My Research

Interactive Storytelling via Player Modelling

Motivation

Is it possible to tell stories through games? Certainly. Like the carefully written script of a movie, one event unfolds after another, and another, gradually leading the player toward a well-planned conclusion. Unfortunately, in most digital games, the player's path through the story is often quite strict; there may be many opportunities to wander around, explore the game's environment, and experience an array of side-plots, but ultimately nothing important happens until the player performs an action that triggers the next step of the predetermined plot. Is this such a bad thing? For one, it breaks the player's sense of immersion in the game; as soon as she realizes that the world full of diversions has little to no effect on what's actually going to happen, she might wonder why the diversions are there at all (think of reading a novel whose author suggests skipping several chapters, since they have nothing to do with the story being told). Secondly, in story-based games with predetermined plots, there is little motivation to play the game again; the excitement and uncertainty felt during the first-time reading of a novel is lost in later readings.

Inspiration

Interactive Storytelling suggests an answer to the problems given above, by asking game-story authors to relax. Instead of specifying exactly what will happen in the game world, their task becomes the specification of everything that can happen in the world, and the game engine then builds a story by connecting the pieces together. This process is well known to the players of Pen & Paper Role-Playing Games, where a group of players' experiences in a fantasy world are shaped by one or more "Game Masters" - players who choose and describe what transpires in the world in response to the players' actions. Game Masters have a working idea of the world in which the game is set; they know what can conceivably happen, and are able to choose sequences of events that lead the players through a fantasy story of their design. Supposing that a set of authors had been convinced to specify the world of things that can happen, how would the game engine choose which things should happen? In answering this question, the techniques used by Game Masters inspire my approach; they watch, and they learn. By observing their players' reactions to the events that occur throughout the story, Game Masters can gain a sense of what things the players might like to have happen, or what situations they might enjoy being in. Given this knowledge, Game Masters are able to tailor the story being told to the specific preferences of the people who are playing, which hopefully improves the experience for all players involved.

My Goal

The goal of my research is to design and implement a system capable of choosing which events should come next in an interactive story, by mimicking the way in which the Game Masters of Pen & Paper Role-Playing Games learn and exploit their players' preferences. I intend to focus my work on the domain of Computer Role-Playing Games, and am currently working on a prototype system using BioWare's Aurora Neverwinter Toolset, the tool used to create Neverwinter Nights, a multi-award-winning computer role-playing game.

Interested?

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Curriculum Vitae

Publications

The following is a list of the work that I've been fortunate enough to have published.