Interactive Storytelling in Videogames
In an interactive story, the audience's actions have some influence
over the events that happen next, but they rarely know the precise
nature of that influence. This lack of knowledge is important for many
kinds of stories (e.g., to avoid "spoilers"), but it puts the quality
of the experience at risk, since a single "wrong" action could ruin
the story's appeal. To help preserve the quality of each audience's
experience, an automated system can be used to dynamically change the
effects of the audience's actions as the story unfolds. Such systems,
called "experience managers", draw from research in Artificial
Intelligence to monitor and modify interactive experiences while they
are underway. In this talk, I present experience management in the
context of stories and video games; I introduce the area, highlight
existing systems, and conclude with a brief preview of ongoing work.
Bio
David Thue ([email protected]) is an Assistant Professor in the School
of Computer Science at Reykjavik University, where he teaches and
conducts research on Interactive Storytelling, Video Game Design &
Development, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for games. He has been
working in the area of AI for video games for 9 years, having
published several related conference papers and three book chapters.
He co-chaired the International Conference on Interactive Digital
Storytelling in 2011 and 2014, and currently serves on the steering
committee for the annual workshop on Intelligent Narrative
Technologies.