Skip to main content

Working with Intelligent Narrative Technologies

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
The Authoring Problem

Part of the book series: Human–Computer Interaction Series ((HCIS))

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence systems have been used to generate narrative structures and simulate virtual story characters at a variety of different scales, across both academia and industry. Such systems are often built from specialized components known as intelligent narrative technologies. The goal of this chapter is to highlight some of the challenges that can arise when such technologies are used as part of authoring or executing an interactive story. Authoring in a way that works with these technologies often requires a host of technical skills, such as writing computer code, building mathematical models, or predicting the effect of a simple change on a large, complex system. In addition to explaining why these skills are needed and the problems that they help to solve, this chapter will highlight recent and ongoing efforts to make authoring for intelligent narrative technologies more accessible to those with fewer technical skills.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 149.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 199.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 199.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    The term experience manager is due to Riedl et al. [42], and refers to an AI system that attempts to modify the course of a player’s experience as it proceeds.

  2. 2.

    Both PaSSAGE [46] and Mimisbrunnur [32] are the result of collaborations between this chapter’s author and others.

References

  1. Ryan J (2017) Grimes’ fairy tales: a 1960s story generator. In: Nunes N, Oakley I, Nisi V (eds) Interactive storytelling. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 89–103

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  2. Bates J (1992) Virtual reality, art, and entertainment. Presence: J Teleoper Virtual Environ 1(1):133–138

    Google Scholar 

  3. Kelso MT, Weyhrauch P, Bates J (1993) Dramatic presence. Presence: J Teleoper Virtual Environ 2(1):1–16

    Google Scholar 

  4. Weyhrauch P (1997) Guiding interactive drama. PhD thesis, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

    Google Scholar 

  5. Mateas M (1997) An OZ-centric review of interactive drama and believable agents. Carnegie Mellon University

    Google Scholar 

  6. Mateas M, Sengers P (eds) (1999) Narrative intelligence—papers from the 1999 fall symposium, vol FS-99-01, AAAI Press

    Google Scholar 

  7. Mateas M, Sengers P (eds) (2003) Narrative intelligence. John Benjamins. https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027297068

  8. Magerko BS, Riedl MO (eds) (2007) Intelligent narrative technologies—papers from the 2007 AAAI fall symposium, AAAI Press

    Google Scholar 

  9. Osborn JC (ed) (2020) Joint proceedings of the AIIDE 2020 workshops, co-located. In: 16th AAAI conference on artificial intelligence and interactive digital entertainment (AIIDE 2020), vol 2862. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2862/

  10. Louchart S, Mehta M, Roberts DL (eds) (2009) Intelligent narrative technologies II—papers from the 2009 AAAI spring symposium, vol SS-09-06. AAAI Press

    Google Scholar 

  11. Bahamón J, Fassone R, Mawhorter P, Poulakos S, Robertson J, Ryan J (eds) (2017) Intelligent narrative technologies—papers from the 2017 AIIDE workshop, vol WS-17-20. AAAI Press

    Google Scholar 

  12. Barot C, Li B, Rowe J, Tomai E (eds) (2015) Intelligent narrative technologies and social believability in games: papers from the 2015 AIIDE workshop, vol WS-15-22. AAAI Press

    Google Scholar 

  13. Cavazza M, Si M, Zook A (eds) (2013) Intelligent narrative technologies: papers from the 2013 AIIDE workshop, vol WS-13-21. AAAI Press

    Google Scholar 

  14. Jhala A, Riedl M, Roberts DL (eds) (2010) INT3 ’10: proceedings of the intelligent narrative technologies III workshop, association for computing machinery, New York, NY, USA

    Google Scholar 

  15. Tomai E, Elson D, Rowe J (eds) (2011) Intelligent narrative technologies IV—papers from the 2011 AIIDE workshop, vol WS-11-18. AAAI Press

    Google Scholar 

  16. Ware SG, Zhu J, Hodhod R (eds) (2012) Intelligent narrative technologies—papers from the 2012 AIIDE workshop, vol WS-12-14. AAAI Press

    Google Scholar 

  17. Wu HY, Si M, Jhala A (eds) (2018) Proceedings of the joint workshop on intelligent narrative technologies and workshop on intelligent cinematography and editing co-located. In: CEUR workshop proceedings on 14th AAAI conference on artificial intelligence and interactive digital entertainment (AIIDE 2018), vol 2321

    Google Scholar 

  18. Zhu J, Horswill I, Wardrip-Fruin N (eds) (2014) intelligent narrative technologies 7—papers from the 2014 workshop, vol WS-14-21. AAAI Press

