Abstract
We present Expressionist, an authoring tool for in-game text generation that combines the raw generative power of context-free grammars (CFGs) with the expressive power of free-text markup. Specifically, authors use the tool to define CFGs whose nonterminal symbols may be annotated using arbitrary author-defined tagsets. Any content generated by the CFG comes packaged with explicit metadata in the form of the markup attributed to all the symbols that were expanded to produce the content. Expressionist has already been utilized in two released games and it is currently being used in two ongoing projects. In this paper, we describe the tool and discuss these usage examples in a series of case studies. Expressionist is planned for release in late 2016.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
We use the term ‘game’ here for brevity and convenience, but we more generally mean any work of interactive storytelling or playable media.
References
Bad Cop Studios: Project Perfect Citizen (2016)
Bona, D.J.L.: Recursion in cognition: a computational investigation into the representation and processing of language. Ph.D. thesis, University Rovira i Virgili (2012)
Caldwell, B.: Free Loaders: This Desktop is Under Investigation. Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Bath (2016)
Cavazza, M., Charles, F.: Dialogue generation in character-based interactive storytelling. In: Proceedings of AIIDE (2005)
Compton, K., Kybartas, B., Mateas, M.: Tracery: an author-focused generative text tool. In: Schoenau-Fog, H., Bruni, L.E., Louchart, S., Baceviciute, S. (eds.) ICIDS 2015. LNCS, vol. 9445, pp. 154–161. Springer, Heidelberg (2015). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-27036-4_14
Elson, D.K.: Modeling narrative discourse. Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University (2012)
Evans, R., Short, E.: Versu–a simulationist storytelling system. In: TCIAIG (2014)
Gatt, A., Reiter, E.: SimpleNLG: a realisation engine for practical applications. In: Proceedings of ENLG (2009)
Horswill, I.D.: Architectural issues for compositional dialog in games. In: Proceedings of GAMNLP (2014)
Joseph, E.: Bot colony–a video game featuring intelligent language-based interaction with the characters. In: Proceedings of GAMNLP (2012)
Lessard, J.: Designing natural-language game conversations. In: Proceedings of DiGRA-FDG (2016)
Loyall, A.B., Bates, J.: Personality-rich believable agents that use language. In: Proceedings of AGENTS (1997)
Mateas, M.: The authoring bottleneck in creating AI-based interactive stories [panel]. In: Proceedings of INT (2007)
Mawhorter, P.A.: Artificial intelligence as a tool for understanding narrative choices. Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Santa Cruz (2016)
Montfort, N.: Generating narrative variation in interactive fiction. Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania (2007)
Reed, A.A., et al.: A step towards the future of role-playing games: the SpyFeet mobile RPG project. In: Proceedings of AIIDE (2011)
Rowe, J.P., Ha, E.Y., Lester, J.C.: Archetype-driven character dialogue generation for interactive narrative. In: Prendinger, H., Lester, J., Ishizuka, M. (eds.) IVA 2008. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 5208, pp. 45–58. Springer, Heidelberg (2008). doi:10.1007/978-3-540-85483-8_5
Ryan, J., Brothers, T., Mateas, M., Wardrip-Fruin, N.: Juke joint: characters who are moved by music. In: Proceedings of Experimental AI in Games (2016)
Ryan, J., Mateas, M., Wardrip-Fruin, N.: Characters who speak their minds: dialogue generation in talk of the town. In: Proceedings of AIIDE (2016)
Ryan, J., Mateas, M., Wardrip-Fruin, N.: A lightweight videogame dialogue manager. In: Proceedings of DiGRA-FDG (2016)
Ryan, J.O., Barackman, C., Kontje, N., Owen-Milner, T., Walker, M.A., Mateas, M., Wardrip-Fruin, N.: Combinatorial dialogue authoring. In: Mitchell, A., Fernández-Vara, C., Thue, D. (eds.) ICIDS 2014. LNCS, vol. 8832, pp. 13–24. Springer, Heidelberg (2014). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-12337-0_2
Ryan, J.O., Fisher, A.M., Owen-Milner, T., Mateas, M., Wardrip-Fruin, N.: Toward natural language generation by humans. In: Proceedings of INT-SBG (2015)
Ryan, J.O., Mateas, M., Wardrip-Fruin, N.: Open design challenges for interactive emergent narrative. In: Schoenau-Fog, H., Bruni, L.E., Louchart, S., Baceviciute, S. (eds.) ICIDS 2015. LNCS, vol. 9445, pp. 14–26. Springer, Heidelberg (2015). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-27036-4_2
Short, E.: Procedural text generation in IF. https://emshort.wordpress.com/2014/11/18/procedural-text-generation-in-if/
Summerville, A.J., Ryan, J., Mateas, M., Wardrip-Fruin, N.: CFGs-2-NLU: sequence-to-sequence learning for mapping utterances to semantics and pragmatics. Techical report. UCSC-SOE-16-11, UC Santa Cruz (2016)
Vacuous Games: Snapshot (2016)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ryan, J., Seither, E., Mateas, M., Wardrip-Fruin, N. (2016). Expressionist: An Authoring Tool for In-Game Text Generation. In: Nack, F., Gordon, A. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10045. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48279-8_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48279-8_20
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-48278-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-48279-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)