Fuzzy cognitive goal net for interactive storytelling plot design

ABSTRACT

Interactive storytelling attracts a lot of research interests among the interactive entertainments in recent years. Designing story plot for interactive storytelling is currently one of the most critical problems of interactive storytelling. Some traditional AI planning methods, such as Hierarchical Task Network, Heuristic Searching Method are widely used as the planning tool for the story plot design. This paper proposes a model called Fuzzy Cognitive Goal Net as the story plot planning tool for interactive storytelling, which combines the planning capability of Goal net and reasoning ability of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps. Compared to conventional methods, the proposed model shows a well-established temporal structure for story plot. It delegates the storytelling process to drama manager agent and sub drama manager agents. Dynamic storylines are prepared for the audiences' interactions. Fuzzy Cognitive Maps provide the drama manager agents strong reasoning capability with respect to story context and user interactions, which empowers the storytelling characteristics of context-awareness and user-awareness. An interactive storytelling engine has been built with the proposed model and knowledge base of interactive storytelling scenario. Based on the interactive storytelling engine, a prototype system, namely "illness investigation in Singapore River City", was implemented in the virtual environment, in which the story of illness investigation is presented in the dynamic context by responding to the user interactions and environment variables.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
        I.2.11 Distributed Artificial Intelligence

Keywords:
AI planning, formation, fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs), generation, goal net, interactive storytelling, plan execution, situated learning, story planning