{"title":"Risk Management: Anticipating and Reacting in StarCraft","authors":"Adam Amos-Binks, Bryan S. Weber","doi":"10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27497","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27497","url":null,"abstract":"Managing risk with imperfect information is something humans do every day, but we have little insight into the abilities of AI agents to do so. We define two risk management strategies and perform an ability-based evaluation using StarCraft agents. Our evaluation shows that nearly all agents mitigate risks after observing them (react), and many prepare for such risks before their appearance (anticipate). For this evaluation, we apply traditional causal effect inference and causal random forest methods to explain agent behavior. The results highlight different risk management strategies among agents, others strategies that are common to agents, and overall encourage evaluating agent risk management abilities in other AI domains.","PeriodicalId":498041,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment","volume":"121 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135303340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"MultiStyle: Characterizing Multiplayer Cooperative Gameplay by Incorporating Distinct Player Playstyles in a Multi-Agent Planner","authors":"Eric W. Lang, R. Michael Young","doi":"10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27505","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27505","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents MultiStyle, a multi-agent centralized heuristic search planner that incorporates distinct agent playstyles to generate solution plans where characters express individual preferences while cooperating to reach a goal. We include algorithmic details, an example domain, and multiple different solution plans generated with unique agent playstyle sets. We discuss our intent to incorporate this planner in a tool for game level designers to help them anticipate and understand how teams of players with distinct playstyles may play through their levels. Ultimately, MultiStyle generates solution plans with a novel and increased expressive range by attempting to satisfy sets of action and proposition preferences for each agent.","PeriodicalId":498041,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135303237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Enhancing Character Depth through Personality Exceptions for Narrative Planners","authors":"Elinor Rubin-McGregor, Brent Harrison, Cory Siler","doi":"10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27509","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27509","url":null,"abstract":"In the field of narrative planning, implementing character personality is a challenge that’s been tackled many different ways. Most of these methods do not incorporate any method for personality to shift when characters are put in situations that would, through stress or satisfaction, naturally cause the character to behave differently than usual. Through use of situationally-triggered Personality Exceptions, we can support the generation of a story that prominently features such personality shifts as a narrative tool. This feature is made as generic as possible so that it can be attached onto a wide range of personality models in narrative generators. Through adapting Indexter’s indexes of narrative salience towards tracking internal narrative salience in the characters’ memories, we can accurately pinpoint triggers which are used to activate these personality exceptions in thematically relevant situations.","PeriodicalId":498041,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135303339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Manuel Eberhardinger, Johannes Maucher, Setareh Maghsudi
{"title":"Learning of Generalizable and Interpretable Knowledge in Grid-Based Reinforcement Learning Environments","authors":"Manuel Eberhardinger, Johannes Maucher, Setareh Maghsudi","doi":"10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27516","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27516","url":null,"abstract":"Understanding the interactions of agents trained with deep reinforcement learning is crucial for deploying agents in games or the real world. In the former, unreasonable actions confuse players. In the latter, that effect is even more significant, as unexpected behavior cause accidents with potentially grave and long-lasting consequences for the involved individuals. In this work, we propose using program synthesis to imitate reinforcement learning policies after seeing a trajectory of the action sequence. Programs have the advantage that they are inherently interpretable and verifiable for correctness. We adapt the state-of-the-art program synthesis system DreamCoder for learning concepts in grid-based environments, specifically, a navigation task and two miniature versions of Atari games, Space Invaders and Asterix. By inspecting the generated libraries, we can make inferences about the concepts the black-box agent has learned and better understand the agent's behavior. We achieve the same by visualizing the agent's decision-making process for the imitated sequences. We evaluate our approach with different types of program synthesizers based on a search-only method, a neural-guided search, and a language model fine-tuned on code.","PeriodicalId":498041,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment","volume":"169 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135303527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Vikram Kumaran, Jonathan Rowe, Bradford Mott, James Lester
{"title":"SceneCraft: Automating Interactive Narrative Scene Generation in Digital Games with Large Language Models","authors":"Vikram Kumaran, Jonathan Rowe, Bradford Mott, James Lester","doi":"10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27504","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27504","url":null,"abstract":"Creating engaging interactive story-based experiences dynamically responding to individual player choices poses significant challenges for narrative-centered games. Recent advances in pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have the potential to revolutionize procedural content generation for narrative-centered games. Historically, interactive narrative generation has specified pivotal events in the storyline, often utilizing planning-based approaches toward achieving narrative coherence and maintaining the story arc. However, manual authorship is typically used to create detail and variety in non-player character (NPC) interaction to specify and instantiate plot events. This paper proposes SCENECRAFT, a narrative scene generation framework that automates NPC interaction crucial to unfolding plot events. SCENECRAFT interprets natural language instructions about scene objectives, NPC traits, location, and narrative variations. It then employs large language models to generate game scenes aligned with authorial intent. It generates branching conversation paths that adapt to player choices while adhering to the author’s interaction goals. LLMs generate interaction scripts, semantically extract character emotions and gestures to align with the script, and convert dialogues into a game scripting language. The generated script can then be played utilizing an existing narrative-centered game framework. Through empirical evaluation using automated and human assessments, we demonstrate SCENECRAFT’s effectiveness in creating narrative experiences based on creativity, adaptability, and alignment with intended author