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April Grow

University of California, Santa Cruz, Computer Science, Graduate Student

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Ricky Kurniawan

Georgia Institute of Technology

Mirjam Eladhari

University of Malta

Hanna-Riikka Roine

Tampere University

University of California, Santa Cruz

JENNIFER SAWYER

Charles University, Prague

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Papers by April Grow

LIGENCE]: Natural Language Processing—Language generation General Terms

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 re-ordered 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.

Soft-bodied Fidget Toys

Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, 2018

We present an exploration of e-textile/soft materials that can be used to capture fidget traces, ... more We present an exploration of e-textile/soft materials that can be used to capture fidget traces, while providing the touch sensations that fidgeters report seeking out in everyday fidget objects [3,4,5]. We created two soft-bodied "sampler" objects with a range of smart fidgeting affordances, which we describe in this paper, along with a general outline of the range of properties explored. This work extends exploration of a novel design space introduced in [4], toward the end goal of creating smart fidget objects that aid self-regulation. We include an overview of our design process, present some preliminary insights about materials that support this design space, and conclude with current and future directions for the work.

ENABL : A Modular Authoring Interface for Creating Interactive Characters April Grow

The authoring of interactive digital characters is a complicated and multidisciplinary task which... more The authoring of interactive digital characters is a complicated and multidisciplinary task which requires some level of expertise in psychology, artificial intelligence, computer graphics, as well as many other fields depending on the purpose of the agent. Demand for high-quality agents is enormous: current research involves interactive agents for many topics including education, medicine, human caregiving, interactive drama, and video games. However, experts able to author these agents are few in number, and supply is falling far short of demand. This work aims to develop a publicly releasable authoring environment for an existing reactive planning behavior language (ABL: A Behavior Language), which significantly reduces the authoring complexity and burden in creating interactive digital characters. By reifying existing coding practices and patterns by expert authors into an authoring environment, authors with some programming background will be able to create interactive characte...

Computationally-Mediated Interactions with Traditional Textile Crafts

Author(s): Grow, April M | Advisor(s): Wardrip-Fruin, Noah | Abstract: Crafting is a fundamental ... more Author(s): Grow, April M | Advisor(s): Wardrip-Fruin, Noah | Abstract: Crafting is a fundamental part of humanity; it gives us purpose and satisfaction, and it produces items that are beautiful and functional. At the same time, our relationship to traditional physical crafts has seen a massive upheaval due to technological advancements. The freedom and support to create textile crafts for pleasure and passion rather than necessity has never been more widespread. Interdisciplinary explorations of computer science and textile crafts have been increasing due to more people being intrinsically motivated to craft, more forms of supportive technology constantly being built, and more interconnected communities growing via the internet. The work in this dissertation begins to coalesce these user-focused and craft-based experiences by presenting crafting as a series of interconnected and nested processes covering the design, manufacture, and experience of textile craft products. Within these...

Creating Playable Social Experiences through Whole-Body Interaction with Virtual Characters

This paper describes work towards the goal of enabling unscripted interaction with non-player cha... more This paper describes work towards the goal of enabling unscripted interaction with non-player characters in virtual environments. We hypothesize that we can define a layer of social affordances, based on physical and non-verbal signals exchanged between individuals and groups, which can be reused across games. We have implemented a first version of that substrate that employs whole body interaction with virtual characters and generates nuanced, real-time character performance in response. We describe the playable experience produced by the system, the implementation architecture (based on the behavior specification technology used in Facade, the social model employed in Prom Week, and gesture recognition technology), and illustrate the key behaviors and programming idioms that enable character performance. These idioms include orthogonal coding of attitudes and activities, use of relational rules to nominate social behavior, use of volition rules to rank options, and priority based ...

