIVE DRAMA ..........................................