Argax Project

Marlinspike Architecture

The Marlinspike architecture is designed to produce a directed interactive drama. An interactive drama is a system in which the player assumes the role of a character in an unfolding story and, through their actions within the virtual story world, can influence the outcome of that story. By directed I mean that the system has some form of centralized control over the story world. This centralized drama manager component works to direct the story, thus generating a well-formed, coherent plot that incorporates the user's actions. (This is in contrast to an emergent approach, in which the story is meant to emerge solely from the player's interactions with autonomous character agents or the static rules of the story world.)

The following section outlines the design of Marlinspike¹. We will then see how this builds upon the poetics discussed previously, as well as upon other existing interactive drama architectures.

Works Cited

• Tomaszewski, Zach, and Kim Binsted. "Marlinspike: An Integrated Approach to Interactive Drama." Integrating Technologies for Interactive Stories: Papers from the INTETAIN 2008 Workshop. Playa del Carmen, Mexico. 7th Jan 2008. pp. 29-33.
• Tomaszewski, Zach, and Kim Binsted. "Demeter: An Implementation of the Marlinspike Interactive Drama System." Intelligent Narrative Technologies II: Papers from the AAAI Spring Symposium. Technical Report SS-09-06. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, 2009. pp. 133-136.

Notes

1. Many of the details of this chapter were presented in earlier works (Tomaszewski & Binsted 2008, 2009).

Argax Project : Dissertation : A Rough Draft Node http://www2.hawaii.edu/~ztomasze/argax

Last Edited: 22 Mar 2011 ©2007 by Z. Tomaszewski.