Automated Planning and Player Modeling for Interactive Storytelling

Abstract

Storytelling plays an important role in human life, from everyday communication to entertainment. Interactive storytelling (IS) offers its audience an opportunity to actively participate in the story being told, particularly in video games. Managing the narrative experience of the player is a complex process that involves choices, authorial goals and constraints of a given story setting (e.g., a fairy tale). Over the last several decades, a number of experience managers using artificial intelligence (AI) methods such as planning and constraint satisfaction have been developed. In this paper, we extend existing work and propose a new AI experience manager called player-specific automated storytelling (PAST), which uses automated planning to satisfy the story setting and authorial constraints in response to the player's actions. Out of the possible stories algorithmically generated by the planner in response, the one that is expected to suit the player's style best is selected. To do so, we employ automated player modeling. We evaluate PAST within a video-game domain with user studies and discuss the effects of combining planning and player modeling on the player's perception of agency.