Cooperative Creativity Support Tools for Computational Crafting

The role of computers and software as tool, manufacturer, collaborator, and artist in relation to... more The role of computers and software as tool, manufacturer, collaborator, and artist in relation to human crafters has been heavily debated philosophically and practically. A creativity support tool for a specific creative domain is interdisciplinary, crossing fields of computational creativity, creativity support tools, procedural content generation, human-computer interaction, and potentially many others. This work aims to consolidate applicable research to domains with physical craft execution, as well as present an instance of a proactive and cooperative creativity support tool for the domain of machine embroidery pattern digitization, or simply digitizing. Proprietary software tools exist for digitizers, but auto-digitizing features – features that claim to automatically convert an image to a pattern – are widely disparaged in the industry, and novices and intermediate digitizers face a steep learning curve. The primary directive of this work is to ease that learning curve by hel...

Modular Computational Critics for Games

Formal game modeling tools could support the automated analysis of game rules and rapid automated... more Formal game modeling tools could support the automated analysis of game rules and rapid automated play-testing, but are not widely used. Furthermore, existing game design support tools are often limited to very specific classes of game, require significant programming expertise to use or customize, or are fully-automatic tools with limited affordances for human designers. We therefore propose a framework for authoring computational game design critics and a new game definition language (Gamelan) grounded in the conventions of board game rules. We show how a set of these critics could have detected specific, attested design problems in the development of Donald X. Vaccarino's influential card game Dominion. We also illustrate an extension of this approach to other collectible card games, turn-taking games, and games in general.

Preliminary Evaluation of Mismanor

users.soe.ucsc.edu

Page 1. Preliminary Evaluation of Mismanor April Grow, Anne Sullivan, Sri Kurniawan University of... more

Crafting in Games

Digit. Humanit. Q., 2017

A compiler for 3D machine knitting

ACM Transactions on Graphics

interactions, 2016

Interactivity is a unique forum of the ACM CHI conference that showcases more than 50 cutting-edg... more Interactivity is a unique forum of the ACM CHI conference that showcases more than 50 cutting-edge demonstrations and inspirational interactive installations from the diverse group of researchers, designers, and artists that make up the CHI community. These works were chosen to engage audiences intellectually, imaginatively, and physically to create a critical discourse for the future of HCI. Julie R. Williamson, Amanda M. Williams, Sean White, and Cesar Torres, CHI 2016 Interactivity Chairs

A Methodology for Requirements Analysis of AI Architecture Authoring Tools

Authoring embodied, highly interactive virtual agents (IVAs) for robust experiences is an extreme... more Authoring embodied, highly interactive virtual agents (IVAs) for robust experiences is an extremely difficult task. Current architectures for creating those agents are so complex that it takes enormous amounts of effort to craft even short experiences, with lengthier, polished experiences (e.g., Facade, Ada and Grace) often requiring person-years of effort by expert authors. However, each architecture is challenging in vastly different ways; it is impossible to propose a universal authoring solution without being too general to provide significant leverage. Instead, we present our analysis of the System-Specific Step (SSS) in the IVA authoring process, encapsulated in the case studies of three different architectures tackling a simple scenario. The case studies revealed distinctly different behaviors by each team in their SSS, resulting in the need for different authoring solutions. We iteratively proposed and discussed each team's SSS Components and potential authoring support strategies to identify actionable software improvements. Our expectation is that other teams can perform similar analyses of their own systems' SSS and make authoring improvements where they are most needed. Further, our case-study approach provides a methodology for detailed comparison of the authoring affordances of different IVA architectures, providing a lens for understanding the similarities, differences and tradeoffs between architectures.

Extending CRPGs as an Interactive Storytelling Form

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011

Computer role-playing games (CRPGs) have strong narratives, but in general lack a density of inte... more Computer role-playing games (CRPGs) have strong narratives, but in general lack a density of interesting and meaningful choices for the player within the story. We have identified two main components of player interaction within the story-quests and character interaction-to address in a new playable experience, Mismanor. In this paper we focus on the character interaction aspect. In particular, it describes how we use the Comme il Faut system to support emergent social interactions between the player and the game characters based on player's traits and the social state of the game world. We discuss the design and creation of the game as well as the modifications to the systems required to support this new CRPG experience.

