Perceptual Experience Management

Abstract

In automatically generated interactive narratives (INs) with strong story structure, there is often a tension between player choice and author constraints. This tension arises when the player contradicts a story the system is in the process of telling. When this happens there are two options available to an IN storyteller that preserve the author's intentions. First, called accommodation , finds a new story that matches the player's action while preserving author constraints. Second, called intervention , removes unwanted effects from the player's action. Neither of these alternatives are ideal. For accommodation, a new story is not always available. For intervention, the player could notice the inconsistent effects of their actions. In this paper, we present a new approach to mediate between player choice and authorial constraints, called perceptual experience management , which mitigates drawbacks of both accommodation and intervention by incorporating a model of player knowledge into the strong story experience management process. This model is used to widen the space of possible accommodations and constrain the space of possible interventions to better balance author control and player choice. These two strategies are implemented in the general mediation engine, an experience manager capable of procedurally generating and revising a game world.