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Towards Integrating Plot and Character 227

to express emotion, personality moves, etc.) will still be contained within
individual characters, providing a library of character- specific actions available
to the higher-level behaviors handed down by the beats.

5. Conclusion

In this paper we described the project goals of a new interactive drama project
being undertaken by the authors. A major goal of this project is to integrate
character and story into a complete dramatic world. We then explored the
assumptions underlying architectures which propose that story worlds should
consist of strongly autonomous believable agents guided by a drama manager,
and found those assumptions problematic. Finally, we gave a brief sketch of
our interactive drama architecture, which operationalizes structures found in
the theory of dramatic writing, particularly the notion of organizing dramatic
value change around the scene and the beat.

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