Narrative Intelligence (NI) can help computational systems interact with users, such as through story generation, interactive narratives, and believable virtual characters. However, existing NI techniques generally require manually coded domain knowledge, restricting their scalability. An approach that intelligently, automatically and economically acquires script-like knowledge in any domain with strategic crowdsourcing will ease this bottleneck and broaden the application territory of narrative intelligence. This doctoral consortium paper defines the research problem, describes its significance, proposes a feasible research plan towards a Ph.D. dissertation, and reports on its current progress.

Authoring narrative content for interactive digital media can be both difficult and time consuming.The research proposed here aims at enhancing the capabilities of content creators through the development of a computational model that improves the quality of automatically generated stories, potentially decreasing the burden placed on the author. The quality and believability of a story can be significantly enhanced by the presence of compelling characters. To achieve this objective, I aim to develop a choice-based computational model that facilitates the automatic generation of narrative that includes characters that are made more compelling by the presence of distinct personality characteristics.

In this paper, we present adaptive quests, an extension to the dominant quest model that guides and motivates gameplay in MMORPG shared worlds. The standard model has proven effective, but is significantly incompatible with the desire for player driven change in the world. We present an incremental step to increasing player impact, discuss the problems it creates with the quest model, and show how adaptive quests can help reconcile the two. We present simulation experiments supporting not only that adaptive quests help mitigate those problems, but that they can actually improve them over the standard model.

In previous research we concluded that a personality profile, based on the Five Factor Model, can be constructed from observations of a player’s behavior in a module that we designed for Neverwinter Nights (Lankveld et al. 2011a). In the present research, we investigate whether we can do the same thing in an actual modern commercial video game, in this case the game Fallout 3. We stored automatic observations on 36 participants who played the introductory stages of Fallout 3. We then correlated these observations with the participants’ personality profiles, expressed by values for five personality traits as measured by the standard NEO-FFI questionnaire. Our analysis shows correlations between all five personality traits and the game observations. These results validate and generalize the results from our previous research (Lankveld et al. 2011a). We may conclude that Fallout 3, and by extension other modern video games, allows players to express their personality, and can therefore be used to create personality profiles.

Serious games offer an opportunity for players to learn communication skills by practicing conversations with nonplaying characters (NPCs). To realize this potential, the player needs freedom of play to discover the relationships between its actions and their effects on the partner and the conversation. Scripting is currently the common approach to design in-game dialogue. Although scripting is a robust technique, the approach tends to produce deterministic conversations, allowing little control to the player. It is claimed that a Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) approach to model the behavior of NPCs allows greater freedom to the player, and delivers better scalability and re-use of dialogues. This claim is evaluated by using BDI in the development of a sales-talk training game in the real-estate domain. It is concluded that BDI enables representative NPCs that respond appropriately and the game allows the player its freedom of choice to explore. The results also showed that BDI brings about new challenges to address, in order to further increase the quality of in-game dialogue.

Recent development in game AI has seen action planning and its derivates being adapted for controlling agents in classical types of games, such as FPSs or RPGs. Complementary, one can seek new types of gameplay elements inspired by planning. We propose and formally define a new game "genre" called anticipation games and demonstrate that planning can be used as their key concept both at design time and run time. In an anticipation game, a human player observes a computer controlled agent or agents, tries to predict their actions and indirectly helps them to achieve their goal. The paper describes an example prototype of an anticipation game we developed. The player helps a burglar steal an artifact from a museum guarded by guard agents. The burglar has incomplete knowledge of the environment and his plan will contain pitfalls. The player has to identify these pitfalls by observing burglar's behavior and change the environment so that the burglar replans and avoids the pitfalls. The game prototype is evaluated in a small-scale human-subject study, which suggests that the anticipation game concept is promising.

Feedback on player experience and behaviour can be invaluable to game designers, but there is need for specialised knowledge discovery tools to deal with high volume playtest data. We describe a study witha commercial third-person shooter, in which integrated player activity and experience data was captured and mined for design-relevant knowledge. We demonstrate that association rule learning and rule templates can be used to extractmeaningful rules relating player activity and experience during combat. We found that the number, type and quality of rules varies between experiences, and is affected by feature distributions. Further work is required on rule selection and evaluation.

We describe ANGELINA3, a system that can automatically develop games along a defined theme, by selecting appropriate multimedia content from a variety of sources and incorporating it into a game's design. We discuss these capabilities in the context of the FACE model for assessing progress in the building of creative systems, and discuss how ANGELINA3 can be improved through further work.

Non-player character diversity enriches game environments increasing their replay value. We propose a method for obtaining character behavior diversity based on the diversity of plans enacted by characters, and demonstrate this method in a scenario in which characters have multiple choices. Using case-based planning techniques, we reuse plans for varied character behavior, which simulate different personality traits.

Heuristic search has been very successful in abstract game domains such as Chess and Go. In video games, however, adoption has been slow due to the fact that state and move spaces are much larger, real-time constraints are harsher, and constraints on computational resources are tighter. In this paper we present a fast search method — Alpha-Beta search for durative moves— that can defeat commonly used AI scripts in RTS game combat scenarios of up to 8 vs. 8 units running on a single core in under 5ms per search episode. This performance is achieved by using standard search enhancements such as transposition tables and iterative deepening, and novel usage of combat AI scripts for sorting moves and state evaluation via playouts. We also present evidence that commonly used combat scripts are highly exploitable — opening the door for a promising line of research on opponent combat modelling.