EM-Glue: A Platform for Decoupling Experience Managers and Environments

Experience Management uses AI technologies to improve people's experiences within an interactive application by changing the environment while the experience is underway. Game-related research in this field has a trend where each experience manager is built in a way that is tightly integrated with the environment that it can change. One consequence of this integration is that it becomes difficult to compare one manager to another in a single environment, or a single manager to itself across multiple environments. With this paper, we propose a solution for decoupling experience managers from the environments that they can change, through the use of an intermediate software platform. We describe the structure of the platform, a protocol that facilitates communication between a manager and an environment, and how normal communication happens. Moreover, we introduce the Camelot Wrapper, software built to extend the interactive visualization engine Camelot and connect it to our platform.