Summer is here and may come some free time explore space in game form and one that caught our eye recently explores how a fictional artificial intelligence (AI) solves problems in space. So, naturally, we couldn't wait to launch right into it. The game, "Observation," developed by No Code and published by Devolver Digital, was released for a few platforms in 2019 and expanded to Microsoft Xbox last year. Unusually for space games, you play as the AI and attempt to help an astronaut who is facing a catastrophic problem on a near-future space station. Your mission as the AI, named SAM, is to open doors, turn valves and solve problems with an astronaut named Emma. An early tense moment in the game has you and Emma working together to contain a fire in the space station, and then Emma asks you to check out the source of the fire using your cameras and sensors.

Need to remind the family to take out the garbage, pick up a prescription at the drugstore, or perform some other household duty? Just leave a digital sticky note on your Google smart display. First announced back at CES in January, the Family Notes feature is rolling out to Google smart displays starting today, along with an update to the Family Bell feature, interactive stories, and "find my family" functionality. First up, you'll soon be able to ask Google Assistant to leave a sticky note on your Google Nest Hub, Google Nest Hub Max, or another Google Assistant-enabled display. Just ask, "Hey Google, leave a family note that says pick up the dry cleaning," and Google Assistant will leave a digital sticky note in the top-right corner of the screen that reads, "Pick up the dry cleaning," along with a timestamp and the name of the person who left the note.

TellTale's'Minecraft: Story Mode' is coming to Netflix in 2018. Minecraft: Story Mode is coming to Netlfix later this year. That's not a new TV show, it's a video game developed by TellTale, the studio behind the popular Walking Dead games. Of course, whether TellTale makes games or "interactive stories" is up for debate, and Netflix is insisting that the company doesn't consider this a video game. "We don't have any plans to get into gaming," a Netflix spokesperson said in a statement.

Google has today launched a re-imagined version of its free Earth mapping service, weaving in storytelling and artificial intelligence. The new programme lets people get a close-up look of the planet from the comfort of their computers, smartphones or tablets. The new-look Google Earth enables its users to learn about far-flung corners of the globe under the guidance of scientists from Nasa and prestigious research institutions. Google Earth's new start-up screen offers a global view of the Earth. 'This is our gift to the world,' Google Earth director Rebecca Moore said.

Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have developed a new artificially intelligent system that crowdsources plots for interactive stories, which are popular in video games and let players choose different branching story options. With potentially limitless crowdsourced plot points, the system could allow for more creative stories and an easier method for interactive narrative generation. Current AI models for games have a limited number of scenarios, no matter what a player chooses. They depend on a dataset already programmed into a model by experts. Using the Georgia Tech approach, one might imagine a Star Wars game using online fan fiction to let the AI system generate countless paths for a player to take.

Agency, being one's ability to perform an action and have some influence over the world, is fundamental to interactive entertainment. Although much of the games industry is concerned with providing more agency to its players, what seems to matter more is how much agency each player will actually perceive. In this paper, we present a computational model of this phenomena, based on the notion that the amount of agency that one perceives depends on how much they desire the outcomes that result from their decisions. Using a structure for high-agency stories that we designed specifically for this intent, we present the results of a 141-participant user study that tests our model's ability to select subsequent events in an original interactive story. Using a newly validated survey instrument for measuring both agency and fun, we found with a high degree of confidence that event sequences selected by our model result in players perceiving more agency than players who experience event sequences that our model does not recommend.

We present a system that uses evolutionary optimization to suggest new story-world events that, if added to an existing interactive story, would most improve the average interactive experience, according to author-supplied criteria. In doing so, we aim to apply some of the ideas from drama-managed storytelling, such as authorial aesthetic control, in an unguided setting more akin to emergent storytelling: rather than guiding or directing a player towards an experience in line with an author's aesthetic goals, the storyworld is augmented with new content in a way that will tend to align with an author's goals, even if the player is not guided. In this paper, we present an offline system, and demonstrate its robustness to a number of variations in authorial criteria and player-model assumptions. This is intended to lay the groundwork for a future system that would generate new content online, allowing for interactive stories larger than those explicitly written by the author.