Directed Emergent Drama

A fully interactive drama, where the player interacts with intelligent Non- Player Characters (NPCs), can revolutionise entertainment, gaming, education, and therapy. Creating such a genuinely interactive drama that is entertaining and gives players a sense of coherency as active participants in the unfolding drama has seen a substantial research effort. Authors have the power to shape dramatised stories for theatre or television at will. Conversely, the authors' ability to shape interactive drama is limited because the drama emerges from players' and NPCs actions during game-play, which significantly limits authoring control.
A coherent drama has a recognisable dramatic structure. One philosophy is to use planning algorithms and narrative structures to reduce required authoring. However, planning algorithms are intractable for the large state-spaces intrinsic to interactive dramas, and they have not reduced the authoring problem sufficiently.
A more straightforward and computationally feasible method is emergent interactive drama from players' and NPCs' actions. The main difficulty with this approach is maintaining a drama structure and theme, such as a mystery theme or a training scenario, that the player experiences while interacting with the game world. Therefore, it is necessary to impose some form of structure to guide or direct the unfolding drama.
The solution introduced in this thesis is to distribute the computation among autonomous actors that are guided by goals and drama structures which a centralised autonomous director agent distributes among the actors, which comprises the following four main elements:
a) autonomous rational actor agents that know they are acting and can negotiate dialogues between them to remain realistic while simultaneously progressing the drama, without the player knowing,
b) Bayesian network to model the actors reasoning, including beliefs about other actors' mental states
c) an autonomous director agent uses "schemas", conceptual structures based on motifs, to guide the actors.