Simulating the Adaptive Behaviour of Storytellers in Computer Video Games

When given the opportunity to interact with their audience, human storytellers are adaptive. Simple conversations and performances of improvisational theatre are both examples of situations in which the content or presentation of stories are dynamically adapted, either to facilitate communication or elicit a particular audience reaction. In the case of storytelling for entertainment, audience enjoyment is the storyteller’s primary goal; if immediate feedback from the audience suggests that this goal is not being met, the storyteller may adapt the story’s content to better suit its current audience, using their feedback as a guide. Although this process of user-adaptive, interactive storytelling has existed for thousands of years, its computational simulation has only recently begun to be explored. In this paper, we present PaSSAGE (Player-Specific Stories via Automatically Generated Events), an Artificial Intelligence system that aims to simulate the adaptive behaviour of human storytellers: automatically learning its current audience’s preferences, and using them to adapt the content of an interactive story. For a review of related work, the reader is encouraged to consult our previous publication [1].