Schemas in Directed Emergent Drama

Maria Arinbjarnar, Daniel Kudenko

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

A common problem in creating interactive drama is the authoring bottleneck. If pre-authored stories are directly incorporated into an interactive virtual environment then there is a need to consider all possible interactions and story twists, which for a sizeable drama is infeasible. One proposed solution to this problem is to use search and planning algorithms along with narrative structures. This leads to a huge state space and planning becomes intractable for real-time solutions. A way to address this problem is to distribute the story planning to antonomous characters so that the drama emerges from their interactions. However without predefined structure or directives the drama is unlikely to emerge into the intended story or even the intended genre. We propose to divide the drama into narrative episodes which we call schemas. Schemas are used by a director and a set of actors to structure the drama so that it emerges into a fully developed drama. The schemas are preauthored in an abstract way such that they can be deployed multiple times in the same drama, which removes the authoring bottleneck. In this article. we define the structure of the schemas and how the director and actors' use schemas in Directed Emergent Drama. (DED).

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationINTERACTIVE STORYTELLING, PROCEEDINGS
EditorsU Spierling, N Szilas
Place of PublicationBERLIN
PublisherSpringer
Pages180-185
Number of pages6
Volume5334 LNCS
ISBN (Print)978-3-540-89424-7
Publication statusPublished - 2008
Event1st Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2008) - Erfurt
Duration: 26 Nov 200829 Nov 2008

Conference

Conference1st Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2008)
CityErfurt
Period26/11/0829/11/08

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