Booting Up

I am starting this blog as a means of recording thoughts and experiences as I doggedly pursue my PhD in Computer Science.  I am working with Dr. James Lester in his IntelliMedia Center for Intelligent Systems at North Carolina State University, with a focus on intelligent narrative systems for education.  My larger interest is intelligent human computer interaction, and games is an almost perfect test bed for research in this area.

I have just finished reading one of Michael Mateas's and Andrew Stern's older papers, titled: Towards Integrating Plot and Character for Interactive Drama.  It's a nice collection of thoughts from  back in Facade 's earliest days, and it serves as a nice overview of their reasoning behind several of the architectural decisions that they made while creating Facade.  There is a particularly nice discussion about the issue of strongly autonomous characters, the computational implications of their strong autonomy in interactive narrative, and why they steered away from this direction.  It systematically and succinctly describes many of the theoretical challenges that they faced in designing a "complete" interactive drama.  I think these thoughts can be particularly helpful as I conceive of a more interactive narrative version of Crystal Island.  It would also be a good early paper for a course in interactive narrative.

I am currently juggling a couple of balls in trying to decide what direction to take my virtual character work for my written prelim exam while coupling it into an overall vision for the new projects within our lab.  In particular, I am thinking about our new CreativeIT funded project, the Narrative Theater.  But more on that later. . .