Michael Mateas
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View article: Clicking some of the silly options: Exploring Player Motivation in Static and Dynamic Educational Interactive Narratives
Clicking some of the silly options: Exploring Player Motivation in Static and Dynamic Educational Interactive Narratives Open
Motivation is an important factor underlying successful learning. Previous research has demonstrated the positive effects that static interactive narrative games can have on motivation. Concurrently, advances in AI have made dynamic and ad…
View article: Generating Together: Lessons Learned from Developing an Educational Visual Novel with AI Collaboration
Generating Together: Lessons Learned from Developing an Educational Visual Novel with AI Collaboration Open
Visual novels are a popular game genre for educational games. However, they often feature pre-authored plot structures that cannot dynamically adjust to the player's progression through learning objectives. Employing procedural storytellin…
View article: Acculturative game design with Latine communities: a bridging review on acculturative stress, behavior change, and serious games
Acculturative game design with Latine communities: a bridging review on acculturative stress, behavior change, and serious games Open
Acculturative stress disproportionately impacts first-generation Latine-Americans, leading to significant mental health risks stemming from intergenerational cultural norms around gender identity and sexuality. Facilitating communication i…
View article: There and Back Again: Extracting Formal Domains for Controllable Neurosymbolic Story Authoring
There and Back Again: Extracting Formal Domains for Controllable Neurosymbolic Story Authoring Open
Story generators using language models offer the automatic production of highly fluent narrative content, but they are hard to control and understand, seizing creative tasks that many authors wish to perform themselves. On the other hand, …
View article: Modeling Morality-Based Argumentation for Believable Game Characters: A Design Postmortem
Modeling Morality-Based Argumentation for Believable Game Characters: A Design Postmortem Open
An ability to morally reason is crucial to the believability of many fictional characters, from Jane Austen’s heroines to the denizens of The Good Place. These works often foreground the complexity of moral questions and the circumstances …
View article: Towards Computational Support with Language Models for TTRPG Game Masters
Towards Computational Support with Language Models for TTRPG Game Masters Open
Tabletop role-playing games require game masters to mediate between the desires of a group of players and the affordances of a mechanically rich game world. In this paper, we explore the potential for large language models like GPT-3 to as…
View article: Shoelace: A Storytelling Assistant for GUMSHOE One-2-One
Shoelace: A Storytelling Assistant for GUMSHOE One-2-One Open
In creative roleplaying games, game masters take on many roles, including keeping track of the game's story, remembering past actions, and improvising new content based on player choices and desires. This dynamic storytelling can be quite …
View article: Towards an Understanding of Character Believability
Towards an Understanding of Character Believability Open
The term 'believability', when referring to game characters, is used in two incompatible ways: realism, meaning human-like, and character believability as used in the character arts (the illusion of life). The same term being used for two …
View article: Playing with the Strings: Designing Puppitor as an Acting Interface for Digital Games
Playing with the Strings: Designing Puppitor as an Acting Interface for Digital Games Open
Interactive drama has focused on how to allow the player agency in influencing their experience through plot action. Interactive drama's preoccupation with changing plot structure bears little resemblance to theater's emphasis on character…
View article: Loose Ends: A Mixed-Initiative Creative Interface for Playful Storytelling
Loose Ends: A Mixed-Initiative Creative Interface for Playful Storytelling Open
We present Loose Ends, a mixed-initiative co-creative storytelling play experience in which a human player and an AI system work together to compose a story. Loose Ends specifically aims to provide computational support for managing multip…
View article: Searching for Balanced 2D Brawler Games: Successes and Failures of Automated Evaluation
Searching for Balanced 2D Brawler Games: Successes and Failures of Automated Evaluation Open
Automated game design (AGD) research focuses on creating systems that can design entirely new games. This is often done by a genetic algorithm, with a fitness function that is used to find individual games that satisfy certain design crite…
View article: Using Self-Determination Theory to Explore Enjoyment of Educational Interactive Narrative Games: A Case Study of Academical
Using Self-Determination Theory to Explore Enjoyment of Educational Interactive Narrative Games: A Case Study of Academical Open
Choice-based interactive storytelling games such as Academical , our responsible conduct of research training game, show great promise as a novel way of providing efficacious ethics training. However, much work remains to determine what fa…
