Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Interactive Narrative is an approach to interactive entertainment that enables the player to make decisions that directly affect the direction and/or outcome of the narrative experience being delivered by the computer system. One common interactive narrative technique is to use a drama manager to achieve a specific narrative experience. To achieve character believability, autonomous character agents can be used in conjunction with drama management. In this paper, we describe the problem of in which character believability and drama management come into conflict and character agents must intelligently produce behaviors that explain away schizophrenic behavior. We describe technologies for implementing semi-autonomous believable agents that can fail believably.

In order for interactive agents to be believable, they will need to respond to any likely situation in a manner that is consistent with their personality, as well as their position within social hierarchies. Thus believable agents will need to have a clearly defined personality, social role, and other traits that will govern their actions in a virtual world. The goal of this paper is to present a template that can be used to define such traits of a character in order to maintain consistency. The template will be dominated by a model that defines aspects of personality typically used to define persons across cultures, aiding both intuitive creation by authors, and acceptance by users. It will also be able to take advantage of character stereotypes to ease the authoring process. In addition to this, a social hierarchy framework is given.

Human emotions are known to play an important role in the users’ engagement, namely by activating their attention, perception and memory skills, which in turn will help to understand the story – and hopefully perceive, or rather “feel” it as an entertaining experience. Despite the more and more realistic and immersive use of 3D computer graphics, multi-channel sound and sophisticated input devices – mainly forced by game applications – the emotional participation of users still seems a weak point in most interactive games and narrative systems. This paper describes methods and concepts on how to bring emotional experiencing and emotional expression into interactive storytelling systems. In particular, the Emotional Wizard is introduced, as an emerging module for authoring emotional expression and experiencing. Within the INSCAPE framework, this module is meant to improve elicited emotions as elements of style, which are used deliberately by an author within an integrated storytelling environment.

We describe extensions to VirtualHuman, a multimodal dialogue system. It uses an interactive game scenario to demonstrate real-time multi-party dialogue between two human users and three virtual characters. The focus is to make the interaction more natural, robust and flexible. Here, we address issues of speech recognition in noisy environments, resolution of spatial references, and enhancements in the character interactions.

Believability is a basic requirement for non-player characters of videogames. Players enjoy characters with personalities that reflect human behavior, specially if those personalities combine well with players’ temperaments. This paper explains a model for customizing automatically non-player characters (NPC) according to the players temperament, which is obtained before the game session. The model uses Case-Based Reasoning and Ontologies to adapt the behavior of a NPC, which is the companion of a player character in the described example.

Personalizing the playing experience is a key factor in making players of computer games feel involved in the virtual world; however, current Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games only to a limited degree allocate development or running resources towards facilitating a personalized experience. In Pen and Paper Role Playing Games, the player-controlled characters form a key component in facilitating the formation of a personalized experience. In these games, characters are often more than the association of stats and skills popular in online games, and several approaches towards utilizing the character-based information directly to personalize the game playing have been developed, e.g. personality systems. Some of these systems can be integrated into online games, providing a realistic and financially feasible method for improving the ability of these games to personalize the experience to the individual players.

This paper proposes and outlines a novel method for designing multiplayer computer role-playing games that revolve around procedural interactive narratives, which are further developed by the participating players. The proposed Plot Cluster system is evaluated practically during the design and construction of the experimental game . The functionality and applicability of the approach is further validated with the empirical field experiment with 260 test subjects. Plot clusters enable the game designers to create controlled but re-playable emergent storylines that intertwine the participating players using multi-tier network structures.

The Pen-and-Paper role-playing game is a successful example of collaborative interactive narrative. Meanwhile, computer-based role-playing games, while structurally similar, offer quite different narrative experiences. Here results are presented of an experimental study of role-playing gamers in Pen-and-Paper and computer-supported settings. Communication patterns are shown to vary significantly on measures such as the share of in-character statements and the share of dramatically motivated statements. These results are discussed in the light of differences between the two gaming forms and finally some design implications are discussed.

A study on how role-play through narrative elements of social communication can be implemented in a computer-based environment. Contemporary computer role-playing games do not support playing roles in a social aspect. Play is conducted in a functional and task-oriented way due to the design of the gameplay. An experimental role-playing game, was constructed to test aspects of social play and elements borrowed from more traditional forms of role-play. The aim is to determine some essential elements the players need to assume a role and play towards socially structured goals.

MMORPGs are an increasingly popular form of entertainment, yet are limited in their ability to tell stories when compared to other media. This paper analyses some of the underlying reasons for this inability, using techniques form narrative analysis. One of the basic problems identified is that the design of MMORPGs inhibits the use of techniques used in other media to create engaging stories by manipulating the presentation of time. The other issue identified is the problems MMORPGs experience in presenting stories with meaningful consequence. A means to a possible solution to these problems, in separating the personal player view point from that of the overall world view, is discussed.