Papers by Ben Selvan Samuel
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment
Meaningful choice has often been identified as a key component in a player's engagement with ... more Meaningful choice has often been identified as a key component in a player's engagement with an interactive narrative, but branching stories require tremendous amounts of hand-authored content, in amounts that increase exponentially rather than linearly as more choice points are added. Previous approaches to reducing authorial burden for computer RPGs have relied on creating better tools to manage existing unwieldy structures of quests and dialogue trees. We hypothesize that reducing authorial burden and increasing agency are two sides of the same coin, requiring specific advancements in two related areas of design and technology research: (1) dynamic story management architecture that represents story events abstractly and allows story elements to be selected and re-ordered in response to player choices, and (2) dynamic dialogue generation to allow a single story event to be revealed differently by different characters and in the context of dynamic relationships between those c...
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment
This paper describes the accepted entries to the sixth PlayableExperiences track to be held at th... more This paper describes the accepted entries to the sixth PlayableExperiences track to be held at the AIIDE conference.The Playable Experiences track showcases innovative completeworks that are informed, inspired, or otherwise enabledby artificial intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence has been applied to many facets of the game design and development proces... more Artificial Intelligence has been applied to many facets of the game design and development process. Though this has led to many advances in games and AI research, there remain few examples of games in which play centers around engagement with AI processes: the design space of AI-based games remains underexplored. By examining a breadth of playful experiences through different lenses, it is determined that games which forefront AI are beneficial for players, designers, and for the field of game scholarship itself. Moreover, there is evidence that symbolic approaches (rather than statistical) lend themselves to experiences with more agency, greater human interpretability, and more controlled authorability.
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 2019
Choice-driven narratives, such as those created through systems like Twine, are a compelling form... more Choice-driven narratives, such as those created through systems like Twine, are a compelling form of interactive storytelling that have been around for many years. But as long as this form has existed, it has grappled with a persistent design problem: consistently presenting choices that feel both effective and relevant. Brute force can achieve the desired effect, but usually at the cost of prohibitively high authorial burden. To tackle this, generative approaches, such as Mawhorter's Dunyazad, facilitate authoring procedural choice content for reuse and recombination. However, many such systems, while successful on technical levels, have yet to to be used to author large enough structures to support a full game, and require a high technical threshold for authors to use. To further development in this space, we present StoryAssembler, an open source generative narrative system that creates dynamic choice-driven narratives. It formed a critical part of Emma's Journey, an interactive narrative game, the initial version of which was collaboratively authored by a team of six writers. In the course of the game's creation, useful authoring patterns and design lessons were learned, as well as techniques that made the system approachable for first-time users. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Hypertext / hypermedia; Systems and tools for interaction design; Hypertext / hypermedia; • Software and its engineering → Interactive games; Interactive games.
Interactive Storytelling, 2021
Social simulation has been a popular domain in computational creativity for decades. However, whi... more Social simulation has been a popular domain in computational creativity for decades. However, while it has been used in applications that are easily digestible by end users (e.g., stories, games, theatrical performances, audio plays), it has typically not been modifiable or authorable for people who are not the original developers. Towards addressing this, we present Kismet, a small social simulation language. While Kismet is not as powerful as other social simulation approaches, it leverages computational machinery (such as an inheritance system) and is authored using natural language inspired syntax that is designed to be end user facing. The ultimate goal of Kismet is to facilitate the authoring of scenario content modules, such as those used in table-top role-playing games.
Interactive Storytelling, 2016
The act of writing is often a difficult process; writing partners can be a way to test ideas, pro... more The act of writing is often a difficult process; writing partners can be a way to test ideas, provide critiques, and overcome the difficulty of adding words to a blank page. Writing Buddy is an in-development prototype of a mixed-initiative playful tool, intended to serve the role of a digital writing partner by combining the authoring affordances of writing software with the natural curiosity inherent in playable media. In it, players create and arrange dramatic beats to achieve certain story goals. Those dramatic beats are then satisfied through assigning character actions to them. Finally, players pen prose and dialogue to bring those actions to life. Writing Buddy aims to ease the authoring process by offering suggestions based on character simulation and story structure.
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games, 2011
One compelling aspect of computer RPGs is the promise of player agency: the ability to make signi... more One compelling aspect of computer RPGs is the promise of player agency: the ability to make significant and desired choices in a large, complex, and story-rich environment. Giving players meaningful choice has traditionally required the creation of tremendous amounts of hand-authored story content. This authoring paradigm tends to introduce both structural and workload problems for RPG designers. Our hypothesis is that reducing authorial burden and increasing agency are two sides of the same coin, both requiring advancement in three distinct areas: (1) dynamic story management architecture that allows story elements to be selected and reordered in response to player choices; (2) dynamic dialogue generation which takes history and relationships into account; and (3) an authoring interface that lets writers focus on quests and characters. This paper describes SpyFeet, a playable prototype of a storytelling system designed to test this hypothesis.
Proceedings of the …, 2010
... of California Santa Cruz 1156 High Street Santa Cruz, CA 95064 {mccoyjo, mtreanor, bsamuel, b... more ... of California Santa Cruz 1156 High Street Santa Cruz, CA 95064 {mccoyjo, mtreanor, bsamuel, batman, michaelm, nwf}@soe.ucsc.edu ... Designed to address these issues, Comme il Faut (CiF) is a playable computational model of social interactions designed specifically to allow ...
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment
We propose a new approach to the human-centered evaluation of AI-based games, grounded in the ana... more We propose a new approach to the human-centered evaluation of AI-based games, grounded in the analysis of player retellings of their play experiences. Retellings offer unique insight into dimensions of player experience that can be hard to get at through existing evaluation methods, such as the typical narrative structures that tend to emerge in the player’s mind when they play a particular game; the variety of subjectively experienced narratives that are possible and probable within a particular game; and the ways in which a game supports, or fails to support, the player’s process of narrativization. We used a grounded theory methodology to analyze retellings of play experiences in Civilization VI, Stellaris, and two distinct versions of the research game Prom Week. We also interviewed the creators of several retellings to gain insight into the subjective experience of story construction in collaboration with these games.
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Papers by Ben Selvan Samuel