Narrative planning is the use of automated planning to construct, communicate, and understand stories, a form of information to which human cognition and enaction is pre-disposed. We review the narrative planning problem in a manner suitable as an introduction to the area, survey different plan-based methodologies and affordances for reasoning about narrative, and discuss open challenges relevant to the broader AI community.

A virtual reality (VR) system’s interface determines its corresponding interaction fidelity. While there exist several naturally-mapped interfaces, these have not been directly compared – in terms of presence, engagement, perceived performance, and real performance – to a more commonly-used interface for interacting with virtual reality: the gamepad. Because gamepads have evolved over several decades and have widespread adoption, it is pragmatic to ask whether it is viable to import them into the design of VR experiences. To study this, we developed a first-person shooter (FPS) Virtual environment and contrasted the VR experience using the Microsoft Xbox 360 controller against the HTC VIVE wand. We assessed the effect of the input device on self-reported presence, engagement, and performance as well as real performance in terms of accuracy and speed, two metrics relevant for our particular environment. A within-subjects FPS shooting task under accuracy and time constraints confirmed our hypotheses in favor of the VIVE wand: presence, engagement, perceived performance, and real performance were deemed significantly higher than the Xbox controller condition. These results are contextualized with participants‘ comments in a post-experiment debrief, in which (paradoxically) several participants reported preferring the gamepad. We discuss the implications of our findings and how what we call genre fidelity can impact the design of VR experiences.

The intersection of gameplay and story has been widely debated in games scholarship (i.e. the ludology/narratology debate). It has also manifested in concepts used in game discourse (e.g. “ludonarrative dissonance”) and development (e.g. “what is narrative design?”). We propose that goals, as a constituent element of games, is a novel and fruitful nexus point between story and gameplay. We provide an analytical framework that articulates and bridges the relationship between the goal structures in games and their narrative counterparts. This framework is anchored upon what we define as a narrative goal: an interpretation of a ludological goal. We can thus formally account for a narrative goal (e.g. “Rescue the prince”) that requires players to act in a way that satisfies a corresponding game imperative (e.g. Reach- ). Finally, we articulate our work’s foundational relevance to narrative design and associated issues.

We present a study that investigates the heretofore unexplored relationship between a player's sense of her narrative role in an interactive narrative role-playing game and the options she selects when faced with choice structures during gameplay. By manipulating a player's knowledge over her role, and examining in-game options she preferred in choice structures, we discovered what we term the Mimesis Effect: when players were explicitly given a role, we found a significant relationship between their role and their in-game actions; participants role-play even if not instructed to, exhibiting a preference for actions consistent with their role. Further, when players were not explicitly given a role, participants still role-played -- they were consistent with an implicit role -- but did not agree on which role to implicitly be consistent with. We discuss our findings and broader implications of our work to both game development and games research.

We present work toward computationally defining a model of narrative comprehension vis-à-vis memory of narrative events, via an automated planning knowledge representation, capable of being used in a narrative generation context.

We report on the experience of teaching an industry-validated course on Artificial Intelligence in Computer Games within the Simulation and Game Design department at a two-year community college during a 16-week semester. The course format used a blended learning just-in-time teaching approach, which included active learning programming exercises and one-on-one student interactions. Moskal's Attitudes Toward Computer Science survey showed a positive and significant increase in students in both interest (W(10) = 25, p = 0.011) and professional (W(10) = 49.5, p = 0.037) constructs. The Felder-Soloman Index of Learning Styles (n = 14) failed to identify any statistically significant differences in learning styles when compared to a four-year CS1 class. In the final class evaluation, 8 out of 13 students (62%) strongly or very strongly preferred the blended learning approach. We validated this course through four semi-structured interviews with game companies. The interview results suggest that companies are strongly favorable to the course content and structure. The results of this work serve as a template that community colleges can adopt for their curriculum.

This work seeks to validate the use of a situation model (a model for the comprehension processes in non-interactive narrative) for use modeling a player's comprehension process within interactive narratives and games. Unlike conventional narratives, games contain actions and events that might not carry any narrative significance; consequently, a cognitive model of player understanding may require a new distinction between "narratively important" and "narratively unimportant" events. This hypothesis was tested in an experiment using Event Segmentation Theory. Our results failed to reject the null hypothesis (Fisher's exact test, p = 1) but were insightful. Narrative importance seems to be perceptually oriented, and dependent on the outcomes of the event in question. Although our data failed to reject the null hypothesis, more work must be done before rejecting the necessity of the distinction between narratively important and unimportant events when modeling a player's comprehension process of an unfolding story-focused game.

This paper discusses a research direction which focuses on a framework intended to help solve the problem of user-interaction versus story coherency in interactive narratives. The framework revolves around a concept named "narrative affordance," which draws from work in visual psychology and human-computer interaction and involves a declarative notion of afforded actions and a model of perceivable actions by a user of an interactive narrative. The paper also discusses motivation for the importance of the work and a future research plan.