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Interactive Narrative: an Intelligent Systems Approach

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Interactive Narrative: an Intelligent Systems Approach This is a preprint version of an article to appear in AI Magazine (in press). Interactive Narrative: An Intelligent Systems Approach Mark O. Riedl1 and Vadim Bulitko2 1School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology 2Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta Abstract Interactive narrative is a form of digital interactive experience in which users create or influence a dramatic storyline through their actions. The goal of an interactive narrative system is to immerse the user in a virtual world such that he or she believes that they are an integral part of an unfolding story and that their actions can significantly alter the direction and/or outcome of the story. In this article we review the ways in which artificial intelligence can be brought to bear on the creation of interactive narrative systems. We lay out the landscape of about 20 years of interactive narrative research and explore the successes as well as open research questions pertaining to the novel use of computational narrative intelligence in the pursuit of entertainment, education, and training. 1 Introduction Storytelling, in oral, visual, or written forms, plays a central role in various types of media, including novels, movies, television, and theatre. The prevalence of storytelling in human culture may be explained by the use of narrative as a cognitive tool for situated understanding [3]. This narrative intelligence| ability to organize experience into narrative form|is central to the cognitive processes employed across a range of experiences, from entertainment to active learning. It follows that computational systems possessing narrative intelligence may be able to interact with human users naturally because they under- stand collaborative contexts as emerging narrative and are able to express themselves by telling stories. A number of narrative intelligence tasks have been studied from a computational perspective including story understanding, story generation, and commonsense reasoning. One of the most compelling applications of narrative intelligence is the prospect of interactive narrative. Interactive narrative is a form of digital interactive experience in which users create or influence a dramatic storyline through actions, either by assuming the role of a character in a fictional virtual world, issuing commands to computer-controlled characters, or directly manipulating the fictional world state. It is most often considered as a form of interactive entertainment, but can also be used for serious applications such as education and training. The most common form of interactive narrative involves the user taking on the role of the protagonist in an unfolding storyline. The user can also be a disembodied observer|as if watching a movie|but capable of making changes to the world or talking to the characters. The goal of interactive narrative is thus to immerse the user in a virtual world such that he or she believes that they are an integral part of an unfolding story and that their actions have meaningful consequences. That is, the user's actions can be observed to have a direct impact on the direction or outcome of the storyline. There are many digital entertainment applications, such as computer games, that use stories to structure users' activities. The distinction between interactive narrative and other forms of digital entertainment is that interactive narrative systems afford the player to act in ways that fundamentally alter the direction and/or outcome of the unfolding storyline. 1 This is a preprint version of an article to appear in AI Magazine (in press). Figure 1: The Holodeck from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. To illustrate the significance of a user able to act to change the direction and/or outcome of a narrative as it is unfolding, consider the Holodeck from the popular television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation (see Figure 1). The Holodeck is a fictitious technology that uses holography to immerse humans in a photorealistic virtual reality, often populated by virtual, intelligent, computer-controlled characters. While the Holodeck is portrayed as having many serious uses, one of its primary uses is entertainment via the immersion of its users in fictional worlds. Examples from the TV series range from Wild West to Film-Noir to Victorian dramas. Suppose one were to enter the Holodeck to step into the shoes of Shakespeare's Hamlet.1 Further suppose that the user chooses not to reenact the actions and dialogue of the Hamlet character, who remains locked in indecision throughout a majority of the story. Instead, suppose the user strikes out in a new direction, perhaps confronting and slaying the antagonist, Claudius, in the first act instead of the third. What should the other characters do in response? What should happen next? Can the story even continue? Shakespeare has nothing to tell us about how to proceed. Setting aside the questions of graphics rendering, holography, and virtual reality|stories are not only told in visual media|the example above presents some intriguing research questions: 1. How does a computational system determine what should happen next in the narrative? 2. What does a computational system need to know about the fictional world and the user in order to reason about the user's narrative experience? 3. How does a computational system intervene in the fictional world to bring about an engaging experience? The first two questions pertain to the construction of computational systems that exhibit narrative in- telligence. The answers to these questions not only take us one step closer to automated creation of engaging experiences in virtual worlds, but also addresses the fundamental quest for intelligent systems that exhibit human-level capabilities; the ability to create stories is an ability that is, to date, unique to humans. The third question pertains to the construction of computational systems that can act on behalf of the user to his or her benefit, be it entertainment, education, or training. Interactive narrative has its roots in entertainment. However, a small but growing faction of researchers are considering the role of interactive narrative in \serious" application such as education, training, advertising, and argumentation. In science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education, interactive narrative shares many parallels with problem-based inquiry learning, which involves guiding a 1The example of the recreation of Hamlet in a Holodeck was inspired by Murray [8]. Cavazza and colleagues [10] have directly experimented with an interactive version of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. 2 This is a preprint version of an article to appear in AI Magazine (in press). student through a succession of problems that build off one another (cf., [13]). Procedural skill learning often employs interactive scenarios to create realistic contexts for skill practice [11]. 2 Experience Management The core research challenge is how to balance the need for a coherent story progression with user agency, which are often at odds. A coherent narrative experience is one in which all events build off prior events until a conclusion is reached. The user may act in a manner he or she deems best, unintentionally intro- ducing inconsistencies|events that the system cannot build off—or making it impossible for subsequent events to unfold as planned. Typically this occurs because the user is unaware of the ways in which the narrative may unfold, but may also occur because the user is trying to steer the narrative in a new direc- tion or actively and mischeviously testing the bounds of the system's responsiveness. The key challenge to interactive narrative is how to balance these competing needs to ensure the player feels he or she has agency to affect the direction and/or outcome of his or her narrative experience while still ensuring the experience is coherent. A common solution, first proposed by Bates [2] is to implement a drama manager. A drama manager is an intelligent, omniscient, and disembodied agent that monitors the virtual world and intervenes to drive the narrative forward according to some model of quality of experience. An experience manager is a generalization of this concept, recognizing the fact that not all narratives need to be dramatic, such as in the case of education or training applications. An experience manager drives the narrative forward by intervening in the fictional world, typically by directing computer-controlled characters (called non-player characters (NPCs)) in how to respond to the user's actions. To that end the user should not be aware of the existence of the experience manager or its interventions. How does an experience manager know how and when to intervene in the virtual world? An experience manager must generally look ahead into possible futures of the user's experience to determine the best intervention, if any, to bring about a structurally coherent experience. Unlike activity recognition or prediction, the experience manager seeks the best narrative sequence according to the narratological principles of coherence and other criteria for experiential quality. Because of the experience managers ability to intervene through NPCs, this sequence does not have to be|and often should not be|the most likely sequence of events. Instead, the future narrative should be the best narrative according to some criteria that can be achieved given the agency of the user and the ability to intervene. The projection of a narrative sequence into the future enables the experience manager to evaluate the global structure of possible player experiences in a way that cannot be achieved by looking at any single world state in isolation. Armed with this knowledge, the experience manager must reason about the effects of its interventions in the virtual world to bring about the desired narrative experience. Looking at experience management from the perspective of states and actions, there are a number of states the fictional world can be in, and a number of actions that can be performed by the user, by NPCs, and directly by the experience manager itself.
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