Page 238 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Chapter 27

TOWARDS INTEGRATING PLOT AND
CHARACTER FOR INTERACTIVE DRAMA

Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern
Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University and www.interactivestory.net

Abstract The authors are currently engaged in a three year collaboration to build an inter-
active story world integrating believable agents and interactive plot. This paper
provides a brief description of the project goals and design requirements, dis-
cusses the problem of autonomy in the context of story-based believable agents,
and describes an architecture that uses the dramatic beat as a structural principle
to integrate plot and character.

1. Introduction
Interactive drama concerns itself with building dramatically interesting vir-
tual worlds inhabited by computer-controlled characters, within which the user
(hereafter referred to as the player) experiences a story from a first person per-
spective [7]). 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 ([12]; [8]; [5]; [4]; [9]; [1]). 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 astoryplot, soastobuildinteractive, dramaticworlds([16]; [2]). Theauthors
are currently engaged in a three year collaboration to build an interactive story
world integrating believable agents and interactive plot. This paper provides
a brief description of the project goals and design requirements, discusses the
problem of autonomy in the context of story-based believable agents, and finally
describes an architecture that uses the dramatic beat as a structural principle to
integrate plot and character.