Coordinating Dialogue Systems and Stories through Behavior Composition

Abstract

We exploit behavior composition in AI as a formal tool to facilitate interactive storytelling in video games. This is motivated by (i) the familiarity of transition systems, on which behavior composition is based, in video game development, and (ii) the fact that behavior composition extends the spectrum of approaches for non-linear storylines by introducing a new paradigm based on planning for a target desired process instead of a goal state. Moreover, this approach provides support for the debugging of deadlocks in stories at design level. We describe the behavior composition framework, and show the details for an interactive dialogue system scenario in order to illustrate how interactive storytelling can be phrased in terms of it. We also report on a simple architecture for implementing a demo game over the scenario using existing behavior composition tools.