Declarative optimization-based drama management in interactive fiction

Abstract

Our work relates to automatically guiding experiences in large, open-world interactive dramas and story-based experiences where a player interacts with and influences a story. A drama manager (DM) is a system that watches a story as it progresses, reconfiguring the world to fulfill the author's goals. A DM might notice a player doing something that fits poorly with the current story and attempt to dissuade him or her. This is accomplished using soft actions such as having a nonplayer character start a conversation with a player to lure him or her to something else, or by more direct actions such as locking doors. We present work applying search-based drama management (SBDM) to the interactive fiction piece Anchorhead, to further investigate the algorithmic and authorship issues involved. Declarative optimization-based drama management (DODM) guides the player by projecting possible future stories and reconfiguring the story world based on those projections. This approach models stories as a set of possible plot points, and an author-specified evaluation function rates the quality of a particular plot-point sequence