Gameplay as on-line mediation search

Abstract

Mediation is a plan-based interactive narrative generation algorithm that creates a cascading policy of plans. This policy represents a branching story and can be used by an execution manager in a game to control the series of events that unfold. With a few modifications we show that mediation's search space can embed all possible traversals through a game world. This shift allows gameplay to be modeled as an on-line mediation search where the game's interface is a representation of the underlying graph traversal. In this paper we outline these modifications and present a text-based implementation.