Designing a Modular, Scalable Benchmark for Narrative Experience Management

We discuss the ongoing development of MicroTales, a collection of elements that can be combined to generate interactive narrative environments of varying size and complexity. MicroTales aims to fill a gap among existing AI benchmarks by featuring active non-player characters, a wide variety of actions, and the possibility to soft-lock the problem. Its purpose is to provide a clearly defined environment to compare different experience management algorithms without enforcing any one definition of what makes a good story. We present design goals and a sketch of an initial design, and invite community feedback to help make our benchmark reusable by other narrative intelligence researchers.