instructions.","PeriodicalId":498041,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment","volume":"61 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135303355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tree-Based Reconstructive Partitioning: A Novel Low-Data Level Generation Approach","authors":"Emily Halina, Matthew Guzdial","doi":"10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27520","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27520","url":null,"abstract":"Procedural Content Generation (PCG) is the algorithmic generation of content, often applied to games. PCG and PCG via Machine Learning (PCGML) have appeared in published games. However, it can prove difficult to apply these approaches in the early stages of an in-development game. PCG requires expertise in representing designer notions of quality in rules or functions, and PCGML typically requires significant training data, which may not be available early in development. In this paper, we introduce Tree-based Reconstructive Partitioning (TRP), a novel PCGML approach aimed to address this problem. Our results, across two domains, demonstrate that TRP produces levels that are more playable and coherent, and that the approach is more generalizable with less training data. We consider TRP to be a promising new approach that can afford the introduction of PCGML into the early stages of game development without requiring human expertise or significant training data.","PeriodicalId":498041,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment","volume":"208 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135303530","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Manuel Flurin Hendry, Norbert Kottmann, Martin Fröhlich, Florian Bruggisser, Marco Quandt, Stella Speziali, Valentin Huber, Chris Salter
{"title":"Are You Talking to Me? A Case Study in Emotional Human-Machine Interaction","authors":"Manuel Flurin Hendry, Norbert Kottmann, Martin Fröhlich, Florian Bruggisser, Marco Quandt, Stella Speziali, Valentin Huber, Chris Salter","doi":"10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27538","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27538","url":null,"abstract":"We present Stanley, a digital sculpture designed to engage audiences with the spontaneous and captivating emotional expressions of an artificial human. A 3D-printed face is brought to life through video projection mapping and a set of machine learning libraries and APIs, enabling real-time, embodied interactions with our virtual character. Stanley’s personality is shaped by traditional acting methods applied to a large language model. By creating human-machine encounters in emotionally salient scenarios, we explore how insights from acting and directing for the stage and the screen can enhance the development of compelling virtual agents. By interacting with Stanley, the audience experiences an entertaining yet unsettling encounter with AI technology, fostering a deeper understanding of machine learning techniques and enabling their critical reflection.","PeriodicalId":498041,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135303235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jack Kelly, Alex Calderwood, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Michael Mateas
{"title":"There and Back Again: Extracting Formal Domains for Controllable Neurosymbolic Story Authoring","authors":"Jack Kelly, Alex Calderwood, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Michael Mateas","doi":"10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27502","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27502","url":null,"abstract":"Story generators using language models offer the automatic production of highly fluent narrative content, but they are hard to control and understand, seizing creative tasks that many authors wish to perform themselves. On the other hand, planning-based story generators are highly controllable and easily understood but require story domains that must be laboriously crafted; further, they lack the capacity for fluent language generation. In this paper, we explore hybrid approaches that aim to bridge the gap between language models and narrative planners. First, we demonstrate that language models can be used to author narrative planning domains from natural language stories with minimal human intervention. Second, we explore the reverse, demonstrating that we can use logical story domains and plans to produce stories that respect the narrative commitments of the planner. In doing so, we aim to build a foundation for human-centric authoring tools that facilitate novel creative experiences.","PeriodicalId":498041,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment","volume":"208 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135303343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Investigating the Influence of Behaviors and Dialogs on Player Enjoyment in Stealth Games","authors":"Wael Al Enezi, Clark Verbrugge","doi":"10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27512","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27512","url":null,"abstract":"The player's perception of AI behavior significantly influences their overall game experience. This perception is shaped by both interactive encounters and careful observations, particularly in genres like stealth, where gameplay revolves around planning strategies based on AI enemy movement. This paper aims to derive general insights into the player experience concerning two crucial gameplay elements that impact the perception of NPC intelligence. The first element pertains to the actual behavior of opponent NPCs, while the second focuses on the dialogues employed to highlight NPC decision-making. We conducted a user study to assess whether players can discern between complex and simple NPC behavior during gameplay in a specific scenario of a top-down stealth game prototype. We introduced variations in spoken dialogs to determine their effect on player perception. In the end, our findings revealed that when simple dialogs were used, players derived greater enjoyment from a more complex AI behavior. However, using contextual dialog allowed a simple behavior to match a complex behavior in player enjoyment.","PeriodicalId":498041,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135303360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Justus Robertson, John Heiden, Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera
{"title":"Evolving Interactive Narrative Worlds","authors":"Justus Robertson, John Heiden, Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera","doi":"10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27508","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27508","url":null,"abstract":"An interactive narrative is bound by the context of the world where its story takes place. However, most work in interactive narrative generation takes its story world design and mechanics as given, which abdicates a large part of story generation to an external world designer. In this paper, we close the story world design gap with an evolutionary search framework for generating interactive narrative worlds and mechanics. Our framework finds story world designs that accommodate multiple distinct player roles. We evaluate our system with an action agreement ratio analysis that shows worlds generated by our framework provide a greater number of in-role action opportunities compared to story worlds randomly sampled from the generative space.","PeriodicalId":498041,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135303352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}