Integrating Drama Management into an Adventure Game

Abstract

Often, video game designers must choose between creating a linear experience, and designing an open world with many different story lines that fail to form a tightly crafted narrative arc. A drama manager (DM) can provide a solution to this dilemma. ADM monitors an interactive experience, such as a computer game, and intervenes to shape the global experience so that it satisfies the author's expressive goals without decreasing a player's interactive agency. In this demo we present the first integration of declarative optimization-based drama management (DODM) into an adventure-style dungeon game called EMPath.