Redcap

Please follow the link below to see some example scenes. Output from Thespian are dialogue acts in text formats. In these example stories, a Java applet is used to convert the dialogues acts into surface sentences and show matching pictures.

http://people.ict.usc.edu/~meisi/Red/LRRH%20Examples.htm

The following story world example was created by means of a series of authoring cycles. The creation process for this world took approximately 15 hours of work.

First cycle

A predictable story "emerged" during simulation: Red skipped to the forest, then to Grandma’s house, and gave her the cake. We chose to author content so that Grandma would eat the cake, and also wanted to enable Wolf to eat the cake, by stealing it. So we added a goal to eat something, and an action to take something from someone else. To enable justification of this goal, we added an event to become hungry.

Second cycle

In the simulation, both Grandma and Wolf could not adopt any goals: for them, the preconditions for available goals did not match the initial state of the story world. So they attempted to justify goals (out-of-character) by selecting the event to become hungry. On her way to Grandma, Red met Wolf, who had adopted the goal to eat something and took the cake from Red. However, since Red still wanted to bring the cake to Grandma, she took back the cake from Wolf. Wolf still wanted to eat the cake, so again took the cake from Red. This "cake fight" continued until Red skipped to Grandma’s house before Wolf managed to take the cake from her. Then, a similar situation occurred with Grandma who did not know that Red was going to give her the cake. Because she was hungry, Grandma took the cake from Red. This also happened to solve Reds goal that Grandma had the cake. Now Red had no more goals to adopt, so she selected the event to become hungry and adopted the goal to eat something. This caused Red to take back the cake from Grandma, and eat it herself.

Some of this behaviour was expected, some was surprising and inspiring (e.g., Red could be an assertive girl), and some was undesired, resulting from a domain underspecification: only mean persons take something from someone when it does not belong to them; nice people ask. Furthermore, if the cake can be taken away from Red without the possibility of taking it back (e.g., if Red is not mean), a response is needed to this event. We chose to have Red cry as a plausible dramatic response for little girls.

So in the implementation phase, we added a framing operator that can endow a character to be mean; we further chose that only one character in the story world can be mean. We added a "cry" reactive action, triggered by someone taking something from a character without the character’s consent. We chose to constrain the crying reactive action trigger so that it is only applicable to little girls (although it would be fun if the wolf would cry too if someone stole something from him).
 
Third cycle

In the simulation, Wolf framed himself to be mean (out-of-character, using the framing operator), so that he could plan to take away the cake from Red. After this mean action from Wolf, Red started crying. This was as expected. As authors, we considered how the simulation might continue at this point. Red might go to Grandma to seek support. In revenge, Grandma might poison a cake and feed it to Wolf. We considered how this might open up possibilities in the simulation for the cake to be poisoned by Red in an attempt to poison Grandma in case Red happens to be the mean one (an idea was to add a goal specifying that mean characters try to poison others). Wolf might be allowed to satisfy his hunger by eating Grandma, or by following Red and eating them both. Red might be given the option to be distrustful and avoid interaction with Wolf. 

We only implemented one of these ideas. We added a goal to seek support and added speech actions for Red to tell Grandma what happened, and to ask her what to do. We also added a goal for Grandma to avenge her granddaughter by poisoning the wrongdoer, and actions that allowed a goal plan. Grandma baked a cake, poisoned it, went up to the wolf and gave him the cake. The wolf, being hungry again, ate it and died. Red and Grandma lived happily ever after.

Consider the scene in the Little Red Riding Hood where Red first encounters the Wolf.  In PaSSAGE’s version, one of two different scenes will occur, as selected based on what PaSSAGE has learned about the player’s preferences thus far in the story: either the traditional event (where the Wolf sends Red to find some flowers), or an alternative event (where the Wolf attempts to convince Red to help him capture the Woodsman) will occur.  For the reader’s familiarity, suppose that PaSSAGE selects the traditional event.  The Wolf initially blocks Red’s entry into the forest, and when Red first asks to pass by, the Wolf attempts to delay her.  At this point, she is given two options - to continue to listen to the Wolf’s story (indicating a preference for detailed plots), or provoke the Wolf into fighting her (indicating a preference for combat).  Based on this choice (and others), PaSSAGE learns a bit more about the player’s preferences, and updates its player model accordingly.  Furthermore, this particular section of dialogue includes a mechanism for steering players who prefer combat along the event’s more fighting-oriented course of action.  In the figure below, players who prefer fighting see the character speech and options to respond on the left, while all other players see the content on the right (in our particular implementation, the Wolf is replaced by a Troll).

Given the story world concept, an excerpt of a story that a contributing author creates with Enigma could for example look like the following:

Here, we describe a brief sample of an instantiation of the LRRH story: the  presented segment occurs when the Wolf, who is disguised as LRRH’s GrandMa, is having a conversation with LRRH and is about to reveal its identity.

• A portion of the current world state may be represented as follow:

We notice that different types of predicates are instantiated within the world state. They illustrate physical attributes such as the location of each character, some contextual property (the WOLF and LRRH in conversation) but also state of mind, such as the curiosity and fear of LRRH towards the WOLF.

• Here is a sequence of 3 operators (STRIPS-like representation): two actions and one interpretation operator.

The following action describes the segment when the LRRH asks: "What great teeth you have got!"

The following action describes the segment when the wicked Wolf replies: "The better to eat you up now!"

The following operator describes when the LRRH realises that her GrandMa was eaten up by the wicked Wolf, and she is likely to be the next person to be devoured.

The following two exemplary interactions should give a taste of the intended interactions. The player uses the keyboard to talk, Julie (the virtual character) uses text-to-speech.

1)      Example of an unsuccessful interaction. This interaction is not successful because the player goes straight to the point. The “lesson” to be learnt: When speaking about such delicate issues, is better to talk cautiously.

Julie says: "I feel bad, because of the nightmare"

User says: "You were dreaming of sex!"

Julie says: "Bullshit"

Whenever Julie says “bullshit”, the user looses the game. Thus, the user has lost this game.

2)      Example of a successful talk. The user acts like a psychoanalyst, who rather tries to ask the right questions, in order to achieve his goals. The “lesson” to be learnt, from this example: It is essential to find out the best question, at every moment.

Julie says: "I feel bad, because of the nightmare"

User says: "Why do you feel bad?"

Julie says: "I do not know exaclty, I think it was frigthening"

(some dialogue steps after)

Julie says: "But who could the wolf stand for?"

User: "Does the wolf remind you of someone?"

Julie says: “I do not know. It is as hairy as my husband.”

User: “Can you imagine that the wolf stands for your husband?”

Julie says: “Yes, it could be!”

User: “But your husband never tried to eat you, I hope.”

Julie says: “No!”

User: “But are you sometimes frightened by your husband?”

Julie: “Well, yes, sometimes…”

(some dialogue steps after)

Julie says: "I think this dream was about sex. Oh my God!"

(User wins the game)