Creating Customized Virtual Experiences by Leveraging
Human Creative Effort: A Desideratum
Mark O. Riedl and Boyang Li
School of Interactive Computing; College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Techology
{riedl, boyangli}@gatech.edu
ABSTRACT
The task of entertaining people has, until very recently, been the
exclusive domain of humans. However, recent work in the area of
computational creativity, story generation, interactive storytelling,
and autonomous believable agents suggests that AI may be used
to create dynamic, interactive, and engaging real-time
entertainment experiences. In this paper we consider the role of a
novel technique called Experience Adaptation in the process of
creating and delivering customized entertaining experiences.
Experience Adaptation is an offline process that leverages human
creative ability by taking human-authored storylines in this case
specifications of desired future experiences and autonomously
“re-writing” them based on unique requirements of individual
users. With Experience Adaptation, we are working toward
effectively scaling up entertainment computing.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
I.2.1 [Artificial Intelligence]: Applications and Expert Systems
games, industrial automation.
General Terms
Algorithms, Design
Keywords
Experience Adaptation, Narrative Intelligence.
1. INTRODUCTION
Artificial intelligence has long been used to automate certain tasks
in order to perform those tasks faster, more accurately, more
efficiently, more safely, or more often. However, the task of
entertaining people has, until very recently, been the exclusive
domain of humans. When it comes to commercial production of
entertainment artifacts TV shows, movies, novels, theatre,
computer games, etc. the task of entertaining people has been
the exclusive domain of “creative professions” such as writers,
actors, movie directors, theatre and improv performers, dungeon
masters, and so on. The reason the task of entertaining people has
been the exclusive domain of humans is because the creativity and
intuition that human entertainers possess have not been reliably
replicated in computational systems.
Currently, there are fewer human “producers” of entertainment
than there are human “consumers” of entertainment. This model
works fine for mass-consumption entertainment such as film, TV,
books, and, to a lesser extent, theatre performances. The creative
authoring bottleneck refers to the situation where the cost of
employing enough professional human producers to satisfy the
demands of human consumers is prohibitively high, resulting in a
situation where there is more demand for quality content than
production of quality content. (We use “authoring” to mean the
deliberate creation of any entertainment-related artifact, including
an improvised performance created in real-time [5]). Recent work
in the area of computational creativity, story generation,
interactive storytelling, and autonomous believable agents lays the
groundwork for a future where entertainment is fully automated.
We are now at a unique point where modern computer
technology, simulation, and computer games have opened up the
possibility of that more can be done in the area of on-demand and
just-in-time entertainment.
On-demand entertainment refers to the possibility that one can
request, at any time, an entertainment experience that is
significantly different from any previously consumed. For
example, game players can exhaust game-play content faster than
expansion packs and new releases can be produced. For an early
case study in which consumers outpace producers of content in
online virtual game worlds, see [8]. Ideally, there is a one-to-one
relationship between producers and consumers so that content can
never be consumed faster than it is produced.
Just-in-time entertainment means that entertainment artifacts
should be customized or configured based on information that is
only available just before it is needed. Just-in-time entertainment
affords creation of unique entertainment experience based on a
consumer’s their needs, wants, ability, and history, all of which
cannot be known a priori.
As we approach a world in which on-demand and just-in-time
entertainment is the expectation, the conventional consumer-
producer model breaks down. To overcome the creative authoring
bottleneck, we must consider automation. In entertainment,
automation is necessary whenever one would want a real person
to do X in an interactive experience, but sufficient other people are
not available in that role. The following are examples of X:
NPCs (shopkeepers, farmers, victims) in computer games.
Opponents and companions in computer games
Dungeon master
Storywriter for books, movies, and games
Game designer
As we go down this list, an autonomous system is charged with
taking progressively more responsibility for the human user’s
quality of experience. The decisions being made can only be
made in a just-in-time fashion because we need to know (a) who
the user is, (b) what the user needs, preferences, and desires are,
and (c) what the user is doing at any given moment.
