Emily Short

Transcription

1 Emily Short

2 About me Author of 20+ works of interactive fiction, including Galatea and Counterfeit Monkey One of the leads on the Versu project versu.com Provide assorted consulting on interactive narrative and conversation modeling

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16 Agency vs. Story Content generation: it s hard to produce enough content to give the player lots of options that affect the game world

17 Best-fit Scene Selection King of Chicago King of Chicago is a 1987 game that had a large series of scenes available. Each time a scene ended, it would pick the best-fitting next scene available. Narrative is thus highly flexible, though it may not always be obvious how the player s choices are affecting it at any given time. Doug Sharp

18 Quest Generation Skyrim s Radiance system Quest templates that can be filled in in different ways depending on the current world state. Quests are not dependent on the survival of a particular quest-giver. Can be situated in different locations to send the player wherever is needed. Characters can be slotted into story roles in different combinations.

19 Procedurally Recombined Dialogue Prom Week Using hand-authored dialogue that has been tagged with a range of meaning, recombines text lines to generate additional texts. Texts are then verified by a human author to assure that they make sense. James Ryan UCSC ult/files/ryan_et_al_toward_recombin ant_dialogue.pdf

20 Story Generation Scheherazade Project Working on the ability to build apparently coherent narratives procedurally, including Sequence generation: crowdsource a number of stories about the same event (such as a bank robbery), then tag and procedurally recombine content. Attitude: report events in different styles depending on the intended sentiment of the reporter. Boyang Li, Mark Riedl Entertainment Intelligence Lab Georgia Tech

21 Agency vs. Story Content generation Pacing: player freedom means that the story may lag or skip things Coherence: the player s actions might not generate a coherent narrative arc

22 Director Left 4 Dead Handles pacing by choosing when to insert new dangers. Chooses character barks based on maximum salience.

23 Narrative Replanner Automated Story Director Instead of creating a large amount of content, the system reacts to player actions by planning out new plot graphs that will build a workable story. NPCs behave autonomously most of the time, but can be redirected by the plot manager at need in order to force particular outcomes. Mark Riedl, Andrew Stern Entertainment Intelligence Lab Georgia Tech omated-story-director

24 Drama Manager Façade Drama manager selects from a variety of possible interaction beats to determine what should happen next. Tracks intensity and attempts to create an arc of rising tension.

25

26 Modeling the Player and Protagonist What are the player s views on the game s main themes? How can we make choices more effective based on these?

27 Personality-based Play Choice of Games Explicit tracking of a range of stats.

28 Reputation System Fable The Fable series (among others) tracks your protagonist s behavior in order to come up with a moral profile for the character. Your character s reputation may affect responses from townspeople. (Along the same lines, in Fallout 3, certain missions appear if you ve selected the right

29 Explicit Morality Questions Catherine Asked players their views on various moral and relationship questions; displayed how your choice related to the selection by a large group of other players.

30 Modeling the Protagonist Passively Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Game tracks both player responses to dialogue questions and information about what the player chooses to pick up and examine. Based on these stats, it builds a psych profile of the protagonist that determines later content. Detailed system description: Profile

31 Modeling Player Interest CHESS Has a large body of video and other content associated with museum exhibits. Allows the person moving through the exhibit to select which segments to view. Builds a model of the person s interests and suggests additional pieces to look at.

32 Forced Conflict of Interest Fallen London Tracks the player s affiliation with a range of different groups in the setting of Fallen London. When the player is on good terms with multiple groups, triggers a story event in which those two groups are at odds and the player must pick one.

33

34 An NPC with an inner life Expressive, appear to have feelings Responsive, notice what you do Active, appear to have their own agenda

35

36 Active NPCs Shadow of Mordor Nemesis System Creates a character who has his own traits and ability to level up. Remembers past interactions with the player and mentions them later in the game. Generates character appearance and selects voiceover content based on the character s traits.

37 Deep Character Model Blue Lacuna Text adventure with a character who pays close attention to your actions. -- assesses you on several axes (dominance, romance, etc.) -- triggers different interaction scenes depending on character assessment Aaron Reed, 2008 Freeware mcyx4zi98qlkh

38 Social Simulation Prom Week Story mechanics focus mainly on taking social actions towards other characters -- model social contexts explicitly -- determine what that social context affords -- select and play dialogue that is the best fit for that social exchange in the circumstances -- outcome of an interaction depends on world state, including personality types

39 Social and Conversation Simulation Versu Social action-focused as well, but more granular than Prom Week. Characters are deciding in real time which actions and conversation to choose next. Emily Short and Richard Evans Versu.com Blood & Laurels available for ipad

40 Autonomous Characters Erasmatron/Storytron Chris Crawford s on-going (20-year) project to design a system focused on character autonomy and interaction, in which drama would arise naturally from character reactions to the player. com/

41 Building Social Simulation Content Restaurant Game Recorded lots of behavior from real people, then tagged and encoded it in order to build a model of how characters might react in social situations in a restaurant. Jeff Orkin

42 Natural Language Conversation A Tough Sell Uses Bruce Wilcox s Chatscript technology as a basis,. Places the protagonist in a well-known situation. Allows the player to try to talk his way through this. Jonathan Lessard, Concordia University Lablablab.net

43 Natural Language Interpretation Façade Façade accepts input in natural language and interprets it into one of a range of social gestures. The NPCs then react to the social gesture that they understood based on the current social context.

44

45 Mechanics and Fiction Do fictional problems and game mechanics rely on the same systems?

46 Fiction arises purely as artifact of simulation Sims 3, Dwarf Fortress Players watch the simulation and observe interesting outcomes. Players tell one another stories based on the results of the simulation.

47 Mechanics express decisions Papers, Please Papers, Please: decisions about whether to admit people to the country or not are both gameplay and narrative.

48 Mechanics produce emotional effect Cart Life, Miss Management The player struggles with problematic systems which express or reinforce the protagonist s experiences.

49 Other Ways of Situating the Player Two-player systems with shared storytelling Player as interpreter Player as co-author

50 Player as Co-curator Bear 71 An interactive documentary but with some game-like features. The documentary provides a voiceover telling the story of Bear 71. At the same time, the player can interactively explore a map that shows humans, animals, vehicles, and many other environmental aspects.

51 Player as Co-Author Ice-Bound The player does not take the role of a protagonist at all. Manipulate objects that represent different themes within the story. Watch the narrative be rewritten depending on the themes you ve selected. Choose when to confirm a particular outcome and move on.

52 Player as Comic Strip Artist Storyteller Player has the challenge of moving sprites into the comic strip boxes in order to construct a sequence of events. System determines what the meaning of the events are and constructs a narration about it. The player passes the level when she has constructed a narrative that meets the requirements.

53 Say Anything Collaborative Story Generation Builds a large corpus of material from weblogs. Allows the player to type an initial sentence and follows with the best follow-up sentence available from the corpus, using an open-source search engine to identify the best option. Reid Swanson, Andrew Gordon

54 Mechanics and fiction, putting story choices on the plane of gameplay Agency vs. story, providing meaningful responses to player choices Personal and interpersonal stakes, giving the player reason to care about protagonist and others

55 More Resources Mark Riedl on interactive narrative challenges: Interactive drama systems overview: iew.pdf List of co-author games: mes-of-co-authorship/