Collaborative narrative generation in persistent virtual environments

We describe witness-narrator agents, a framework for collaborative narrative generation in persistent virtual environments such as massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs). Witness-narrator agents allow reports of events in the environment to be published to external audiences so that they can keep up with events within the game world (e.g., via a weblog or SMS messages), or fed back into the environment to embellish and enhance the ongoing experience with new narrative elements derived from participants’ own achievements. The framework consists of agent roles for recognising, editing and presenting reports of events to a variety of output media. Techniques for recognising events from an ontology of events are described, as well as how the agent team is coordinated to ensure good coverage of events in a large scale environment.