While this motivates the need for autonomous systems capable of
creativity and expressivity, achieving the goal of autonomous
systems capable of assuming responsibility for human users'
entertainment experiences is largely an open research question.
Until we have computational systems capable of creativity
rivaling that of human creators, there is value in exploring hybrid
approaches in which humans and computational systems share the
responsibility of managing human users' entertainment
experiences. The goal of such a system is to scale up the human
creator’s ability to produce meaningful, customized, and
potentially highly interactive experiences. We can consider both
online and offline approaches. An online system leverages human
creativity through semi-autonomy or interpreting and elaborating
on human intent (c.f., [3]). An offline system attempts to
autonomously modify and/or customize human-authored content
to prepare it for real-time interactive experience.
In this paper, we describe an offline system for leveraging human
creativity for the purposes of scaling up the production and
delivery of unique, customized entertainment experiences.
Specifically, we introduce Experience Adaptation, as a
computational technique that takes a creative authored artifact and
adapts it to the specific requirements of a single individual.
Experience Adaptation, when implemented for many people –
consumers – results in the multiplication of a single creative
artifact into many unique creative artifacts.
2. EXPERIENCE ADAPTATION
Considering the creative authoring bottleneck, how do we scale up
a human creator’s ability to deliver unique, customized,
interactive experiences to a large number of consumers of
entertainment artifacts? To put it another way: how do we
increase authorial leverage [1], the ratio of quality of experience
to authorial input. Chen et al. [1] measure authorial leverage as
the quality of experience per unit of domain engineering, where
quality is a function of complexity, ease of change, and variability
of experience. Riedl et al. [10] calculate leverage as the number of
distinct experiences per unit of domain engineering. In both cases,
the number of distinct experiences that can be produced from a
static amount of authored content is measured.
We propose a technique whereby a few human-authored
descriptions of experiences to be had in a virtual world are
leveraged to provide numerous experiences customized to
individuals. The technique, Experience Adaptation,
computationally takes a single, human authored story and
autonomously customizes it to individuals’ unique needs, wants,
and desires. Experience Adaptation leverages the creative abilities
of a single human author into multiple playable experiences.
The Experience Adaptation pipeline is shown in Figure 1. A
human author develops a storyline as a means of describing what
a user should experience in the virtual world. The storyline
determines events that will happen in the virtual world, including
specifications for the behaviors of non-player characters. The
storyline, provided in a computational format that facilitates
automated analysis and reasoning, is combined with a player
model and a world model. The world model describes what
characters human or virtual characters can do in the world,
and how the world is changed when actions are performed. The
player model provides information about the user in terms of
preferences over experiences. The player model also contains
historical information describing the types of experiences the user
has previously had. The player model is capable of generating a
set of experiential requirements the features of the experience
the user should receive. See Medler [6] and Thue et al. [13] for
perspectives on player modeling. Currently, we allow the player
to directly specify what he or she desires in an experience.
The storyline, player model requirements, and world model are
inputs into the Experience Adaptation system. The storyline is
analyzed to determine whether it meets the experiential
requirements from the player model. If it does not, the Experience
Adaptor engages in an iterative process of making changes to the
storyline until it meets the requirements of the user model. The
result is a new creative artifact describing a customized story
experience, which is sent to an appropriate game engine for
interactive real-time execution. Note the cycle in Figure 1 created
by the Experience Adaptation process, resulting in greatly
improved replayability of authored experiences; as the player
model evolves over time, the same human-authored storyline can
be recycled into unique experiences.
The core component in the Experience Adaptation process is the
Experience Adaptor. The Experience Adaptor has two functions,
to interpret the requirements provided by the user model, and to
“rewrite” the story provided by a human author. The Experience
Adaptation Problem is as follows: given a domain model, a set of
experiential requirements, and a storyline that does not meet the
requirements, find a coherent storyline that meets the experiential
requirements and preserves the maximal amount of original
content. A coherent storyline is one in which all events have
causal relevance to the outcomes [14]. The preservation of
original content ensures that as much of the creative intuition of
the human author remains intact as possible.
The storyline can be adapted in three different ways:
Deletion Events in the storyline can be removed because
they are unnecessary or unwanted.
