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area includes approaches that don't specifically make use of AI techniques, such
as hypertext fiction and text and graphical adventure games. These approaches
have been quite fruitful for exploring the nature of interactivity and the struc-
tural possibilities of interactive narrative (Murray 1998b). But for the purposes
of this brief overview, we will focus on AI-based approaches to interactive
fiction and drama.
Most of the work in interactive drama has approached it from an
autonomous-agents perspective. The focus has been on building believable
agents that can play roles in stories. The Oz Project built an agent architec-
ture (Loyall & Bates 1991; Loyall 1997) including a model of emotion (Reilly &
Bates 1992; Neal Reilly 1996) to support the construction of autonomous char-
acters. Hayes-Roth built agents that improvise activity around a fixed script
(Hayes-Roth, van Gent & Huber 1997). Blumberg was originally motivated by
the ALife goal of building computational instantiations of ethological models
of action selection (Blumberg 1994), but more recently has focused on build-
ing architectures to support the construction of characters (Kline & Blum-
berg 1999). Most of the believable agents architectures make use of some re-
active action-selection framework, though there has been some work on using
planning techniques to ease the authorial burden (Rizzo et al. 1998).
There has been less work on building systems to support interactive plot.
Some work has focused on systems that provide high level plot guidance to be-
lievable agents. For example, Weyhrauch (Weyhrauch 1997) built a dramatic
guidance system that issues high-level commands to Oz believable agents.
Blumberg and Galyean (Blumberg & Galyean 1995) explored the concept of
a director giving commands to autonomous characters at multiple levels of ab-
straction. Other work has focused on tracking the user's progress through a
fixed plot, using user actions to trigger the next part of the story. For example,
Galyean (Galyean 1995) built a system that uses cinematic techniques adapted
to virtual reality to guide a user through a plot. Pinhanez (Pinhanez 1997) built
a system that uses a temporal calculus to trigger story events given user actions.
Mateas and Stern (Mateas & Stern 2000) are building an interactive drama sys-
tem which blurs the distinction between strongly autonomous characters and
high-level plot control by intermingling believable agent behaviors and plot
constructs.
In “Assumptions underlying the Erasmatron storytelling system,” Craw-
ford
describes
the
Erasmatron, a
system
for
authoring
and
playing
in-
teractive stories.
In “The Dr. K- Project,” Rickman describes a text-based interactive narra-
tive system based on a historical account of two murderers in 1820's Edinburgh.
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