Structure, Agency, and Intent: Preliminary Data Collection

We discuss the first phase of a multi-year effort to construct a dataset based on an interactive narrative exercise between pairs of humans. One human took the role of the player in a hypertext-based game, while the other took the role of a game master controlling the non-player characters. Alongside gameplay logs, we collected users’ explanations for their own choices and for each other’s choices, and their ratings for the quality of story structure and personal agency. Through repeated iterations of this process, we hope to support the design and testing of AI experience managers that maximize structure and agency by capturing a human game master’s capability to reason about and influence the player’s desires and expectations.