[1] Together, these systems generate characters that act "human," alter the world in real-time reactions to the player, and ensure that new narrative events unfold comprehensibly.
Varying levels of interactivity are a function of the "relatedness of transmitted messages with previous exchanges of information where sender and receiver roles become interchangeable."
Though its final goal is a fully unauthored AI environment with a comprehensive human-level understanding of narrative construction (e.g., the Holodeck), projects that use branching stories and variable gates are considered experimental prototypes in the same genre.
[6] IF and video games, to balance user choice with authorial effort, must constrain the directions the narrative can take with puzzles, battles, or unchangeable plot points and bottlenecks, all of which detract from a sense of immersion.
[4] Sandbox games like The Sims and Spore, which do involve extensive AI-based social interaction, do not manage dramatic tension or produce a cohesive narrative .
[3] Because of limited technology and the amount of work required, it is still difficult to combine a robust interactive storytelling system and a game engine without detracting from the effectiveness of both.
Emerging voices in the field, however, argue for the possibilities of adding narrative complexity and realistic characters to existing video game genres.
Using MADE (Massive Artificial Drama Engine), a team of AI researchers developed a genetic algorithm to guide emergent behavior for secondary non-player characters (NPCs) based on literary archetypes.
[11] In the AI engine of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, this was tested to elaborate on the mechanistic behavior of townspeople: ...hungry inhabitants could become thieves, guards could pursue the thieves, villagers could fall in love with others, or different war alliances could emerge.Early attempts to understand interactive storytelling date back to the 1970s with such efforts as Roger Schank's research at Northwestern University and the experimental program TaleSpin.
There were also a number of conferences touching upon these subjects, such as the Workshop on Interactive Fiction & Synthetic Realities in 1990; Interactive Story Systems: Plot & Character at Stanford in 1995; the AAAI Workshop on AI and Entertainment, 1996; Lifelike Computer Characters, Snowbird, Utah, October 1996; the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents at Marina del Rey, CA.
[citation needed] The first published interactive storytelling software that was widely recognized as the "real thing" was Façade, created by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern.
Secondly, data-driven strategies have a library of "story components" which are sufficiently general that they can be combined smoothly in response to a user's actions (or lack thereof).
A dramatically interesting narrative experience is one that moderates tension between characters and events over time, such that conflicts arise logically and are not left without resolution.
"[21] Likert scales filled out by players create a rough quantitative picture of user experience, but leave out much of the subjective interpretation that lies behind complex human interactions.
Mehta et al. focused on conversation-centric systems to develop qualitative metrics for the user's successful engagements, instead of quantitative measures of "inappropriate utterances" (in which the AI misunderstands player input and responds nonsensically) and other technical failures.
Artificially intelligent agents have trouble translating ambiguous user input into the limited narrative meaning system, as when "sad" or "hurt" is interpreted only as a reference to clinical depression.
It was the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Slamdance Independent Games Festival and is recognized as the first true interactive storytelling software.
Interactive entertainment experiences allow the player to witness data as navigable, participatory, and dramatic in real-time:[29] “a narratological craft which focuses on the structuralist, or literary semiotic creation of stories."