Distributed Drama Management: Beyond Double Appraisal in Emergent Narrative

In this technical paper, we describe an implementation of Distributed Drama Management (DDM). DDM is a concept which involves synthetic actor agents in an Emergent Narrative scenario acting on both an in-character level, which reflects the concerns of the characters, and an out-of-character level, which reflects the concerns of a storyteller. By selecting the most “dramatically appropriate” action from a set of autonomously proposed actions, Distributed Drama Management aims to retain the benefits of Emergent Narrative such as believability and agility of response to user actions, but attempts to provide a structurally and emotionally consistent experience.