    Google Scholar 

  19. Nack F, Gordon AS (eds) (2016) Interactive storytelling. In: 9th international conference on interactive digital storytelling (ICIDS 2016), vol LNCS 10045, Springer, Cham

    Google Scholar 

  20. Finlayson MA, Richards W, Winston PH (2010) Computational models of narrative: review of a workshop. AI Mag 31(2):97. http://orcid.org/10.1609/aimag.v31i2.2295, https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/2295

  21. Finlayson MA (ed) (2010) Computational models of narrative—papers from the 2010 AAAI fall symposium, vol FS-10-04. AAAI Press

    Google Scholar 

  22. Finlayson MA (ed) (2012) The third workshop on computational models of narrative (CMN’12). http://narrative.csail.mit.edu

  23. Finlayson MA, Fisseni B, Löwe B, Meister JC (eds) (2013) 2013 Workshop on computational models of narrative (CMN 2013), vol 32, OASICS

    Google Scholar 

  24. Finlayson MA, Meister JC, Bruneau EG (eds) (2014) 2014 Workshop on computational models of narrative (CMN 2014), vol 41, OASICS

    Google Scholar 

  25. Finlayson MA, Miller B, Lieto A, Ronfard R (eds) (2015) 6th workshop on computational models of narrative (CMN 2015), vol 45, OASICS

    Google Scholar 

  26. Miller B, Lieto A, Ronfard R, Ware SG, Finlayson MA (eds) (2016) 7th workshop on computational models of narrative (CMN 2016), vol 53, OASICS

    Google Scholar 

  27. Koenitz H (2010) Towards a theoretical framework for interactive digital narrative. In: Aylett R, Lim MY, Louchart S, Petta P, Riedl M (eds) Interactive storytelling. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 176–185

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  28. Mateas M, Stern A (2007) Façade. http://www.interactivestory.net/

  29. Mateas M (2002) Interactive drama, art, and artificial intelligence. PhD thesis, Carnegie Mellon University

    Google Scholar 

  30. Thue D (2020) What might an action do? toward a grounded view of actions in interactive storytelling. In: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on interactive digital storytelling (ICIDS’20), Springer, Cham. LNCS, Vol 12497, pp 212–220. https://rise.csit.carleton.ca/pubs/Thue_ICIDS_2020.pdf

  31. Liapis A, Yannakakis GN, Togelius J (2013) Sentient sketchbook: computer-aided game level authoring. In: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on foundations of digital games, society for the advancement of the science of digital games, pp 213–220

    Google Scholar 

  32. Stefnisson I, Thue D (2018) Mimisbrunnur: AI-assisted authoring for interactive storytelling. In: Proceedings of the 14th AAAI conference on artificial intelligence and interactive digital entertainment, AAAI Press, pp 236–242. https://aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AIIDE/AIIDE18/paper/view/18116/17248

  33. Mateas M, Stern A (2005) Structuring content in the Façade interactive drama architecture. In: Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence and interactive digital entertainment, AAAI Press, pp 93–98, https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AIIDE/article/view/18722

  34. Latitude (2019) AI dungeon. https://play.aidungeon.io/

  35. McCoy J, Treanor M, Samuel B, Reed AA, Mateas M, Fruin NW (2012) Prom week. https://promweek.soe.ucsc.edu/

  36. Salge C, Green MC, Canaan R, Togelius J (2018) Generative design in minecraft (GDMC): settlement generation competition. In: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on the foundations of digital games, association for computing machinery, New York, NY, USA, FDG ’18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3235765.3235814, https://doi.org/10.1145/3235765.3235814

  37. Bay 12 Games (2006–2021) Dwarf fortress. http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

  38. Ludeon Studios (2013) Rimworld. https://rimworldgame.com

  39. Riedl MO, Young RM (2010) Narrative planning: balancing plot and character. J Artif Intell Res 39:217–268

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  40. Brown T, Mann B, Ryder N, Subbiah M, Kaplan JD, Dhariwal P, Neelakantan A, Shyam P, Sastry G, Askell A, Agarwal S, Herbert-Voss A, Krueger G, Henighan T, Child R, Ramesh A, Ziegler D, Wu J, Winter C, Hesse C, Chen M, Sigler E, Litwin M, Gray S, Chess B, Clark J, Berner C, McCandlish S, Radford A, Sutskever I, Amodei D (2020) Language models are few-shot learners. In: Larochelle H, Ranzato M, Hadsell R, Balcan MF, Lin H (eds) Advances in neural information processing systems, curran associates, Inc., vol 33, pp 1877–1901

