Problem Formulation for Accommodation Support in Plan-Based Interactive Narratives

Abstract

Branching story games have gained popularity for adapting to user actions within a story world. An active area of Interactive Narrative (IN) research uses automated planning to generate story plans as it can lighten the authorial burden of writing a branching story. Branches can be generated from a declarative representation rather than hand-crafted. A goal of an Experience Manager (EM) is to guide a user through a space of desirable narrative trajectories, or story branches, in an IN. However, in the cases when an EM must accommodate user actions and mediate them from a desired narrative trajectory to a new narrative trajectory, automated planning’s authorial advantage becomes a liability as the available narrative trajectories are not known apriori. This limitation can lead to the EM choosing a new narrative trajectory that is not coherent with the previous one and may result in a negative user experience. The goal of my research is to develop a problem formulation methodology for story planning problems that elicits the available narrative trajectories enabling an EM to execute more coherent accommodations.