I think Douglas Hofstadter’s AI research–published in the book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies–might be of interest, since it is an attempt to model certain kinds of creative processes that achieve some sort of aesthetics. I can’t summarize the book here, but two important aspects are that they’re working in microworlds, and that they’re primarily modelling an unconscious creative process, not a conscious one.

I got a chance to talk to him about this a little, since games as microworlds seem a pretty good fit, but he wasn’t at all interested in that side of things–he’s less interested in application, more just in pursuing AI to understand human mental function. But he did mention that one of the projects, Letter Spirit, he felt was too automatic, that it was using his unconscious-process modelling paradigm solely, and needed a certain amount of introspecting in what it was trying to accomplish and how to go about it; but I couldn’t get a clear idea from him what he thought this looked like from an implementation standpoint. Is it just a planner? I don’t know.

The biggest lesson we’ve learned from Facade is the need to take an even more generative approach to interactive story. The drama manager approach has been fruitful, but it only works well if there is a big enough bag of content for the drama manager to choose from. The process of more-or-less manually writing slews of various hierarchies of behaviors has been the most laborious part of the project for us, and the reason the project has gone on at least a year longer than we originally planned for. Once the architecture was complete, it’s taken over 2 person-years of work just to create a short, varied but still limited, dramatic situation about a marriage falling apart.

Nicolas’ work, mentioned in the previous comment, is an example of new research in generative, interactive narrative; definitely check his papers out. From what I understand, among other things, his research goals include ways for the system to begin trying to “understand” the dramatic qualities of the experience in real-time, and somehow modulate the system’s response to enhance these qualities.

It would be great to have a general discussion of the merits of various AI & creativity techniques, in future threads of this blog.

I will just briefly introduce myself first. I am Magy Seif El-Nasr, just finished my PhD on Expressive lighting for Interactive Narrative. My view of interactive narrative has been more of a filmmakers’ view, where the drama manager combines (a) (similar to Michael and Andrew’s work) techniques for selecting story beats and (b) a visual plan to visually present them integrating camera, lighting, blocking, and postures/gestures.

I agree with Nicolas, tension is important to promote in an interactive narrative. I worked with many artists to produce Mirage (an interactive drama based on the Greek Tragedy Electra), we tried many techniques to keep the drama and tension and promote beats and character goals that aid in establishing the right tension. The technique that we finally adopted was a user-centric architecture based on Benedetti’s acting theory where beats are further divided into tactics that are selected by characters, and where the characters monitor the effect of the tactic on the user’s actions (mouse clicks, time to respond, etc.).. I didn’t yet test that with users, but I thought it was an interesting idea to try…

Also related to tension, from my experience writing the story, it seems, at least to me, that the success of tension or drama heavily rely on the setup and the existence of a clock. For example, in Mirage the clock was ‘Orestes’s arrival’. In the story, Orestes is the user’s double, his position or the meaning of the clock really depend on the user’s position and actions… But the clock was always helpful to increase the tension whenever needed.

Of course, investement is a very important element to keep the tension and drama going.

Another issue/comment that is worth mentioning also, is user modeling. In Mirage, the user’s personality was modeled as a point in a multi-dimentional scale describing his character as a coward, self-interested, passive, violent, or a reluctant hero. This, I think, helped us define the interactivity model within Mirage… As the story unfolds, the user’s character becomes more defined within this scale and his choices become more limited and the character’s reactions towards him starts to form depending on the personality. I thought that was also an interesting point, because I think user modeling is an important technique that may open up many doors for interactive narrative design.

Anyway, that was my two cents…

Instead, much of the field may think, “The lesson here is that this human-authored approach worked while none of the attempts at ‘emergent’ narrative have.” And, frankly, hiring a roomful of writers (even good ones, with track records) is quite a bit easier (and more sensible) than tackling unsolved AI research problems when one is trying to create a major art/entertainment project (the kind with budgets and deadlines).

In other words, I think the Facade approach, with the massive human authoring effort involved, may soon be seen as the only ‘production quality” approach we have to interactive drama.

To answer Noah’s comment, I would say that AI-based generativity is not just a matter of saving writing time. With an authored approach, the user feels like reading what has been written by an author, while with a generative approach, the user feels he is producing a situation, and that the system, on behalf of the writer, reacts to this situation, in a unique way. For example, in Façace, which is already generative up to a certain point, at any moment, the user can walk to the painting on the wall and comment it; the author has not predicted that the user would do that action at that precise moment, but he (with the programmer) has found a way to react to that event in a generic way that should work everytime. But in Façade, the user might perceive that his action “just” triggers some pre-written beats… or he might not!! We’ll see…

When will the rest of the world get to play with Facade? And if not the whole enchilada how about some of the pieces?

adam…