Toward a Unified Understanding of Experience Management

We present a new way to represent and understand experience managers — AI agents that tune the parameters of a running game to pursue a designer's goal. Existing representations of AI managers are diverse, which complicates the task of drawing useful comparisons between them. Contrary to previous representations, ours uses a point of unity as its basis: that every game/manager pair can be viewed as only a game with the manager embedded inside. From this basis, we show that several common, differently-represented concepts of experience management can be re-expressed in a unified way. We demonstrate our new representation concretely by comparing two different representations, Search-Based Drama Management and Generalized Experience Management, and we present the insights that we have gained from this effort.