    Google Scholar 

  41. Author Unknown (2020). https://prompts.aidg.club/

  42. Riedl MO, Stern A, Dini D, Alderman J (2008) Dynamic experience management in virtual worlds for entertainment, education, and training. Int Trans Syst Sci Appl Spec Issue Agent Based Syst Hum Learn 4(2):23–42

    Google Scholar 

  43. Thue D (2015) Generalized experience management. PhD thesis, University of Alberta, Canada

    Google Scholar 

  44. Horswill I (2020) A declarative PCG tool for casual users. In: Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence and interactive digital entertainment. AAAI Press, vol 16, pp 81–87

    Google Scholar 

  45. Horswill ID, Robison E (2022) Imaginarium—January 2022 release. https://github.com/ianhorswill/Imaginarium

  46. Thue D, Bulitko V, Spetch M, Wasylishen E (2007) Interactive storytelling: a player modelling approach. In: 3rd AI and interactive digital entertainment conference (AIIDE 2007). AAAI Press, Palo Alto, California, pp 43–48

    Google Scholar 

  47. Sharma M, Mehta M, Ontañón S, Ram A (2007) Player modeling evaluation for interactive fiction. In: Technical report on AIIDE 2007 workshop on optimizing player satisfaction. AAAI Press, Palo Alto, California

    Google Scholar 

  48. Thue D, Bulitko V, Spetch M (2008) Making stories player-specific: delayed authoring in interactive storytelling. The first joint international conference on interactive digital storytelling. Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg, Erfurt, Germany, pp 230–241

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  49. Mateas M, Stern A (2004) A behavior language: joint action and behavioral idioms. In: Prendinger H, Ishizuka M (eds) Life-like characters: tools, affective functions, and applications. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 135–161

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  50. Riedl MO, Stern A (2006) Believable agents and intelligent story adaptation for interactive storytelling. 3rd international conference on technologies for interactive digital storytelling and entertainment. Springer, Darmstad, DE, pp 1–12

    Google Scholar 

  51. Ramirez AJ, Bulitko V (2012) Telling interactive player-specific stories and planning for it: ASD + PaSSAGE = PAST. The eighth artificial intelligence and interactive digital entertainment conference (AIIDE 2012). AAAI Press, Palo Alto, California, pp 173–178

    Google Scholar 

  52. Ramirez A, Bulitko V (2015) Automated planning and player modelling for interactive storytelling. IEEE Trans Comput Intell AI Games 7(4):375–386

    Article  Google Scholar 

  53. McCoy J, Treanor M, Samuel B, Reed A, Mateas M, Wardrip-Fruin N (2013) Prom week: designing past the game/story dilemma. In: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on the foundations of digital games (FDG 2013), Chania, Crete, Greece

    Google Scholar 

  54. Reed A, Garbe J, Apostol N (2013) The ice-bound concordance. www.ice-bound.com

  55. Reed A (2017) Changeful tales: design-driven approaches toward more expressive story games. PhD thesis, UC Santa Cruz

    Google Scholar 

  56. Evans R, Short E, Nelson G (2014) Blood & laurels. https://versu.com/2014/05/28/blood-laurels/

  57. Evans R, Short E (2014) Versu—a simulationist storytelling system. IEEE Trans Comput Intell AI Games 6(2):113–130. https://doi.org/10.1109/TCIAIG.2013.2287297

  58. Szilas N, Dumas J, Richle U, Boggini T, Habonneau N (2015) Nothing for dinner. http://nothingfordinner.org/

  59. Szilas N (2015) Reconsidering the role of AI in interactive digital narrative. In: Ferri G, Haahr M, Sezen D, Sezen TI, Koenitz H (eds) Interactive digital narrative. Routledge

    Google Scholar 

  60. Ryan J (2018) Curating simulated storyworlds. PhD thesis, University of California, Santa Cruz

    Google Scholar 

  61. Kreminski M, Dickinson M, Wardrip-Fruin N (2019) Felt: A simple story sifter. In: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on interactive digital storytelling (ICIDS 2019). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 267–281

    Google Scholar 

  62. Kreminski M, Dickinson M, Mateas M (2021) Winnow: a domain-specific language for incremental story sifting. In: Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence and interactive digital entertainment, AAAI Press, pp 156–163. https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AIIDE/article/view/18903

Download references

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Grant #2020-06502.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to David Thue .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Thue, D. (2022). Working with Intelligent Narrative Technologies. In: Hargood, C., Millard, D.E., Mitchell, A., Spierling, U. (eds) The Authoring Problem. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05214-9_17

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05214-9_17

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-05213-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-05214-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics