Juke Joint: Characters Who Are Moved By Music

Abstract

We present Juke Joint, a small work of interactive storytelling that demonstrates an extension to the Talk of the Town framework by which characters form thoughts, expressed in natural language, that are elicited by environmental stimuli. Juke Joint takes place in a procedurally generated American small town, in a bar with a haunted jukebox and two patrons facing personal dilemmas; the player is a ghost whose only action is to select which song from the jukebox will play. As the lyrics of the song emanate from the machine, thoughts are elicited in the minds of the patrons, constituting streams of consciousness that may eventually lead them to resolutions of their respective dilemmas. In this paper, we outline the game and also the AI architecture that makes it possible; the latter combines a light simulation of stimulus processing with a novel approach to natural language generation.