Posthuman Storytelling: What Autonomous Agents
Can Learn by WatchingMovies
Jay Douglas, Ph.D. Student
jdouglas@ict.usc.edu
Autonomous agents are finding their way into a range
of applications, from training and education to games and entertainment.
One area that potentially benefits from the liberal use of autonomous agents
is
interactive storytelling. Agents' roles in this application are twofold:
the portrayal of believable characters to populate the interactive story
world; and, the incarnation of writer/directors to provide the human
interactor with a dramatic, engaging story experience. Yet in the area of
writing/directing, agent penetration seems shallow when compared to agents
that take on acting roles. One reason for the lag in development of
writer/director, or story, agents may be the lack of a rich real-world model,
a situation that does not plague developers of believable agents. I propose
that there are strong existing models for
story agents to be found in both the cinema (cinematic texts and narrative
theory) and operating system design. In particular, a film such as "The Truman
Show" provides a useful framework for thinking about, and implementing, narratives
that unfold in real time. By combining dramatic and theoretical elements
of narrative and cinema with the software architecture of multi-processing
operating systems, a useful model of a story agent with real-time narrative
properties, finally begins to emerge.