View article: Crosston Tavern: Modulating Autonomous Characters Behaviour through Player-NPC Conversation
Crosston Tavern: Modulating Autonomous Characters Behaviour through Player-NPC Conversation Open
NPCs (Non-Player Characters) are a staple of video games, filling all kinds of supporting roles. This work seeks to flip that paradigm and place the player in the role of support for the goals of a small collection of NPCs enabling a new k…
View article: Winnow: A Domain-Specific Language for Incremental Story Sifting
Winnow: A Domain-Specific Language for Incremental Story Sifting Open
Story sifters attempt to automatically or semi-automatically extract nuggets of compelling narrative content from vast chronicles of game or simulation events. Though sifting has successfully been used to enable novel computational narrati…
View article: Lessons Learned From a Rational Reconstruction of Minstrel
Lessons Learned From a Rational Reconstruction of Minstrel Open
Scott Turner's 1993 Minstrel system was a high water mark in story generation, harnessing the concept of imaginative recall to generate creative stories. Using case-based reasoning and an author level planning system, Minstrel models human…
View article: Learning from Demonstration for Goal-Driven Autonomy
Learning from Demonstration for Goal-Driven Autonomy Open
Goal-driven autonomy (GDA) is a conceptual model for creating an autonomous agent that monitors a set of expectations during plan execution, detects when discrepancies occur, builds explanations for the cause of failures, and formulates ne…
View article: There Is No Escape: Theatricality in Hades
There Is No Escape: Theatricality in Hades Open
To date, the theatricality of videogames has been examined primarily through the lens of performance, a perspective that centers the liveness of theater and identifies the player with the role of the actor. However, another key facet of th…
View article: Playable Experiences at the 16th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment
Playable Experiences at the 16th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Open
This paper describes the accepted entries to the eighth Playable Experiences track to be held at the 16th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE’20). The Playable Experiences track showcases…
View article: Germinate: A Mixed-Initiative Casual Creator for Rhetorical Games
Germinate: A Mixed-Initiative Casual Creator for Rhetorical Games Open
Digital games are hindered as an artform by significant technical barriers to entry, which exclude many would-be game developers from participating in this medium of expression. Casual creators for game design attempt to mitigate these bar…
View article: Scheherazade’s Tavern: A Prototype For Deeper NPC Interactions
Scheherazade’s Tavern: A Prototype For Deeper NPC Interactions Open
In many games, NPC-player interactions play a vital role in gameplay. Previous literature has successfully shown how NPC interaction focused on social simulation is an effective means for creating dynamic characters such as in the games Pr…
View article: Why Are We Like This?: The AI Architecture of a Co-Creative Storytelling Game
Why Are We Like This?: The AI Architecture of a Co-Creative Storytelling Game Open
We present Why Are We Like This? (WAWLT), a mixed-initiative, co-creative storytelling game in which two players develop a story transcript by selecting and editing actions to perform and narrativize in an ongoing simulation. In this paper…
View article: Why Are We Like This?: Exploring Writing Mechanics for an AI-Augmented Storytelling Game
Why Are We Like This?: Exploring Writing Mechanics for an AI-Augmented Storytelling Game Open
Why Are We Like This? (WAWLT) is a playful, co-creative, AI-augmented, improvisational storytelling game in which one or more players explore and influence an ongoing simulation which they then glean for narrative material. It uses the rec…
View article: Is Your Game Generator Working? Evaluating Gemini, an Intentional Generator
Is Your Game Generator Working? Evaluating Gemini, an Intentional Generator Open
Determining whether a game generator is working properly is challenging, since it entails conducting potentially many evaluations of generated games and synthesizing these into a net evaluation of the system. The problem is compounded when…
View article: Towards expressive input for character dialogue in digital games
Towards expressive input for character dialogue in digital games Open
While there has been work in interactive narrative built using theory and practice from theater, it has mostly focused on the structure of narrative and how a player's interaction with the plot alters that structure. How a player interacts…
View article: StoryAssembler
StoryAssembler Open
Choice-driven narratives, such as those created through systems like Twine, are a compelling form of interactive storytelling that have been around for many years. But as long as this form has existed, it has grappled with a persistent des…
View article: Gaming and the Arts of Storytelling
Gaming and the Arts of Storytelling Open
This book examines the notion of storytelling in videogames. This topic allows new perspectives on the enduring problem of narrative in digital games, while also opening up different avenues of inquiry. The collection looks at storytelling…