Julie Porteous
Fred Charles
Marc Cavazza
ABSTRACT
Narrative time has an important role to play in Interactive Storytelling (IS). The prevailing approach to controlling narrative time has been to use implicit models that allow only limited temporal reasoning about virtual agent behaviour. In contrast, this paper proposes the use of an explicit model of narrative time which provides a control mechanism that enhances narrative generation, orchestration of virtual agents and number of possibilities for the staging of agent actions. This approach can help address a number of problems experienced in IS systems both at the level of execution staging and at the level of narrative generation. Consequently it has a number of advantages: it is more flexible with respect to the staging of virtual agent actions; it reduces the possibility of timing problems in the coordination of virtual agents; and it enables more expressive representation of narrative worlds and narrative generative power. Overall it provides a uniform, consistent, principled and rigorous approach to the problem of time in agent-based storytelling. In the paper we demonstrate how this approach to controlling narrative time can be implemented within an IS system and illustrate this using our fully implemented IS system that features virtual agents inspired by Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. The paper presents results of an experimental evaluation with the system that demonstrates the use of this approach to co-ordinate the actions of virtual agents and to increase narrative generative power.
- J. Allen. Planning as Temporal Reasoning. In Proc. of the 2nd Int. Conf. on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, 1991.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- R. Aylett, J. Dias, and A. Paiva. An affectively-driven planner for synthetic characters. In Proc. of 16th Int. Conf. on Automated Planning and Scheduling, 2006.Google Scholar
- D. Balas, C. Blom, A. Abonji, and J. Gemrot. Hierarchical Petri Nets for Story Plots Featuring Virtual Humans. In Proc. of the 4th AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference, 2008.Google Scholar
- M. Cavazza, F. Charles, and S. Mead. Generation of Humorous Situations in Cartoons through Plan-based Formalisations. In Proc. of the ACM CHI Workshop on Humour Modelling in the Interface, 2003.Google Scholar
- F. Charles and M. Cavazza. Exploring the scalability of character-based storytelling. In Proc. of 3rd Int. Conf. on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS 2004), pages 872--879, NY, USA, 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. Chen, B. Wah, and C. Hsu. Temporal Planning using Subgoal Partitioning and Resolution in SGPlan. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 26:323--369, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. I. Coles, M. Fox, K. Halsey, D. Long, and A. Smith. Managing concurrency in temporal planning using planner-scheduler interaction. Artificial Intelligence, pages 1--44, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- W. Cushing, S. Kambhampati, Mausam, and D. Weld. When is Temporal Planning Really Temporal. In Proc. of the 20th Int. Joint Conf. on AI (IJCAI), 2007. Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. Dawson and L. Siklossy. The Role of Preprocessing in Problem Solving Systems "An Ounce of Reflection is Worth a Pound of Backtracking". In Proc. of the 5th Int. Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI), 1977. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Do and S. Kambhampati. Sapa: A Multi-objective Metric Temporal Planner. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 20:155--194, 2003. Google ScholarCross Ref
- S. Donikian. HPTS: A Behaviour Modelling Language for Autonomous Agents. In Proc. of the 5th Int. Conference on Autonomous Agents, 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- B. Drabble and A. Tate. The Use of Optimistic and Pessimistic Resource Profiles to Inform Search in an Activity Based Planner. In Proc. of the 2nd. Conf. on AI Planning Systems (AIPS-94), 1994.Google Scholar
- R. Fikes and N. Nilsson. STRIPS: A new approach to the application of theorem proving to problem solving. Artificial Intelligence, 2:189--208, 1971.Google ScholarCross Ref
- P. Gebhard, M. Kipp, M. Klesen, and T. Ritt. Authoring Scenes for Adaptive, Interactive Performances. In Proc. of the 2nd Int. Joint Conf. on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. W. Geib and B. Webber. A Consequence of Incorporating Intentions in Means-End Planning. In Working Notes -- AAAI Spring Symposium Series: Foundations of Automatic Planning: The Classical Approach and Beyond, 1993.Google Scholar
- A. Gerevini and D. Long. BNF Description of PDDL3.0. Technical report, 2005. http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dvm/papers/pddl-bnf.pdf.Google Scholar
- M. Ghallab, D. Nau, and P. Traverso. Automated Planning: Theory and Practice. Morgan Kaufmann, 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Hoffmann, J. Porteous, and L. Sebastia. Ordered Landmarks in Planning. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 22:215--278, 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- B. Karlsson, A. Ciarlini, B. Feijó, and A. Furtado. Applying a Plan-Recognition/Plan-Generation Paradigm to Interactive Storytelling. In ICAPS Workshop on AI Planning for Computer Games and Synthetic Characters, 2006.Google Scholar
