The virtual storyteller: Story creation by intelligent agents

Abstract

Character-based storyline development, where the story's characters are fully autonomous agents, gives no guarantees for the emergence of well-structured plots. Storyline development by script, where the characters have no autonomy at all, results in static plots and offers limited interaction possibilities. Therefore, often an intermediate approach is adopted where the characters are given limited autonomy in acting out a global script. We propose an alternative approach that does not make use of pre-defined scripts. Our approach has been implemented in the Virtual Storyteller, an agent framework where co-operating intelligent agents are responsible for the creation of the different story levels (plot, narrative, and presentation).