Player modeling in the interactive drama architecture

The field of interactive drama attempts to provide a player of a virtual system with a rich dramatic experience that provides him with a large set of consequential actions that directly affect how that experience progresses. As the player makes decisions, the system incorporates those decisions and adapts the environment to continue the ongoing narrative. The amount of content possibly written for such experiences, however, is finite. In a highly interactive world, the player's capabilities may easily exceed the story experiences covered by the authored content (called the story space). A major problem in interactive drama is how to create a large story space and how to believably manage the player's experience so it remains within the boundaries of that story space. I present here the Interactive Drama Architecture (IDA) which addresses this problem. IDA employs a real-time story management agent, called the director , which attempts to subtly guide the player's experience to stay within the boundaries of an authored story space. A key approach to this story management is the use of a model of player behavior and knowledge, which is used to intelligently anticipate problematic situations before they occur. This dissertation describes the functions of the director agent, the story representation, the definition of synthetic characters and how they relate to the director, and an experimental design and results for evaluating the use of prediction for story management in an interactive drama.