Anne-Gwenn Bosser

Linear Logic for Non-Linear Storytelling

Whilst narrative representations have played a prominent role in AI research, there has been a renewed interest in the topic with the development of interactive narratives. A typical approach aims at generating narratives from baseline action representations, most often using planning techniques. However, this research has developed empirically, often as an application of planning. In this paper, we explore a more rigorous formalisation of narrative concepts, both at the action level and at the plot level. Our aim is to investigate how to bridge the gap between action descriptions and narrative concepts, by considering the latter from the perspective of resource consumption and causality. We propose to use Linear Logic, often introduced as a logic of resources, for it provides, through linear implication, a better description of causality than in Classical and Intuitionistic Logic. Besides advances in the fundamental principles of narrative formalisation, this approach can support the formal validation of scenario description as a preliminary step to their implementation via other computational formalisms.

Dialogs taking into account experience, emotions and personality

This paper describes the DEEP project (Dialogs taking into account Experience, Emotions and Personality, adapted to computer games), which started in June 2006. The aim of the project is to provide generic solutions for the integration of autonomous Non Player Characters (NPCs) in next-generation adventure games. DEEP NPCs, equipped with a personality and a believable emotional engine, will use context-based information from the game environment and the player behavior to provide entertaining, rich and relevant dialogs.

Hardcore gamers and casual gamers playing online together

In this paper, we discuss why Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) need to attract both hardcore and casual players and study the evolution of MMOG features for this purpose.

Linear Logic Programming for Narrative Generation

In this paper, we explore the use of Linear Logic programming for story generation. We use the language Celf to represent narrative knowledge, and its own querying mechanism to generate story instances, through a number of proof terms. Each proof term obtained is used, through a resource-flow analysis, to build a directed graph where nodes are narrative actions and edges represent inferred causality relationships. Such graphs represent narrative plots structured by narrative causality. This approach is a candidate technique for narrative generation which unifies declarative representations and generation via query and deduction mechanisms.

Architecture of an authoring system to support the creation of interactive contents

Since three-dimensional computer graphics (3D-CG) technology and interaction technology should be applied to e-learning as well as games, people must be able to easily create interactive contents based on 3D-CG, even if they are not 3D-CG professionals. In this paper, we propose a support system for creating interactive contents that runs on MS Windows and uses Direct X as the file format. By describing a script using two kinds of script files prepared by the system, a content creator can easily create 3D-CG scenes and can also control interactions between a user and the system. As an example of content creation, we present and explain interactive content in which users can enter the virtual world of classic Japanese tales and experience the story development of various types of classic tales for the first time.

Structural analysis of narratives with the Coq proof assistant

This paper proposes a novel application of Interactive Proof Assistants for studying the formal properties of Narratives, building on recent work demonstrating the suitability of Intuitionistic Linear Logic as a conceptual model. More specifically, we describe a method for modelling narrative resources and actions, together with constraints on the story endings in the form of an ILL sequent. We describe how well-formed narratives can be interpreted from cut-free proof trees of the sequent obtained using Coq. We finally describe how to reason about narratives at the structural level using Coq: by allowing one to prove 2nd order properties on the set of all the proofs generated by a sequent, Coq assists the verification of structural narrative properties traversing all possible variants of a given plot.

A framework to help designing innovative massively multiplayer online games interactions

This paper presents FITGap, an object-oriented framework dedicated to designing innovative interactions occurring in a Virtual Environment such as a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG). This framework has been designed as the underlying software of a future development environment for online games prototyping. FITGap is an open framework based on an extensible basic-blocks library, and uses a deterministic scheduling model to ease the development and tuning of the final application. Its semantics is well-defined to allow future analysis tools.

Analysis of the Protocols Used to Assess Virtual Players in Multi-player Computer Games.

Recently, the development of believable agents has gained a lot of interest and many solutions have been proposed by the research community to implement such bots. However, in order to make advances in this field, a generic and rigorous evaluation that would allow the comparison of new systems against existing ones is needed. This paper provides a summary of the existing believability assessments. Seven features characterising the protocols are identified. After a comprehensive analysis, recommendations and prospects for improvement are provided.