- J. Penberthy and D. Weld. Temporal Planning with Continuous Change. In Proc. of the 12th Nat. Conf. on AI (AAAI-94), 1994. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Porteous, M. Cavazza, and F. Charles. Narrative generation through characters' point of view. In Proc. of 9th Int. Conf. on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS 2010), 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- P. Ricoeur. Time and Narrative, Volume 1. University Of Chicago Press, 1990.Google Scholar
- M. Riedl. Incorporating Authorial Intent into Generative Narrative Systems. In Proc. of AAAI Spring Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies, Palo Alto, California, 2009.Google Scholar
- W. Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice. Penguin Popular Classics (New Edition), 2007.Google Scholar
- A. Tate. Generating Project Networks. In Proc. of the Int. Joint Conf. on AI (IJCAI-77), 1977. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Veloso, M. Pérez, and J. Carbonell. Nonlinear Planning with Parallel Resource Allocation. In Proc. of the DARPA Workshop on Innovative Approaches to Planning, Scheduling and Control, 1990.Google Scholar
- T. Vernieri. A Web Services Approach to Generating and Using Plans in Configurable Execution Environments (M.S. thesis). PhD thesis, North Carolina State University, 2006.Google Scholar
- H. Younes and R. Simmons. VHPOP: Versatile Heuristic Partial Order Planner. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 20:405--430, 2003. Google ScholarCross Ref
Index Terms
- Controlling narrative time in interactive storytelling
Recommendations
Applying planning to interactive storytelling: Narrative control using state constraints
We have seen ten years of the application of AI planning to the problem of narrative generation in Interactive Storytelling (IS). In that time planning has emerged as the dominant technology and has featured in a number of prototype systems. ...
Interactive storytelling with temporal planning
AAMAS '11: The 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 3Narrative time has an important role to play in Interactive Storytelling (IS) systems. In contrast to prevailing IS approaches which use implicit models of time, in our work we have used an explicit model of narrative time. The goal of the demonstration ...
Narrative generation through characters' point of view
AAMAS '10: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems: volume 1 - Volume 1Virtual Actors are at the heart of Interactive Storytelling systems and in recent years multiple approaches have been described to specify their autonomous behaviour. One well known problem is how to achieve a balance between the characters' autonomy, ...
Reviews
Franz J Kurfess
The success of modern computer games depends more and more on interesting stories and less on dazzling graphics. To keep the player's interest, game developers need to find a balance between the freedom of the user to explore all possible scenarios and the need to maintain a cohesive and consistent narrative. An important element of this narrative structure is time, which plays a crucial role in maintaining the required causality between the key elements of the story being told. The relative duration of scenes is also relevant to player interest, which can drop off when a scene goes on for too long. Previous approaches frequently relied on pre- and post-condition constructs for actions, thus imposing an implicit temporal structure on the narrative of a game. The approach here relies on temporal aspects, such as duration, concurrency, and overlap, which are explicitly incorporated into the narrative action representation. The authors claim that, this way, the story and discourse can be generated via shared principles; the narrative construction is simplified; and the capability for the integration of action and motion at a technical level is achieved. As a test case, they used a scene from Shakespeare's The merchant of Venice . One version was generated by PDDL3.0 (the planning domain definition language), a system with implicit temporal information based on a standard action description for planning approaches. The other version was generated according to the authors' approach; it used an explicit temporal representation. Their qualitative evaluation compared timing problems for the staging of agent actions, the ability to exploit information about the staging of agent actions, and the relative generative powers of the two systems. Their system can handle narratives that require actions with explicit durations, and it enables the representation of complex relationships between the story and the discourse. Furthermore, the approach offers a uniform and consistent treatment of time in agent-based storytelling. Overall, the paper gives a good overview of the use of explicit temporal information in interactive storytelling. At times, further background information would be desirable (for example, on the PDDL language used in the example); within the page limits of a conference paper, however, this may not be practical. Online Computing Reviews Service
Access critical reviews of Computing literature here
Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.
Comments