2009 AIIDE Behavior Architecture Marcus Trenton, Duane Szafron, Joshua Friesen, and Curis Onuczko, Quest Patterns for Story-based Computer Games, Proceedings of the Sixth Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE), Stanford, USA, October, 2010, 204-209. abstract or pdf.
Abstract:

As game designers shift focus from graphical realism to immersive stories, the number of game-object interactions grows exponentially. Games use manually written scripts to control interactions. ScriptEase provides game designers with generative patterns that generate scripting code to control common interactions. This paper describes a new kind of generative pattern, quest patterns, that generate scripting code to control story plot. We present our quest pattern architecture and study results that show quest patterns are easy-to-use and reduce plot scripting errors.