HeadSpace: Incorporating Action Failure and Character Beliefs into Narrative Planning

Abstract

Previous work on story planning has lacked a knowledge representation for characters that attempt actions that fail because of the characters' misconceptions about the world state. This work describes HeadSpace, a state-space heuristic search planning system that generates stories that track and manipulate characters' beliefs about the story world. The planner produces story plans with actions that are attempted but fail. We show an example story plan that contains failed-action content that cannot be generated by typical planning-based approaches to story creation, and we provide an analytical evaluation that characterizes our planner's increased expressive range relative to other narrative planners addressing character belief and/or failed action execution.