Narrative interpolation
Author
Here at my school there''s a new course being offered for the first time ever: Artificial Intelligence in the Narritive Arts. We had the first class yesterday. One of the issues raise was how interactive storytellers, a concept I consider applicable to games, try to keep the user along "story threads" that are "interesting." As a consequence, whenever the user begins to progress along an uninteresting path it becomes necessary to "force" the user back.
Think linearity.
One of my focuses over the duration of the course will be more dynamic means of story creation and greater user flexibility. The rough concept I have is to create dramatic arcs comprised of "story nodes," and then interpolating state information from the nodes to create a compelling story. In other words, the experience (I use this term because our class is not aimed at games) begins with a context and premise, from which the user may explore and/or take decisions. These decisions would advance the user state along a directed graph (think spider web) and create a "virtual b-spline" describing where the user has been and providing "memory" for realistic dynamic reaction to the user/character.
Say we start at a node A which has connections to 5 nodes {B1 - 5}, each of which has a varied number of links to other nodes {{BA},..., {BE}}. Some of those connections may be bi-directional, meaning the story may revisit scenes/situations several times. Now if each of the nodes contains a time stamp for when the narrative arrived there, a list of event nodes for what happened there, etc, some of the new advances in AI (particularly an AI bot that writes fiction) would be able to generate a convincing narrative/storyline based on the user''s decisions and a few external stimuli.
I think this could be a very powerful technology and could blow the lid off the RPG genre, but it will be quite a while before the technology is ready.
Comments, critiques, suggestions all welcome.
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Thanks to Kylotan for the idea!
I''ve actually spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I find the concept very intersting. The fact that your school is offering a course is sweet!
The biggest problem is, of course, finding a way to define "interesting" so that your AI can understand it. Do we define it on the basis of how many active plot elements there are, or how well they interact? And how can we determine from the actions of the user if they are actively interested?
Other problems arise from needing to know the course of the story in advance, like if you intend to use foreshadowing at all.
Where I think this can be really neat, however, is allowing a player to customize their character''s goals within a game. For example, in all of the recent Final Fantasy games the main goals of the character are heroism and love. I would love to play a game with as rich a story, but maybe decide that power or fame were my goal, and tell the cute little anime chick to bug off.
BTW, what school are we talking about? This sounds like a really intersting class.
"So crucify the ego, before it''s far too late. To leave behind this place so negative and blind and cynical, and you will come to find that we are all one mind. Capable of all that''s imagined and all conceivable."
- Tool
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The biggest problem is, of course, finding a way to define "interesting" so that your AI can understand it. Do we define it on the basis of how many active plot elements there are, or how well they interact? And how can we determine from the actions of the user if they are actively interested?
Other problems arise from needing to know the course of the story in advance, like if you intend to use foreshadowing at all.
Where I think this can be really neat, however, is allowing a player to customize their character''s goals within a game. For example, in all of the recent Final Fantasy games the main goals of the character are heroism and love. I would love to play a game with as rich a story, but maybe decide that power or fame were my goal, and tell the cute little anime chick to bug off.
BTW, what school are we talking about? This sounds like a really intersting class.
"So crucify the ego, before it''s far too late. To leave behind this place so negative and blind and cynical, and you will come to find that we are all one mind. Capable of all that''s imagined and all conceivable."
- Tool
------------------------------
Author
quote:Original post by WayfarerX
I''ve actually spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I find the concept very intersting. The fact that your school is offering a course is sweet!
Yeah, the course is an outcome of a lecture/discussion series called the Ashby Dialogs.
quote:The biggest problem is, of course, finding a way to define "interesting" so that your AI can understand it.
I''m actually not interested in defining "interesting". The user can wander in the wilderness for 40 years for all I care (and never make it to the promised land to boot). I''m interested in the AI being able to recognize the user''s progression and generate a "storyline" of sorts based on previous actions (and inactions). In the preceding example, the story should/could be "And our hero - who wasn''t a hero at all - wandered aimlessly in the desert for 40 years, accomplishing nothing."
You might want to search for references to Author (the AI bot I referred to above - I don''t have the links right now) to see how a narrative could be generated. It was built by people at North Carolina State University.
Being able to tell cute anime chicks to bug off, among other things, is one of the objectives of this technology - to enable the user fulfill thier own objectives within the given game world (wrt games) or the realm described in the interactive narrative.
quote:BTW, what school are we talking about? This sounds like a really intersting class.
UNC Greensboro. (Go Spartans! Or whatever)
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Thanks to Kylotan for the idea!
