I for one welcome our new story overlords

From the drowning of suspected witches in pre-Reformation Europe to Star Trek's Kobayashi Maru scenario, no-win situations have been seen as a way to test one's character. When faced with disastrous loss, how does one behave? As Star Trek's performance test makes obvious, it's all so much more useful when this is done in a simulator, and not in real life, when lives are on the line. That's the kind of setup that Swartout et al describe in their paper, "Toward the Holodeck: Integrating Graphics, Sound, Character and Story."

They have set up the Mission Rehearsal Exercise Project for Army testing, creating an in-country scenario for new officers to experience dilemmas and associated problem solving. Along the way, they've faced some of the most challenging problems in interactive narrative. In solving it, they come up with a story engine they call StoryNet, and develop a hybrid approach to modeling virtual humans. For the least involved characters, their actions are scripted, while more integral characters have AI reasoning components -- the most central of which use additional emotional simulation.

StoryNet is probably the most interesting part of their overall solutions, the rest being important but necessary technical compromises due to modern limitations. Regardless of how good our technological base is, we still face a fundamental question of how stories are generated in an interactive context. The paper admits that early attempts had little capacity for getting off-track and must have essentially been an exercise in getting the individual being trained to think through the proper steps. As valuable as that might be, the bigger question of having your StoryNet respond to ad-hoc player/trainee decisions is still very open.

The MRE StoryNet solution is a hybrid one. It allows free-play within certain nodes of activity, while certain "hook" actions lead down links to other nodes -- essentially a (well-?)disguised choose your own adventure. While Swartout et al explicitly reject that sort of obvious mechanism, I wonder how many attempts a single individual could make before the "seams" started showing. That's not to fully criticize what they've accomplished however -- I'm sure it meets the specific needs they've been funded for. However, it leaves open the question of how much work it would take to change to a different scenario. It would probably require a fundamental overall including all the assets and reauthoring of the story line and its component nodes.

This remains the open question we face. How do you accomplish meaningful narrative, while still allowing elegant changes to the scenario and sophisticated interaction? The MRE is one approach, and there are many more...