Addition Events can be added to the storyline to achieve
experiential requirements, and to ensure narrative coherence.
Replacement a combination of deletion and addition, old
events are swapped for new events that better achieve
experiential requirements.
The application of these operations enables a refinement-search
algorithm to incrementally tear down and build up a complete,
human-authored narrative structure until it meets the experiential
requirements.
2.1 Computational Representation of
Experience
We represent experience as a narrative. A narrative is a sequence
of events with continuant subject and constitutes a whole. In this
case, the narrative is a description of the expected sequence of
events that will occur in a virtual environment. Computationally,
we represent narratives as a partial-order plan, which provides a
formal framework for which to reason about changes to narrative
built on first principles (for example, we can ask if a narrative is
sound). Specifically, we employ a specialized plan representation
Figure 1. The experience adaptation pipeline.
from Decompositional Partial Order Planning (DPOP) [15], a
combination of partial-order planning and hierarchical task
network planning. In a DPOP plan, actions are related via causal
links, temporal constraints, and decompositions. A causal link,
denoted a
1
c
a
2
, specifies that action a
1
established a condition c
in the world that is causally necessary for latter action a
2
to occur.
Temporal constraints determine if one action must strictly occur
before another. Decompositions relate abstract actions to sets of
less abstract actions.
By representing narratives as plans, actions indicate events that
are expected to happen during the user’s interactive experience.
Figure 2 shows an example of a DPOP plan representing an
experience one might have in a role-playing game. Primitive
world-level events are shown as boxes and abstract events are
shown as arrows. Arrows represent causal links. Not all causal
relations are shown. Dashed lines encapsulate events that make up
decompositions. The events that are essential for each experience
occur within the hierarchical decompositions, while other events
are considered incidental. The events are numbered in
chronological order.
The initial state is the description of what the author assumes the
state of the virtual world would be like before the experience
begins and the goal situation describes the way the author expects
the user and the virtual world will be different after the experience
terminates. The goal situation is partially in terms derived from
the experiential requirements. Thus, one of the responsibilities of
the Experience Adaptor is to reconcile the initial state and goal
situation with just-in-time information about the user.
2.2 The Adaptation Process
The adaptation process involves two steps: (a) storyline analysis,
and (b) storyline reconciliation. Storyline analysis is a process
whereby the experiential requirements from the player model are
compared to the storyline. In the case that there is some aspect of
the storyline that does not meet the set of experiential
requirements, the storyline analysis begins deleting undesired
events and updating the plan goal and initial state. Typically, this
involves deleting an abstract experiential event and all of its
children. In the process of deleting experiential and world events,
storyline analysis causes numerous inconsistencies in the plan.
Inconsistencies include gaps in the plan due to deleted events,
unsatisfied goals, and mismatches between the events in the plan
and the initial state.
Storyline reconciliation is a refinement search process in which
inconsistencies are eliminated. The refinement search algorithm
is an extension of DPOP. The Adaptation algorithm is specifically
designed to address the following challenges:
1. The starting point of the planning process is a partially
complete plan instead of the typical empty plan. This is
significant because existing events in the initial plan can
cause aesthetically unappealing results or outright failure.
Thus the Adaptation algorithm has the option of removing
events that were hand-authored.
2. Causal coherence is maintained. Coherence means that all
events have causal relevance to the outcome. Planners
guarantee that all events’ preconditions are satisfied; there is
a causal path from initial state to every action. Cohesion and
coherence require that all events have effects that lead, in a
significant way, to the goal state. An event that does not have
an effect that leads to the goal state is a dead end, which has
a negative impact on one’s comprehension of the narrative
structure [14] and, we believe, one’s satisfaction with the
experience.
The Adaptation algorithm, thus, works as follows. Starting with
the original storyline plan with unwanted events deleted and
initial state and goals updated, flaws are identified. Flaws include
the standard set of DPOP flaws: an abstract action that is not
decomposed; an action has a precondition that is not satisfied by a
causal link, and causal threats (c.f. Young and Pollack [15]).
