Intentionality and Conflict in The Best Laid Plans Interactive Narrative Virtual Environment

Abstract

In this paper, we present The Best Laid Plans, an interactive narrative adventure game, and the planning technologies used to generate and adapt its story in real time. The game leverages computational models of intentionality and conflict when controlling the non-player characters (NPCs) to ensure they act believably and introduce challenge into the automatically generated narratives. We evaluate the game's ability to generate NPC behaviors that human players recognize as intentional and as conflicting with their plans. We demonstrate that players recognize these phenomena significantly more than in a control with no NPC actions and not significantly different from a control in which NPC actions are defined by a human author.