Argax Project:: Dissertation: A Rough Draft Node

Node Status: ROUGH

Interactive Drama

While many interactive narrative forms are possible, this dissertation is most concerned with a single type: the interactive drama.

In an interactive drama, a human player assumes the role of a single character in a story. Through this character, the player then interacts with objects and other system-controlled characters in a virtual story world--much like an actor on a stage. The interactive drama system then responds to the player in order to produce a story. It does this primarily by directing the behavior of the system-controlled characters. The resulting story should be well-formed and it should be significantly affected by the actions of the player.

Thus, an interactive drama experience is much like that of a modern roleplaying computer game. The difference is that, rather than providing only an open world for the player to explore or else a fairly rigid preset storyline, the events of the story can change significantly in response to the player. To achieve this, an interactive drama generates the story procedurally at runtime.

Interactive drama also goes by many other names, such as interactive story, digital storytelling, cyberdrama, or ractive.

Challenges

A successful interactive drama system must resolve a number of conceptual tensions. The first tension is between authorial and player control. If the author has control of the story, then the player will likely to restricted to making only minor or preset choices allowed by the author. But if story is driven solely by the player, then there is no way to ensure that the resulting outcome will even be story-like, let alone a good story.

Related to this is world simulation versus a plotted story. In a world simulation, the world supports many diverse actions. The system's character agents can independently follow their own programmed inclinations; it is easier to produce consistent, believable characters this way. However, in a simulated world, there is no resulting story. Or, if there is a story, it is emergent from the rules of the world--how each character and object works and how those behaviors then interact.

On the other hand, a plotted story requires specific player actions to advance. Where it offers choices, those choices are usually between a handful of explicit story paths. If character agents are autonomous, they must be subservient the demands of the story. Thus, the story can be said to be directed.

Aside from issues of control is the issue of knowledge and artificial intelligence. Computers are ignorant. They must be provided with explicit knowledge about how the world works. They must also be instructed on all the subtleties of human psychology in order to produce a believable character. They need to know the rules of natural language if they are to generate character speech or textual event narration at runtime. And they must be told about narrative structure and what makes for a good story over a bad story.

Frankly, this general knowledge challenge is insurmountable at this time. However, it remains an intriguing artificial intelligence problem. All humans share narratives with each other, usually starting at a very early age.¹ Many of the TV shows or movies we watch seem to follow fairly simple, predictable narrative rules. Yet, on closer examination, we find that narrative production involves some incredibly complex and intuitive processes.

So the challenge is to begin chipping away at this complexity, breaking the problem into tiny, solvable chunks. Much of this involves limiting the knowledge required to only the specific context of the current interactive drama. That is, the system doesn't need to know how the world, characters, or all stories work in general, but only what actions these particular virtual objects support, what internal states these certain agents have, and the rules by which to combine specific small pre-authored components to form a workable story.

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Notes

Whether most of those narratives are good narratives is another question. Most of the stories we read and films we watch are produced by skilled and/or highly-paid professionals. This level of expectation certainly raises the bar for any story-generating AI. Mimicking the general story-generating skills of a five year old would be impressive from an AI standpoint, but very few people would likely value the results on par with literature or film.