A methodology for requirements analysis of ai architecture authoring tools

Authoring embodied, highly interactive virtual agents (IVAs) for robust experiences is an extreme... more Authoring embodied, highly interactive virtual agents (IVAs) for robust experiences is an extremely difficult task. Current architectures for creating those agents are so complex that it takes enormous amounts of effort to craft even short experiences, with lengthier, polished experiences (e.g., Facade, Ada and Grace) often requiring person-years of effort by expert authors. However, each architecture is challenging in vastly different ways; it is impossible to propose a universal authoring solution without being too general to provide significant leverage. Instead, we present our analysis of the System-Specific Step (SSS) in the IVA authoring process, encapsulated in the case studies of three different architectures tackling a simple scenario. The case studies revealed distinctly different behaviors by each team in their SSS, resulting in the need for different authoring solutions. We iteratively proposed and discussed each team's SSS Components and potential authoring support strategies to identify actionable software improvements. Our expectation is that other teams can perform similar analyses of their own systems' SSS and make authoring improvements where they are most needed. Further, our case-study approach provides a methodology for detailed comparison of the authoring affordances of different IVA architectures, providing a lens for understanding the similarities, differences and tradeoffs between architectures.

A Step Towards the Future of Role-Playing Games: The SpyFeet Mobile RPG Project

Meaningful choice has often been identified as a key component in a player's engagement with an i... 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 reordered 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 characters and the player. This paper describes SpyFeet, a playable prototype of a storytelling system designed to test this hypothesis.

Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI EA '16, 2016

The design of Mismanor: creating a playable quest-based story game

ABSTRACT Computer role-playing games (CRPGs) have strong narratives, but in general lack interest... more ABSTRACT Computer role-playing games (CRPGs) have strong narratives, but in general lack interesting and meaningful choices for the player within the story. As a result, the stories are not playable. In this paper we present an existence proof for a new approach to CRPG stories that addresses this, while providing details of our implementation. We designed and created a new playable experience, Mismanor, to test our theories of playable stories. We discuss the design decisions made as well as the details of the CiF-RPG and GrailGM systems used for complex quest generation and story management based on player&#39;s traits and the social state of the game world.

SpyFeet: an exercise RPG

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 re-ordered in response to player choices;

LIGENCE]: Natural Language Processing—Language generation General Terms

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 re-ordered 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.

Soft-bodied Fidget Toys

Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, 2018

We present an exploration of e-textile/soft materials that can be used to capture fidget traces, ... more We present an exploration of e-textile/soft materials that can be used to capture fidget traces, while providing the touch sensations that fidgeters report seeking out in everyday fidget objects [3,4,5]. We created two soft-bodied "sampler" objects with a range of smart fidgeting affordances, which we describe in this paper, along with a general outline of the range of properties explored. This work extends exploration of a novel design space introduced in [4], toward the end goal of creating smart fidget objects that aid self-regulation. We include an overview of our design process, present some preliminary insights about materials that support this design space, and conclude with current and future directions for the work.

ENABL : A Modular Authoring Interface for Creating Interactive Characters April Grow

The authoring of interactive digital characters is a complicated and multidisciplinary task which... more The authoring of interactive digital characters is a complicated and multidisciplinary task which requires some level of expertise in psychology, artificial intelligence, computer graphics, as well as many other fields depending on the purpose of the agent. Demand for high-quality agents is enormous: current research involves interactive agents for many topics including education, medicine, human caregiving, interactive drama, and video games. However, experts able to author these agents are few in number, and supply is falling far short of demand. This work aims to develop a publicly releasable authoring environment for an existing reactive planning behavior language (ABL: A Behavior Language), which significantly reduces the authoring complexity and burden in creating interactive digital characters. By reifying existing coding practices and patterns by expert authors into an authoring environment, authors with some programming background will be able to create interactive characte...

