Real-Time camera control for Interactive Storytelling

Abstract

Stories are often implemented in contemporary compu ter games in a linear fashion. In general, a player follows a pre-scripted storyline from start to finish, which c an lead to the player feeling that their actions an d choices in the game have limited effect. This is particularly tru e for massively multiplayer online games where typic ally there are thousands of quests. A different approach, which in troduces non-linearity, allows the narrative to be s tructured in such a way as to allow an element of choice, whereby t he user can affect the direction of the story at ke y moments. However, creating such stories requires significant effort at design time to cover all the possible cho ices that may be made by the user at run time. One possible way to afford the player a significant amount of influence over the story direction while also keeping design costs rel atively low is by allowing elements of the story to e merge as the game is played (interactive storytelling). A key ch allenge is maintenance of a coherent story within th e context of an emergent narrative based on user actions in real ti me. This paper begins with a review of research in t he field of interactive storytelling. An architecture to suppo rt emergent stories in the context of a multiplayer game is pre- sented along with initial ideas for implementation o f the real-time planner.