Interactive drama presents one of the most challenging applications of autonomous characters, requiring characters to simultaneously engage in moment-by-moment personality-rich physical behavior, exhibit conversational competencies, and participate in a dynamically developing story arc. One way to advance the field and continue to make exciting progress is to develop building blocks needed for ...

Focusing on the work of the left-wing film and television director Roy Battersby, this article seeks to shed light on the issues at stake in the controversies surrounding the production and reception of ‘radical television drama’ during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Through an examination of a number of BBC productions that were either cut (Five Women), banned (Hit Suddenly Hit) or the subjec...

To enter Agnon's fictive universe, one must acknowledge the very central place occupied by Torah as the fabric of the world that both contains Creation and binds God to Israel. Torah, as pre-existing text, authorizes subsequent interpretations in the assumption that they are already contained within it. Using the texts of rabbinic tradition, Agnon maps out this territory in Seper, soper vesippu...

Males usually have little involvement in the dramas of social insect societies, but a newly identified Cardiocondyla ant species has been found to produce long-lived, murderous males, even before the first workers, in a new form of queen-queen competition.

Because it supports progress, drama embodies development and, thus, can be used to support development communication. In fact, drama is the most appropriate medium for effecting change for development because it 1) involves interpersonal communication; 2) broadens the meaning of development; 3) challenges assumptions, demands accountability, suggests remedies, and evaluates the totality of per...

A drama manager (DM) monitors an interactive experience, such as a computer game, and intervenes to shape the global experience so that it satisfies the author's expressive goals without decreasing a player's interactive agency. Most research work on drama management has proposed AI architectures and provided abstract evaluations of their effectiveness. A smaller body of work has evaluated the ...

Hypernetworks are a generalized graph structure representing higher-order interactions between variables. We present a method for self-organizing hypernetworks to learn an associative memory of sentences and to recall the sentences from this memory. This learning method is inspired by the “mental chemistry” model of cognition and the “molecular self-assembly” technology in biochemistry. Simulat...

Automated emotion recognition is an important process towards the effective adjustment of children in their environment. Unmatured children are easily influenced by violent activities from movies and television programs. Hence, violence rating systems are developed to information about the violent levels in movies and television programs to help parent make informed choices. In Thailand, a manu...

Entertainment-education dramas can persuade because they show characters who change their behavior to improve their lives. Stories have unique power and nuance to describe people’s behavior and interactions, and their consequences. When audience members see that they could be in the same situation as the characters, stories can move them to change, too. E-E is particularly able to influence beh...

A content analysis was conducted to examine sexual consequences on teen programming. The sample consisted of prime-time television dramas that featured characters between the ages of 12 and 22 years. Two major goals guided the study. First, the types of sexual consequences in teen programming were investigated. Results showed that emotional and social consequences far outnumbered physical conse...