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Invited OS  PG PD

Interactive Narrative: from procedural generation of gameplay to brave new game genres

Date  
September 1 (Wed) 11:20 - 12:20
Format  
Session (60min.)
Expected Skill

Producers, AI Programmers, Game Designers

Ideas Take Away

State-of-the-Art understanding of an important area of research of potential high impact on gaming technology

The concept of Interactive Storytelling has gained popularity in recent years as one which can characterise the future of gameplay. Current research in the field aim at producing specific technologies for narrative generation, which would make Interactive Storytelling more than a high-level design concept. These techniques can be seen as extending procedural generation to the game actions themselves. Furthermore, Interactive Storytelling demands sophisticated interaction and I/O mechanisms and bears strong relationships to dialogue understanding and generation.
This talk will present State-of-the-Art research in the field, illustrating the most promising directions and also the technical challenges to be overcome. It will review the origins and main approaches to Interactive Storytelling, from the “Holodeck” metaphor to desktop games, and introduce key concepts and vocabulary. It will describe candidate technologies for implementing narrative generation and will relate them to recent trends in game AI. We will discuss also the relationship between narrative generation and other forms of dynamic content generation, in particular for NPC dialogues. In addition, the presentation will include insight on relevant interaction techniques and the synergies between Interactive Storytelling and language-based interfaces, from chatterbots to dialogue and speech recognition systems.
These different aspects will be illustrated by results from research prototypes, some of which have been developed in partnership with industry, showing State-of-the-Art techniques in operation as well as discussing how these can be integrated at various stages of the games production process.
Finally, it will discuss how Interactive Storytelling can benefit existing game genres but also how it can extend the existing genres to provide new sorts of player experience and attract new audience to computer games.
The presentation is primarily aimed at AI developers but will also be of interest to producers, game designers, investors and studio managers.

* The session contents are based on the information provided by the speakers.

  • Marc Cavazza

    Marc Cavazza

    Professor

    School of Computing

    Teesside University

    Marc Cavazza is a Professor at Teesside University (United Kingdom) and is recognised as one of the leading researchers in Interactive Storytelling. His group at Teesside has been active in the field for over 10 years, and its members are also teaching computer games development in one of the largest dedicated courses in Europe. The group has been involved in many research projects, some in partnership with computer games companies, and has developed no less than five different Interactive Storytelling prototypes since 2002.
    He has published over 200 papers, including some of the most cited papers in Interactive Storytelling, and has been regularly invited to give presentations and introductory lectures on the topic. He has been a programme committee member for 80 conferences in the field of Virtual Agents, Interactive Storytelling and Entertainment Computing. He also chairs the IFIP Working Group 14.1 on Digital Storytelling, which is under IFIP TC14 on Entertainment Computing.
    In 2010, He is serving as co-Chair for the ACM Intelligent User Interfaces and the ACM Multimedia Conferences, and is one of the keynote speakers at the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games. He is the project co-ordinator of the FP7 European Network of Excellence IRIS on Interactive Storytelling and, since 2009, the acting co-ordinator of the FP6 Companions Project, which is one of the largest research projects on conversational characters.