Computationally-Mediated Interactions with Traditional Textile Crafts

Author(s): Grow, April M | Advisor(s): Wardrip-Fruin, Noah | Abstract: Crafting is a fundamental ... more Author(s): Grow, April M | Advisor(s): Wardrip-Fruin, Noah | Abstract: Crafting is a fundamental part of humanity; it gives us purpose and satisfaction, and it produces items that are beautiful and functional. At the same time, our relationship to traditional physical crafts has seen a massive upheaval due to technological advancements. The freedom and support to create textile crafts for pleasure and passion rather than necessity has never been more widespread. Interdisciplinary explorations of computer science and textile crafts have been increasing due to more people being intrinsically motivated to craft, more forms of supportive technology constantly being built, and more interconnected communities growing via the internet. The work in this dissertation begins to coalesce these user-focused and craft-based experiences by presenting crafting as a series of interconnected and nested processes covering the design, manufacture, and experience of textile craft products. Within these...

Creating Playable Social Experiences through Whole-Body Interaction with Virtual Characters

This paper describes work towards the goal of enabling unscripted interaction with non-player cha... more This paper describes work towards the goal of enabling unscripted interaction with non-player characters in virtual environments. We hypothesize that we can define a layer of social affordances, based on physical and non-verbal signals exchanged between individuals and groups, which can be reused across games. We have implemented a first version of that substrate that employs whole body interaction with virtual characters and generates nuanced, real-time character performance in response. We describe the playable experience produced by the system, the implementation architecture (based on the behavior specification technology used in Facade, the social model employed in Prom Week, and gesture recognition technology), and illustrate the key behaviors and programming idioms that enable character performance. These idioms include orthogonal coding of attitudes and activities, use of relational rules to nominate social behavior, use of volition rules to rank options, and priority based ...

Cooperative Creativity Support Tools for Computational Crafting

The role of computers and software as tool, manufacturer, collaborator, and artist in relation to... more The role of computers and software as tool, manufacturer, collaborator, and artist in relation to human crafters has been heavily debated philosophically and practically. A creativity support tool for a specific creative domain is interdisciplinary, crossing fields of computational creativity, creativity support tools, procedural content generation, human-computer interaction, and potentially many others. This work aims to consolidate applicable research to domains with physical craft execution, as well as present an instance of a proactive and cooperative creativity support tool for the domain of machine embroidery pattern digitization, or simply digitizing. Proprietary software tools exist for digitizers, but auto-digitizing features – features that claim to automatically convert an image to a pattern – are widely disparaged in the industry, and novices and intermediate digitizers face a steep learning curve. The primary directive of this work is to ease that learning curve by hel...

Modular Computational Critics for Games

Formal game modeling tools could support the automated analysis of game rules and rapid automated... more Formal game modeling tools could support the automated analysis of game rules and rapid automated play-testing, but are not widely used. Furthermore, existing game design support tools are often limited to very specific classes of game, require significant programming expertise to use or customize, or are fully-automatic tools with limited affordances for human designers. We therefore propose a framework for authoring computational game design critics and a new game definition language (Gamelan) grounded in the conventions of board game rules. We show how a set of these critics could have detected specific, attested design problems in the development of Donald X. Vaccarino's influential card game Dominion. We also illustrate an extension of this approach to other collectible card games, turn-taking games, and games in general.

Preliminary Evaluation of Mismanor

users.soe.ucsc.edu

Page 1. Preliminary Evaluation of Mismanor April Grow, Anne Sullivan, Sri Kurniawan University of... more

Crafting in Games

Digit. Humanit. Q., 2017

A compiler for 3D machine knitting

ACM Transactions on Graphics

interactions, 2016

Interactivity is a unique forum of the ACM CHI conference that showcases more than 50 cutting-edg... more Interactivity is a unique forum of the ACM CHI conference that showcases more than 50 cutting-edge demonstrations and inspirational interactive installations from the diverse group of researchers, designers, and artists that make up the CHI community. These works were chosen to engage audiences intellectually, imaginatively, and physically to create a critical discourse for the future of HCI. Julie R. Williamson, Amanda M. Williams, Sean White, and Cesar Torres, CHI 2016 Interactivity Chairs