Here''s another approach. Rather than trying to come up with clever ways for an AI to auto-generate a story, why not come up with better mechanisms through which real storytellers (I mean, professional writers and not just people who think they have a good story idea) can tell stories in games.
That isn''t meant to sound snarky. I just think part of the problem is we have such archaic and clumsy methods for telling stories in games, especially with dialogue. There is a lot of research being done in communications theory around this idea. If you want to find ways to tell stories in games, look into some of this work, a lot of which is being done at MIT.
That isn''t meant to sound snarky. I just think part of the problem is we have such archaic and clumsy methods for telling stories in games, especially with dialogue. There is a lot of research being done in communications theory around this idea. If you want to find ways to tell stories in games, look into some of this work, a lot of which is being done at MIT.
Author
quote:Original post by Tacit
Here''s another approach. Rather than trying to come up with clever ways for an AI to auto-generate a story, why not come up with better mechanisms through which real storytellers (I mean, professional writers and not just people who think they have a good story idea) can tell stories in games.
Well, our focus isn''t specifically games (and the course title does have the term Artificial Intelligence in it). However, I agree. The problem is that human storytelling is inherently linear and therefore restricts the level of interactivity. Writers will of course be needed to create scenarios for the various plot nodes/points, but stringing them together coherently is where the AI would come into play. If you had just 16 plot nodes, which you could revisit, and no limit to sequence length then you''d have an infinite number of potential stories - all created from the same basic elements. Sure, some of them would be absolutely "boring" (if the user kept revisiting the same nodes, for example) but could have the environmental "drama" of a National Geographic article series.
quote:That isn''t meant to sound snarky. I just think part of the problem is we have such archaic and clumsy methods for telling stories in games, especially with dialogue. There is a lot of research being done in communications theory around this idea. If you want to find ways to tell stories in games, look into some of this work, a lot of which is being done at MIT.
Again, the focus isn''t specifically games. As per the dialog issue, however, the inherent limitation I see is the fact that the dialog is pre-written, the objectives are predetermined, the characters are preconceived and their potential relationships predestined. With this system, should it ever be implemented, the user would be presented with an environment and a basic premise (say, Middle Earth and there is a new dark menace). The user may choose to seek out more information on this menace - or run for the mountains and spend his/her lifetime exploring them and cultivating the forests there. Absolute flexibility.
Say the user then has a change of heart and decides to go find out what the menace had come to. Well, the world would have advanced without him/her - landscapes may have changed, horrors may have transpired, rebellions and resistances may have been forged and crushed depending on how long we dallied in the mountains. Just a short while ago a classmate and I were discussing a model for inter-personal relationships in interactive media that would tie in strongly with this.
As you can see, the objective is divergent from the current trend in games, which is why I continually stress that this is not about games. The methods and technology being developed may not be applicable to consumer entertainment/media for a good while yet.
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Thanks to Kylotan for the idea!
Have you read anything about Chris Crawford''s Erasmotron ? It''s something of an inverse/analogue approach to the problem of interactive fiction.
Just my gut-level response,
ld
Just my gut-level response,
ld
Well crud. This is exactly the kind of thing I''m tinkering with now (see a recent thread posted in the Writing forum). I''d love to get a copy of the course materials.
OTOH, I wonder what a node is supposed to be. In traditional IF a node was a room, representing a physical place. But stories aren''t composed of rooms, they''re composed of scenes.
So does the class intend to use nodes to model archetypcal scenes? Or just another version of standard IF?
JSwing
OTOH, I wonder what a node is supposed to be. In traditional IF a node was a room, representing a physical place. But stories aren''t composed of rooms, they''re composed of scenes.
So does the class intend to use nodes to model archetypcal scenes? Or just another version of standard IF?
JSwing
Anybody got any links to any of this stuff? Sounds very useful for what I''m doing...
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Oluseyi, my comments were not related to your course specifically, but the subject in general.
You raise some good points, but if you take your concept of story nodes and expand the scope to the extent where a node becomes a level of a game, you have a lot more possibilities for what you can do with storytelling. Add to that a simple but effective system for dynamic behaviour-driven dialogue (through trees, not strictly AI -- no chatterbots), and you''ve got something entirely different.
This is the system I''m exploring. It works in theory, but has yet to be proven in practice.
R.
You raise some good points, but if you take your concept of story nodes and expand the scope to the extent where a node becomes a level of a game, you have a lot more possibilities for what you can do with storytelling. Add to that a simple but effective system for dynamic behaviour-driven dialogue (through trees, not strictly AI -- no chatterbots), and you''ve got something entirely different.
This is the system I''m exploring. It works in theory, but has yet to be proven in practice.
R.
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