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narrative than Babyz, because Petz currently has twice the amount of behavior
and animation content.)
We believe that given enough time to carefully craft behaviors, and the time
to create a sufficient number of them, the character-centric approach makes it
possible to create an interactive narrative experience that is more eventful and
entertaining than mundane “real life” experience, but inevitably with less econ-
omy and efficiency than a tightly constructed story (e.g., drama). Experiencing
such a virtual world would be akin to “hanging out” with someone who is a
talented improvisational actor, who is always trying their best to make enter-
taining and exciting things happen. However, if it is the artist's goal to create
interactive
drama
, we believe one cannot rely primarily on emergent narrative
and must adopt a more centralized approach to controlling the characters. In
future work we hope to integrate the looser character-centric approach with a
more structured plot-centric approach, while attempting to keep the same level
of freedom and interactivity that the character-centric approach offers (Mateas
& Stern 2000).
Conclusion
This paper has described the overall design philosophy behind Babyz and gave
examples of short-term and long-term narrative experiences it offers. Dur-
ing implementation we found it expedient to borrow techniques from several
disciplines including artificial intelligence, artificial life, videogames, improvi-
sational acting, and traditional cartoon animation. Our goal was to create a
complete, polished, mass-appeal interactive entertainment product, as well as
to make progress in the areas of lifelike computer characters and interactive
narrative.
In
Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future Of Narrative in Cyberspace
,Janet
Murray suggests that interactive virtual characters “may mark the beginning
of a new narrative format”, taking on the task of redefining what it means to
be human in the face of artificial intelligence (Murray 1997). By endowing our
new set of virtual characters with some explicit narrative intelligence, as well
as some simple natural language capability, we hope that we are one baby step
closer to achieving that goal.
