{"id":44,"date":"2006-06-06T00:35:15","date_gmt":"2006-06-05T22:35:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/?p=44"},"modified":"2006-06-15T09:03:56","modified_gmt":"2006-06-15T07:03:56","slug":"interview-with-andrew-stern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/?p=44","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Andrew Stern"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrew Stern has been doing the kind of stuff that we’re looking into on these pages for years. He has been involved as a designer and developer in pet games Dogz, Catz and Babyz as well as the recent interactive drama Fa\u00c3\u0192\u00c2\u00a7ade<\/a>. He’s made numerous publications and presentations on the subject of autonomous characters and is a very active contributor to Grand Text Auto<\/a>.
\nI had the pleasure of interviewing him via email. He starts by answering two questions simultaneously.<\/em><\/p>\n

Michael Samyn:<\/em> What do you think of the “paradox of the actor<\/a>“, as described by Diderot in the 18th century, in relation to autonomous characters? Diderot claims that the best actor is the one who does not feel a thing but who excells at imitating only the symptoms of the behaviour of humans. Is it required for virtual actors to feel the emotions (i.e. to posses a mind) in order to express them?<\/p>\n

Your work has always favoured artistic goals over scientific ones. Still I feel that there is a strong scientific “reflex” in the solutions you come up with. A lot of your work seems to attempt to model a character or a story from the inside out, which I consider to be the scientific approach (break things apart and put them back together). Do you feel that a scientific approach is required?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Andrew Stern:<\/em><\/strong> First, let’s realize that even the most sophisticated “mind” we can program with contemporary methods will be but pale imitations (greatly simplified versions) of real minds. So arguably all we can do, practically speaking, is imitate symptoms of human behavior anyway. But the spirit of your questions is, should we attempt a cognitive solution, that attempts to model mind-like processes, or should we create some other simpler, perhaps an ad-hoc solution?
\nThe answer is, it depends on what you want your virtual actor to be capable of doing. If you’re happy with shallow interaction, say, stimulus-response interaction, then an approach such as AIML, used to make the text bot A.L.I.C.E. will suffice, which is basically a large number of inputs mapped in a relatively simple way to outputs.
\nA.L.I.C.E. is quite broad, and very shallow. It works for certain domains and artistic goals; in fact the creator of AIML and A.L.I.C.E. has been known to say that statistically speaking, most real human conversation is shallow, stimulus-response interaction. I see A.L.I.C.E. as, in a sense, a commentary on the shallowness of the typical human conversation; the system is successful in that regard.
\nBut if you want you virtual actor to have deeper responses, that is, responses that take into account the history of the player’s input, that result in more meaningful, cumulative responses to your discourse, you’ll need to be keeping track of the discourse (an episodic memory), to be modelling attitudes and beliefs over time (a model of emotion, knowledge, personality), give the actors motivations (goals and plans) and so on. The models are some sort of encapsulation of the “rules” of how your actor should behave, implemented in some relatively elegant, thought-through, non-ad-hoc way.<\/p>\n

At the end of the day, there’s just no way to fake that. And at the end of the day, most artists want more than less meaning and depth in their work.<\/p>\n

Note behavior models (e.g. episodic memory, emotion, knowledge, personality) — which are in essence various ways of keeping track of and modulating the actor’s state as it changes over time in response to the player’s actions — can be much simpler than real minds are, and in fact may not really directly mirror any systems actually in the human mind. Nonetheless, they are non-trivially sophisticated models of dramatic behavior. In fact, because they’re modelling dramatic behavior, they will necessarily differ from biologically-inspired models of behavior, e.g. a-life driven agents.<\/p>\n

Behavior models are also the key to creating characters that can generate behavior, that is, virtual actors that can get themselves into states and as a result perform patterns of behavior over time that weren’t explicitly pre-written by their author.
\nAnother way to answer your questions — and this is something my collaborator Michael and I often say — is that there is no “design only” solution to creating non-trivially interactive characters and stories. To make something more sophisticated than a stimulus-response bot or a choose-your-own-adventure story, one needs to start modelling behavior.
\nI think modelling behavior is probably equivalent to what you’re calling truly “feeling” the emotions they are performing. Do real actors need to do that? By and large, I think many successful actors truly feel the emotions they are performing; by doing so, it allows them to generate a more authentic, robust performance.<\/p>\n

Finally, let me say that these dramatic models of behavior, while technical in form, are heavily shaped by our artistic goals. That is, when creating these models — essentially these rules governing how virtual actors will behave — we’re always thinking about how the player perceives this behavior, are these rules going to result in the kind of performance we want to achieve for this actor, etc. As artists, we’re still very much in control of what the actor will ultimately be capable of doing or saying, even though exactly what is said and when will be determined in real-time, in response to the player’s actions. Even as these models get deeper and more generative in the future, I feel we’ll be able to retain a high level of authorial control over them.<\/p>\n

