The Virtual Storyteller is a story generator based on principles of emergent narrative [1]. There is no predetermined plot; autonomous Character Agents are used to simulate the ‘lives’ of characters in a story world. This yields a particular event sequence (the fabula) that can then be used as a basis for generating and presenting a narrative text. A Character Agent can be replaced by an interface for human participation.
One of the goals of the Virtual Storyteller project is to serve as an experiment in emergent narrative authoring [2]. Authoring here means writing character models and supplying specific actions, goals etc. for a particular story ‘world’. We investigate how an author may think and work to end up with the content and processes that make up such a world.
What is particular about the Virtual Storyteller in comparison to other character-centric approaches, is that it also pays attention to the role that virtual characters can play as "drama managers" of their own stories, inspired by improvisational acting [3]. To this end, the Virtual Storyteller provides support for some out-of-character mechanisms (i.e., mechanisms at the story level). Most notably, the characters in the Virtual Storyteller can justify the adoption of new character goals and support the creation of plans for their goals, by selecting story world events (which are unintentional at the character level) and by filling in the details of the story world setting during execution [4].
The Virtual Storyteller source code is available from SourceForge. More information can be found on the Virtual Storyteller homepage.
Tags: Architectures