These flaws are resolved in the standard ways: by instantiating
new events, adding causal links between existing and new events,
or asserting temporal orderings. Due to the fact that we are
starting with a complete plan, we also allow the algorithm to
resolve unlinked precondition flaws and causal threats by
removing the action in question.
In addition, we introduce a dead-end flaw indicating that an event
does not have an effect that contributes to a causal chain leading
to a goal. Dead-end flaws occur because we are working from an
existing plan structure with gaps; during the storyline analysis
stage, causal links can be broken. Conventional DPOP only
considers whether it is possible for an event can occur, by
establishing a causal chain from the initial state to the event. From
a storytelling and experiential perspective, we also require all
events to contribute to the achievement of some meaningful goal
situation. Dead-end flaws can be repaired with the following
strategies:
Extend a causal link from one of the effects of the dead-end
event to an unsatisfied precondition of another event.
Move the initiation point of an existing causal link from
Figure 2. The original experience storyline.
some event to the dead-end event. Note that this may make
the other event a dead-end.
Remove the dead end event.
Do nothing, leaving the final result non-coherent.
Being able to further remove events from the plan structure
ensures that no event from the original plan can cause the plan
refinement process to fail. This can happen if the effects of the
event prevent other actions from being inserted. Note that to
preserve systematicity, the algorithm can only remove events that
came from the original narrative plan, preventing infinite loops of
addition and removal. Most significantly, removal of events in
dead-ends means that original events that cannot be used in the
adapted plan are not kept around because they could look odd,
unnecessary, or irrelevant.
2.3 Example
To provide a motivating example, consider the short storyline in
Figure 2 meant to be played as an interactive role-playing game.
The background is that the player is an adventurer who has heard
of a feud between the king and a witch. The storyline shows a
sequence of events in which the player kills the witch, gains the
trust of the king, and is sent to rescue the princess. The sequence
culminates in the player marrying the princess. However, suppose
the player is not interested in rescuing and marrying a princess.
Instead, the player is motivated by material achievement, such as
acquiring gold. Storyline analysis results in the removal of the
rescue experience. The goal is updated to require that the player
experience an escape and, on the world-level, that the player
acquires wealth.
The Experience Adaptor revises the storyline to make the witch
hunt and escape work together seamlessly. The adapted storyline
is shown in Figure 3, with changes in bold. Specifically, the
escape experience is inserted into the plan. The events in which
the player learns about and moves to the lair become dead-ends
and are removed. The event in which the king trusts you also
becomes a dead-end and is replaced by a new reward, being told
about the treasure, which is linked into previously existing causal
chain. Finally, to link the witch-hunt experience to the escape
experience, an event in which the player moves to the cave is
inserted into the storyline.
2.4 Authoring and Scaling
The authoring process is as follows. First, there must be a world
domain model, containing specifications for primitive event
actions. Second, some number of experience fragments must be
authored as DPOP recipes. These first two steps constitute a one-
time authoring cost by a domain engineer. Next, one or more
storylines may be authored in the DPOP representation such that
they consist of experience fragments and other primitive events
that connect the fragments. This may require additional effort on
the part of the human author, but the payoff for this extra effort is
an exponential scaling of the initial effort.
Theoretically, experience adaptation takes a single storyline and
produces as many adaptations as the size of the power set of
experience fragments. In practice, the number of pragmatic
adaptations will be lower because it’s likely that a large fraction
of the original is retained in each adaptation request. However, the
scaling will still be exponential.
To manually achieve this scaling, one would have to author n(n-1)
experience fragments (n-1 variations of each experience so it can
be paired with n-1 other experiences) and use a simple algorithm
for appropriately selecting and sequencing those n(n-1) fragments.
Under the manual scheme, adding new experience fragments
becomes increasingly difficult. With Experience Adaptation, new
experiences can be added independently of any other in the
library, assuming a sufficiently rich world domain model. One
benefit of Experience Adaptation that cannot be reproduced
manually comes in the ability to arbitrarily make changes to the
initial state and goal situation to create fine-grain adaptations such
as swapping a magic potion for gold, or adjusting difficulty by
making the witch immune to water.
