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characters pursuing their autonomous goals. Story-centric systems model the
structural properties of stories themselves (viewing the story as an artifact); the
system tells stories by manipulating this structural artifact.
Like story understanding, storytelling work also began during AI's clas-
sical engagement with narrative. Interestingly, the three perspectives outlined
above all emerged during this classical engagement at roughly the same time.
Perhaps the most famous early storytelling system is Tale-Spin (Meehan 1977).
Tale-Spin is a character-centric system, modeling the goals and plans of ani-
mal characters taken from Aesop's fables. Ani (Kahn 1979), an author-centric
system, generates an animation (using a square, triangle and circle to repre-
sent characters) telling a simplified version of Snow White. The system is given
a high level script describing the authorial goals for the story (what should
be conveyed); given this script, it makes all the detailed animation decisions
necessary to tell the story. Rumelhart (Rumelhart 1975) takes a story-centric
approach, capturing the notion of story as a story grammar. For more detailed
descriptions of the history of story-telling systems, see Lang in this volume
(Chapter 12).
All three storytelling approaches tend to utilize some form of combinato-
rial search over a space of primitive story elements. Elliott (Elliot 1998) has
explored an alternative approach. His system, while using a fixed script, tells
different stories by narrating the stories with different emotional emphases.
The emotional behavior of the narration agent is generated by the Affective
Reasoner, a cognitive appraisal model of emotion. Elliott's work demonstrates
that a storytelling system can leverage the interpretive capabilities of a hu-
man observer, in this particular case the ability to understand motivations
and emotions.
In “The recombinant history apparatus presents Terminal Time,” Domi-
ke, Mateas and Vanouse describe a system which generates ideologically-biased
histories in response to audience feedback. While Terminal Time is audience
interactive, its architecture is influenced more by work in story generation than
work in interactive fiction and drama.
In “Story grammars: Return of a theory,” Lang describes an implemented
story grammar that generates stories in the style of ethnic folktales.
Interactive fiction and drama
The field of interactive fiction and drama seeks to build systems that let the
audience experience the story as an interactive participant (this includes, but is
not limited to, being a first-person protagonist). System - building work in this