A Methodology for Requirements Analysis of AI Architecture Authoring Tools

Authoring embodied, highly interactive virtual agents (IVAs) for robust experiences is an extreme... more Authoring embodied, highly interactive virtual agents (IVAs) for robust experiences is an extremely difficult task. Current architectures for creating those agents are so complex that it takes enormous amounts of effort to craft even short experiences, with lengthier, polished experiences (e.g., Facade, Ada and Grace) often requiring person-years of effort by expert authors. However, each architecture is challenging in vastly different ways; it is impossible to propose a universal authoring solution without being too general to provide significant leverage. Instead, we present our analysis of the System-Specific Step (SSS) in the IVA authoring process, encapsulated in the case studies of three different architectures tackling a simple scenario. The case studies revealed distinctly different behaviors by each team in their SSS, resulting in the need for different authoring solutions. We iteratively proposed and discussed each team's SSS Components and potential authoring support strategies to identify actionable software improvements. Our expectation is that other teams can perform similar analyses of their own systems' SSS and make authoring improvements where they are most needed. Further, our case-study approach provides a methodology for detailed comparison of the authoring affordances of different IVA architectures, providing a lens for understanding the similarities, differences and tradeoffs between architectures.

Extending CRPGs as an Interactive Storytelling Form

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011

Computer role-playing games (CRPGs) have strong narratives, but in general lack a density of inte... more Computer role-playing games (CRPGs) have strong narratives, but in general lack a density of interesting and meaningful choices for the player within the story. We have identified two main components of player interaction within the story-quests and character interaction-to address in a new playable experience, Mismanor. In this paper we focus on the character interaction aspect. In particular, it describes how we use the Comme il Faut system to support emergent social interactions between the player and the game characters based on player's traits and the social state of the game world. We discuss the design and creation of the game as well as the modifications to the systems required to support this new CRPG experience.

A methodology for requirements analysis of ai architecture authoring tools

Authoring embodied, highly interactive virtual agents (IVAs) for robust experiences is an extreme... more Authoring embodied, highly interactive virtual agents (IVAs) for robust experiences is an extremely difficult task. Current architectures for creating those agents are so complex that it takes enormous amounts of effort to craft even short experiences, with lengthier, polished experiences (e.g., Facade, Ada and Grace) often requiring person-years of effort by expert authors. However, each architecture is challenging in vastly different ways; it is impossible to propose a universal authoring solution without being too general to provide significant leverage. Instead, we present our analysis of the System-Specific Step (SSS) in the IVA authoring process, encapsulated in the case studies of three different architectures tackling a simple scenario. The case studies revealed distinctly different behaviors by each team in their SSS, resulting in the need for different authoring solutions. We iteratively proposed and discussed each team's SSS Components and potential authoring support strategies to identify actionable software improvements. Our expectation is that other teams can perform similar analyses of their own systems' SSS and make authoring improvements where they are most needed. Further, our case-study approach provides a methodology for detailed comparison of the authoring affordances of different IVA architectures, providing a lens for understanding the similarities, differences and tradeoffs between architectures.

A Step Towards the Future of Role-Playing Games: The SpyFeet Mobile RPG Project

Meaningful choice has often been identified as a key component in a player's engagement with an i... 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 reordered 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 characters and the player. This paper describes SpyFeet, a playable prototype of a storytelling system designed to test this hypothesis.

Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI EA '16, 2016

The design of Mismanor: creating a playable quest-based story game

ABSTRACT Computer role-playing games (CRPGs) have strong narratives, but in general lack interest... more ABSTRACT Computer role-playing games (CRPGs) have strong narratives, but in general lack interesting and meaningful choices for the player within the story. As a result, the stories are not playable. In this paper we present an existence proof for a new approach to CRPG stories that addresses this, while providing details of our implementation. We designed and created a new playable experience, Mismanor, to test our theories of playable stories. We discuss the design decisions made as well as the details of the CiF-RPG and GrailGM systems used for complex quest generation and story management based on player&#39;s traits and the social state of the game world.

SpyFeet: an exercise RPG

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 re-ordered in response to player choices;