Directing Intentional Superposition Manipulation

Abstract

Strong story interactive narratives (IN) are stories that branch based on participant actions where all branches conform to a set of predefined constraints. However, participants in these systems may create branches where the constraints no longer hold. Strong story experience management, the process of generating IN trees, can be viewed as a game where the experience management agent wins if the story constraints hold during gameplay and loses if they are broken. In domains where the player has incomplete information of the story world, the experience manager can take action by shifting the player between alternate states that are consistent with the player's observations in order to maximize the probability that constraints will hold. This process is called superposition manipulation. In this paper we present a method of estimating the number of goal states reachable from different states in order to make informed decisions during superposition manipulation.