Multi-agent narrative experience management as story graph pruning

Stephen G. Ware, Edward T. Garcia, Alireza Shirvani, Rachelyn Farrell

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

15 Scopus citations

Abstract

In many intelligent interactive narratives, the player controls an avatar while an experience manager controls non-player characters (NPCs). The space of all stories can be viewed as a story graph, where nodes are states and edges are actions taken by the player, by NPCs, or by both jointly. In this paper, we cast experience management as a story graph pruning problem. We start with the full graph and prune intelligently until each NPC has at most one action in every state. Considering the entire graph allows us to foresee the long-term consequences of every pruning decision on the space of possible stories. By never pruning player actions, we ensure the experience manager can accommodate any choice. When used to control the story of an adventure game, players found our technique generally produced higher agency and more believable NPC behavior than a control.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 15th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, AIIDE 2019
Pages87-93
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781577358190
StatePublished - 2019
Event15th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, AIIDE 2019 - Atlanta, United States
Duration: Oct 8 2019Oct 12 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 15th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, AIIDE 2019

Conference

Conference15th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, AIIDE 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAtlanta
Period10/8/1910/12/19

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2019, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Visual Arts and Performing Arts
  • Artificial Intelligence

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