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Game AI as Storytelling

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Abstract

Much research on artificial intelligence in games has been devoted to creating opponents that play competently against human players. We argue that the traditional goal of AI in games-to win the game-is but one of several interesting goals to pursue. We promote the alternative goal of making the human player’s play experience “better,” i.e., AI systems in games should reason about how to deliver the best possible experience within the context of the game. The key insight we offer is that approaching AI reasoning for games as “storytelling reasoning” makes this goal much more attainable. We present a framework for creating interactive narratives for entertainment purposes based on a type of agent called an experience manager. An experience manager is an intelligent computer agent that manipulates a virtual world to dynamically adapt the narrative content the player experiences, based on his or her actions and inferences about his or her preferred style of play. Following a theoretical perspective on game AI as a form of storytelling, we discuss the implications of such a perspective in the context of several AI technological approaches.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332, USA

    Mark Riedl

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  1. Mark Riedl
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  2. David Thue
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  3. Vadim Bulitko
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Correspondence to Mark Riedl .

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  1. , Dpto. de Ingeniería, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, 28040, Spain

    Pedro Antonio González-Calero

  2. , Dpto. de Ingeniería, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, 28040, Spain

    Marco Antonio Gómez-Martín

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Riedl, M., Thue, D., Bulitko, V. (2011). Game AI as Storytelling. In: González-Calero, P., Gómez-Martín, M. (eds) Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8188-2_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8188-2_6

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