Page 241 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

224 Socially Intelligent Agents

agent. This frequent guidance from the drama manager will be complicated
by the fact that low-bandwidth guidance (such as giving a believable agent
a new goal) will interact strongly with the moment-by-moment internal state
of the agent, such as the set of currently active goals and behaviors, leading
to surprising, and usually unwanted, behavior. In order to reliably guide an
agent, the scene-level drama manager will have to engage in higher-bandwidth
guidance involving the active manipulation of internal agent state (e.g. editing
the currently active goal tree). Authoring strongly autonomous characters for
story-worlds is not only extra, unneeded work (given that scene-level guidance
will need to intervene frequently), but actively makes guidance more difficult,
in that the drama manager will have to compensate for the internal decision-
making processes (and associated state) of the agent.
As the drama manager provides guidance, it will often be the case that the
manager will need to carefully coordinate multiple characters so as to make the
next story event happen. For example, it may be important for two characters to
argue in such a way as to conspire towards the revelation of specific information
at a certain moment in the story. To achieve this with autonomous agents,
one could try to back away from the stance of strong autonomy and provide
special goals and behaviors within the individual agents that the drama manager
can activate to create coordinated behavior. But even if the character author
provides these special coordination hooks, coordination is still being handled
at the individual goal and behavior level, in an ad-hoc way. What one really
wants is a way to directly express coordinated character action at a level above
the individual characters.
At this point the assumptions made by an interactive drama architecture
consisting of a drama manager guiding strongly autonomous agents have been
found problematic. The next section presents a sketch of a plot and character
architecture that addresses these problems.

4. Integrating Plot and Character with the Dramatic Beat
In dramatic writing, stories are thought of as consisting of events that turn
(change) values ([14]). A value is a property of an individual or relationship,
such as trust, love, hope (or hopelessness), etc. A story event is precisely any
activity that turns a value. If there is activity – characters running around, lots
of witty dialog, buildings and bridges exploding, and so on – but this activity
is not turning a value, then there is no story event, no dramatic action. Thus
one of the primary goals of an interactive drama system should be to make sure
that all activity turns values. Of course these values should be changed in such
a way as to make some plot arc happen that enacts the story premise, such as
in our case, "To be happy you must be true to yourself".