Importance of well-motivated characters in interactive narratives: an empirical evaluation

Authors:
Mei Si;Stacy Marsella;David Pynadath
Affiliations:
Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, CA;Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, CA;Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, CA
Venue:
ICIDS'10 Proceedings of the Third joint conference on Interactive digital storytelling
Year:
2010

Citing 7
Cited 0

Agents' Interaction in Virtual Storytelling

IVA '01 Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Agents
The Effects of Mood on Individuals' Use of Structured Decision Protocols

Organization Science
Managing interaction between users and agents in a multi-agent storytelling environment

AAMAS '03 Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
Thespian: using multi-agent fitting to craft interactive drama

Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
Reinforcement learning for declarative optimization-based drama management

AAMAS '06 Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
Directorial Control in a Decision-Theoretic Framework for Interactive Narrative

ICIDS '09 Proceedings of the 2nd Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling: Interactive Storytelling
Evaluating directorial control in a character-centric interactive narrative framework

Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems: volume 1 - Volume 1

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

In order for the author to create his/her intended effects using interactive narratives, the user has to be able to understand his/her experience as designed by the author. In this paper, we argue that a key desideratum for interactive narrative frameworks is to model the characters' motivational consistency during the interaction. This work reports an empirical study for evaluating the importance of using well-motivated characters in interactive narratives. The results demonstrate that inconsistency in the characters' motivations can confuse the user and affect the user's expectations and interpretations of the events in the story.