[MUD-Dev] narrative

[Bruce Mitchener]

Joe Andrieu wrote:

> The goal here is to get a writer to distill the essence of a good
> story and use AI to interpret it given the context and actions of
> the player so that the resulting experience is a coherent dramatic
> arc built around the natural self-motivated actions of the player.

Okay, so if we start to look at this, we can see several pieces:

    * Distilling the essence of a story or plotline
       * What are the important aspects?
          * Points of interaction with the world
          * Points of interaction with the player
          * Time synchronization points
          * When and where and how decisions/branches get
            made.
          * Plenty of other stuff.
    * Representing that essence in a way that the computer
      comprehends.
       * This was one of the things that has been done in
         various papers, like the declarative format in one
         of the papers that originally started this thread.
       * This is a tough thing because you want it to be really
         easy as a tool for the end-user (writers) and you don't
         want them writing code, and so on.
    * Representing the state of the world and how it can be
      interacted with, in a way that is accessible to the narrative
      engine. (This is related to some of the previous discussions
      about the use of ontological models and OpenCyc.)
    * Keeping track of the events that involve a player or group
      of players, the stories that they're involved in, the state
      of the world around them, and then presenting them with
      things in the gameworld that foster that dramatic arc
      while still remaining sensible and logical for the player.
    * The ability to divine the motivation and intent behind the
      actions of the player.

I'm not sure where the industry stands on the last 2 items, and I'm
not as directly knowledgeable about the first.  But the second and
third are things that I've been working with.

Would anyone like to keep fleshing out some of these things and talk
about what they're doing and how it might be made to be better? 
Pointers to relevant research and existing work are (as always)
entirely welcome.

I'll respond to that myself over the weekend as time is running
short for me at the moment.

  - Bruce


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