Guiding interactive drama 论文

摘要

In traditional drama, an audience watches a story presented by characters on a stage. Interactive Drama changes the audience to a single User who enters that stage, interacting with the characters, and participating in the story. Computer-based interactive drama allows a User to interact with simulated worlds which are inhabited by dynamic and complex autonomous characters and shaped by a flexible, aesthetically pleasing story. Unlike the actions of characters in a play, the actions of the User are not controlled by the artist. The problem is to shape the User's experience to conform to the set of themes and ideas to be conveyed. This work proposes this problem can be solved by dynamically monitoring and subtly guiding the experience of the User. This dissertation describes an architecture called Moe that is designed to provide dramatic guidance. Moe uses abstract, adversary search with an aesthetic evaluation function to decide how and when to guide the User's experience. The first technical achievement of this work is a demonstration of the ability to capture a dramatic aesthetic (for one interactive drama) in an automated evaluation function that can examine an experience and determine its quality, much as a movie critic determines the quality of a film. This result is supported by statistically demonstrating a high degree of correlation (r =.87) between the evaluation function and the human artist. The second main technical achievement of this work is the implementation of three such strategies (SAS and SAS+, both based on random sampling; and MMFC, which uses memoization to implement a full-depth search) and a search state that seem capable of effectively modelling and guiding an interactive dramatic experience. Moe has not yet been connected to a running interactive experience, but instead Moe has been tested with a variety of Simulated User Types. On average Users, SAS, SAS+, and MMFC are able to improve Users' experiences from the 50th percentile, to the 94th, 98th, and 99th percentile, respectively. This is a large and artistically meaningful increase. This dissertation describes the first implementation of a system designed to provide centralized dramatic guidance in an interactive drama.