MS:<\/em> How do you feel about the concept of plot in interactive storytelling? And more specifically about the concept of a drama manager (a computer program that steers an interactive story towards an interesting plot arc)? Do you believe that a drama manager can be built to tell stories that can rival traditional literature or good theater? Or is pulp and formats the best it can do?<\/strong><\/p>\n

AS:<\/em><\/strong> I very much want to create systems that can generate a variety of narratives, in response on a moment-by-moment basis to what the player is saying and doing. Necessarily, this means we must abandon the ideal of a tightly-plotted story, because players are always going to be experimenting, pushing things in all kinds of directions, that will rarely allow for an extremely well-formed overall plot to be created.
\nThat said, let’s not forget that in a real-time collaboration between the human player and the drama manager, that the drama manager — who is controlling the behavior of all of the virtual actors — is one half of the overall authorship of the experience. 50% control over the events being generated in a story is probably is enough to allow a loosely-plotted story to be created, if the overall domain of the story is set up to allow for that.
\nFor example, in Facade, you’ve got the player vs. the duo Grace and Trip. The player can say and act any way they like; they could act like they’re dying, or act really violent, or completely absurd, what have you. The coordinated duo Grace and Trip will attempt to respond to the player, but also can believably mix in their own agenda, even believably ignore the player at times as needed (just as the player may ignore Grace and Trip if she wishes). You may end up with a absurdist story in the end where the characters each seem to be in a world of their own, but because the characters all share the same space and to some extent are reacting to one another, I’d at least call that loosely-plotted.
\n(Ideally the human player and drama manager cooperate and help each other out, at least some of the time.)<\/p>\n

I’m not at all interested in making a drama manager that attempts to force the player into a particular story. If Facade seems to do that, it’s only because we ran out of time and\/or energy to author a broad enough array of responses to at least respond to what the player wants to do. (This is another argument for more generative models of behavior, to help make virtual actors even more responsive to the player.)<\/p>\n

Once you buy into the idea of allowing for loosely-plotted stories, even “bad” stories to be generated, we get rid of several of the supposed conundrums of interactive stories: 1) we get rid of the conflict between freedom vs. well-formed plot, because we’re not requiring a well-formed plot, we’re okay with a looser plot; 2) we get rid of this concern of some that too much freedom is bad thing, that we must greatly constrain players in order to ensure for a satisfying experience. I’m much more in favor of an open ended interface, that allows players to do and say anything they want, and only apply constraints on how the virtual actors will decide to interpret and work with the player’s actions. Again, let’s give the player a full 50% of the authorship of the story, and the drama manager 50%. Ideally the player and drama manager cooperate, but they don’t have to.<\/p>\n

MS:<\/em> The linearity of a story and the linearity implied by goal-oriented gameplay seem oddly compatible. This motivates people like Marianne Krawczyk<\/a> (writer for God of War) to claim that they overlap, that the story of a game is expressed through goal-oriented gameplay. Obviously your narrative ambitions go far beyond anything an action game can express. Does this mean that goal-oriented gameplay should be abandoned?<\/strong><\/p>\n

AS:<\/em><\/strong> No, goal-oriented gameplay shouldn’t be abandoned, in fact it should be expanded and broadened. It’s only natural that players find achieving goals satisfying. But allowing players to form their own goals and be able to pursue and achieve them, in various ways, will be far more satisfying than offering players only one primary goal and one linear path to achieve that goal. <\/p>\n

Just as importantly, we should allow players the freedom to just screw around, to play, to not pursue a goal if they wish. In total, we should be making dramatic worlds that allow for both freeform play, as well as goal-oriented play.<\/p>\n

MS:<\/em> You once mentioned that you thought of agency as one of the most important elements in interactive fiction, i.e. the things that the player can do and how this effects the other characters and the game world. Why is agency so important? Does a higher level of agency improve the story? And if so, how?<\/strong><\/p>\n

AS:<\/em><\/strong> I mention it all the time in my blog posts! Agency is the most fundamental property of interactive anything — be it games, web surfing, email, what have you. If you can’t have meaningful influence over what you’re doing when you take action on the computer, why is it interactive? If you’re to be led through an experience, why didn’t the author just make a movie or write a book?<\/p>\n

But like I said earlier, I don’t think players need 100% control over the experience; an interactive experience can be a 50\/50 collaboration between the human player and the system — where the system is a proxy for the human artist\/programmer who created it.
\nLet’s not forget, ultimately, playing interactive art\/entertainment is an interaction between people, via the artifact of a software system — particularly when the system is simulating (dramatic) human behavior, i.e. virtual actors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrew Stern has been doing the kind of stuff that we’re looking into on these pages for years. He has been involved as a designer and developer in pet games Dogz, Catz and Babyz as well as the recent interactive drama Fa\u00c3\u0192\u00c2\u00a7ade. He’s made numerous publications and presentations on the subject of autonomous characters and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-projects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tale-of-tales.com\/DramaPrincess\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}