Our current prototype Experience Adaptor has been tested in the
context of role-playing game storylines (such as that in Figure 2)
and on military training scenarios. Future work is required to
measure the pragmatic authorial leverage [1, 10] of the system in
terms of authoring effort versus effective output. An evaluation of
aesthetic quality of generated storylines is currently underway.
3. RELATED WORK
Experience Adaptation is being simultaneously explored in the
context of military training, under the moniker Scenario
Adaptation [9]. In Scenario Adaptation, military training scenarios
are represented as DPOP plans, which are adapted in order to keep
the learner in his or her zone of proximal development.
Thue et al. [13] describe a technique whereby a player model
based on role player types is used to select branches through an
interactive story. This approach assumes the existence of a
branching story graph. Hullett and Mateas [2] describe a
technique whereby experiences of users are changed by
reconfiguring the level. Experience is equated with navigation
through a virtual space. Experience Adaptation will also require
coordination between storyline and the virtual environment and
Figure 3. The adapted experience storyline, replacing the princess rescue and marry events with a treasure hunt.
future work will likely involve some degree of automated
reconfiguration of a virtual world.
Experience Adaptation is not Interactive Storytelling. Interactive
Storytelling systems demonstrate how players or learners may
interact with story and scenario content in complex simulation
environments. Typically, an intelligent agent called a Drama
Manager adjusts the virtual environment including the
behaviors of virtual characters during execution to meet
dramatic or learning objectives. See Roberts and Isbell [12] and
Riedl et al. [10] for an overview of interactive storytelling and
drama management systems. The distinction between Experience
Adaptation and Interactive Storytelling is that in Interactive
Storytelling adjustments to the virtual world occur at execution
time in order to cope with the real-time actions of the player.
Experience Adaptation, on the other hand, “rewrites” the
objectives of the virtual environment in an offline process. In this
light, Experience Adaptation and Drama Management are
complimentary: the Experience Adaptor configures the Drama
Manager, which oversees the user’s interactive experience.
The Drama Management technique known as Narrative
Mediation is especially relevant. The Automated Story Director
framework [10] in particular makes partially ordered plans
interactive by generating branches and rendering storyline events
into goals that dictate the behaviors of semi-autonomous character
agents. We envision systems such as this can be used in
conjunction with Experience Adaptation to deliver highly
individualized, interactive experiences.
As an offline procedure, Experience Adaptation is a form of story
generation. Story generation is the process of automatically
creating novel narrative sequences from a set of specifications.
The most relevant story generation work is that that uses planning
as the underlying mechanism for selecting and instantiating
narrative events (c.f., [7, 4, 11]). The distinction between our
Experience Adaptor and story planning is that the Experience
Adaptor starts with a complete, sound narrative structure and is
capable of removing events.
4. CONCLUSIONS
This paper addresses the problem of leveraging human-authored
content in order to scale-up the applicability of virtual
entertainment experiences. We assume that experiences are
narratives that describe how the experience is expected to unfold.
We introduce the concept of employing an offline process to
customize experience specifications. Specifically, a player model
determines the desired features of a real-time experience and an
Experience Adaptor automatically customizes a hand-authored
storyline accordingly. To that end, we draw heavily from recent
work on search-based narrative generation, although adaptation is
necessarily different due to the fact that it starts with a complete,
human-authored narrative.
While this paper focuses on offline aspects of Experience
Adaptation, the process is in service of creating compelling
interactive, real-time experiences. Interactive real-time
experiences require autonomous believable characters and the
ability to dynamically adapt the storyline to accommodate the
user’s moment-to-moment decisions. Future work considers the
use of interactive narrative techniques such as that of Riedl et al.
[10], which uses a combination of dynamic narrative re-planning
and semi-autonomous character agents to create a real-time
experience. Ultimately, we believe that a combination of offline
and online AI processes will be required to solve the general
problem of customizing interactive entertainment experiences. As
on-demand and just-in-time entertainment computing becomes
reality, the greater the need for autonomous systems capable of
creativity and expressivity.
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