Value-driven characters for storytelling and drama

Abstract

Agent architectures have proven to be effective in the realization of believable characters, but they stay at odds with the notion of story direction, that is difficultly reconciled with the characters' autonomy. In this paper we introduce the notion of character's values to mediate between agent architecture and story direction in storytelling systems. Modern theories of drama view story advancement as the result of the characters' attempt to maintain or restore their values, put at stake by unexpected events or antagonists.We relate characters' values with their goals; the activation and suspension of goals depend on the values that are put at stake by the progression of story incidents. Values and goals are integrated in a computational framework for the design of storytelling systems in which the direction is defined in terms of characters' values. © Springer-Verlag 2009.