IDA: An Interactive Drama Architecture

Brian Magerko
Computer Science and Engineering Department, University of Michigan

February 18, 2005
11 a.m. - 12 noon
Fuller Labs 320

Abstract

The field of interactive drama explores the connection between authoring story content for a digital story world and a player's agency in that world. Is it possible to allow the player to "be his own character" and act as he wishes in the story world while still maintaining a coherent narrative? If you give the player too much freedom, he may execute behaviors that harm the progression of the story. Give the player too little control, and he will likely feel over-constrained and disconnected from the character that he is controlling. It is this tension between authoring a story and player agency this is the driving force behind my work. I am investigating how to build an interactive drama that strikes a balance between offering the player a high degree of interaction and providing a story-based experience where the player is a key character.

My approach to this problem is embedded in the Interactive Drama Architecture (IDA). IDA is comprised of the story content authored by a human storyteller, a story world for the narrative to take place, the synthetic characters that populate that world, and an omniscient story director agent that manages the player's narrative experience. This director agent uses the authored story content to track the player's progress, detect deviations from the story, and make directions to supporting characters in the game. The director is used within a game developed by the Soar Games Group, called "Haunt 2", which is an extension to the Unreal Tournament engine. The key strength to story direction in IDA is the user of a predictive model of player behavior. By using this predictive model, the director agent can subtlely avoid conflicts between player action and plot content altogether, rather than having to deal with those conflicts the moment they happen in the world. This talk will present interactive drama as a field, discuss how IDA works, and present future directions to take the architecture in computer games and education.

Host

Michael A. Gennert
Refreshments will be served.

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Last modified: Sep 27, 2006, 16:05 EDT