Character-Focused Narrative Generation for Execution in Virtual Worlds

Because narrative plays such a key role in the understanding of events in our daily lives, the ability to generate narrative can be of great use in virtual reality systems whose purpose is to entertain, train, or educate their users. Narrative generation, however, is complicated by the conflicting goals of plot coherence – the appearance that events in the narrative lead towards the narrative’s outcome – and character believability – the appearance that events in the narrative are driven by the traits of the story world characters. Many systems are capable of achieving either one or the other; we present a new approach to narrative generation in the Actor Conference system, which is capable of generating narratives with both plot coherence and character believability. These narratives are declarative in nature, readily lending themselves to execution by embodied agents in virtual reality environments.