1. Prom Week Josh McCoy and Mike Treanor 3-6-2012 GDC 2012 – AI Summit
Make the demo the thing we are talking about the whole time in all the examples

2. What is prom week’s big mission
What is prom week’s big mission? Big vision of making social space playable.
It makes us very happy that Prom Week was chosen as a finalist in this year’s Independent Games Festival in the Technical Excellence category.
So, why make a playable model of social space?

3. Star wars: The Old Republic is an example of the currrent gold standard of storytelling .
SWTOR uses dialogue trees. The player experiences a performance and has a limited, pre-authored responses to choose from.
Dialogue trees have well-known problems.

4. Explicitly Defined Interaction Points
Dialogue trees consist of explicit, pre-defined interaction points.
To add additional story, the author has to make sure the existing story reflects the new story added. This does not scale well.
The usually results in the use of the beads-on-a-string style of story space.
To reduce the amount of story space that needs to be authored, the story is sync’d back at various points.
This effectively erases the player’s choices before the syncing.
How does this compare to games that do not use dialogue trees?

5. Rich Realization & Deep Social Interaction
SW: TOR
The Sims
Dynamic Social Interaction
SW: TOR
The Sims
Character Realization
The two axes here are the level of dynamic social interaction available to the player and character realization.
Games with dialogue tress are on the low end of dynamic social interaction while The Sims 3 is on the higher end.
Character realization is the specificity of the characters’ performances in relation to the social and story worlds.
In The Sims 3, the character realization consists of simlish and abstract communication.
SWTOR has very specific

6. Rich Realization & Deep Social Interaction
SW: TOR
The Sims
Dynamic Social Interaction
SW: TOR
The Sims
Character Realization
Short: We want the best of both worlds!

7. “Social Physics” Angry Birds

8. First-Class Interaction Patterns
Façade

9. Demo

10. Social Exchange Ask on a Date Show Off Idolize Share Interest Open Up
Text Message Break Up
Make Plans
Insult Friend Of
Bully
and more…
A social exchange is an abstract “move” a character can take in order to change the social world.
They include many concrete, but parameterized, ways of performing that move.
For example, s

11. Prom Week’s Process Flow
This is the “life cycle” of a social exchange
We’ll be explaining how we go from selecting which exchange to perform to concrete character dialogue and performance.

12. The Social World

13. Relationships, Statuses, Character Desc.
Character Description
Traits (compassionate, arrogant)
Character-specific locutions (“noob”, “word”)
Relationships
Friends
Dating
Enemies
Temporary Statuses
Heartbroken
Cheerful
Popular …
Reiterate that these are from the prom, not cif generally

14. Subjective Opinions 10
Buddy
Romance
Cool 80 50 95 90 50

15. Social History
Romantic
Mean
Cool
Get the names straight.

16. Cultural Knowledge

17. The Social World

18. Social Considerations
Given that, what we call “Social considerations” are how characters reason about the social world in order determine what they want to do
These are rules that make up the “social norms” of the world.

19. Example Social Considerations
Rule
Weight
Intent
friends(x, y) 4
nice(x, y)
friends(x, y) and hasCrushOn(x, z) and romantic(y, z, recently) 2
mean(x, y)
highRomance(x,y) and mean(z,x,first) and mean(y,z,second) 3
date(x,y)
(Noah thought that the friend zone seemed too simple)
Communicate intents of the outer rules.
Encode many rules like being in the “Friends zone” – I becomes uncomfortable with R due to the romance.
If you’re friends with someone and they do something romantic to you, intent to romDown is increased, intent to be mean to them is increased.

20. Example Social Considerations
Rule
Weight
Intent
friends(x, y) 4
nice(x, y)
friends(x, y) and hasCrushOn(x, z) and romantic(y, z, recently) 2
mean(x, y)
highRomance(x,y) and mean(z,x,first) and mean(y,z,second) 3
date(x,y)
And 5,000 more!
Note that we are not trying to model reality. We studied existing media experiences to and targeted our rule authoring to create it.

21. Social Considerations
Social considerations are rules that influence behavior
Influence rules nudge a character’s willingness to make certain changes in the social world (like become better friends or start dating).
Are the primary and secondary friends…. were they friends 5 turns ago…. Do they have more than 3 friends…
Likewise
“All rules are Horne clauses, so their predicates are ANDed together. This decreases evaluation time, which is a consideration with so many rules.”

22. Choosing a Social Exchange
Be more clear about how to guide people’s eyes through what is happening.

23. Choosing a Social Exchange

24. Responding to a Social Exchange
Now Josh will explain how to go from an abstract social exchange to creating a concrete character performance…

25. Responding to a Social Exchange

26. How and Why Characters Respond
Reminisce
Accept or Reject based
determined by considerations
Most salient response chosen
Each changes the social world
in different ways
Accept
Y has done something to embarrass Z recently
X is enemies with Z

27. Natural Language Generation

28. Instantiation X: Hey %y%. Man, I can't stand %z%...
Y: Tell me about it. Hey, remember that time when
%SFDB_(embarrassed,y,z)%?
X: Oh god, I totally do! %pronoun(z ,he/she)% totally had that coming for being such a %pejorative%!

29. Instantiation Simon: Hey Monica. Man, I can't stand Oswald...
Monica: Tell me about it. Hey, remember that time when
I broke up with Oswald in the middle of his tennis match just to make him lose?
Simon: Oh god, I totally do! He totally had that coming for being such a n00b!

30. Evolving the Social World

31. Indirect Effects Cascading consequences of social exchanges
Captures state changes across social exchanges
E.g.
Cheating(x,y):
Dating(x,y) then Dating(x,z)
AngryAt(x,y):
Dating(x,z) and Mean(y,z)

32. Takeaway: “Social Physics” through Retargeting Social Interactions

33. Thanks! http://promweekgame.com Josh McCoy mccoyjo@soe.ucsc.edu
Mike Treanor
and Ben Samuel, Aaron Reed, Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Ryan Andonian, Kathleen Kralowec, Corey DiMiceli, Zane Mariano, Jacob Pernell, Christian Ress, Duncan Bowsman, Travis Brown, Melissa Bernetsky, Devon Wyland, Ellen Otsuka, Garin Kessler, Alexander Baker, Daniel Cetina, Alexander Schneider, Lauren Scott, Evan Mertz, Brandon Tearse, Alexei Othenin-Girard

34. Prom Week’s Architecture
Distinction between what needs to be authored (green) and what CiF does with the authored parts (orange).
Introducing these is a slog – should we assume this is obvious given the game design saavy crowd?

35. Challenges Technical authoring NLG + rules
unexpected consequences: “you’ll never get my flower!”
What to show to the player
Performance vs spreadsheet
Social space tuning
Consistent story quality
Technical authoring (NLG + rules + unexpected consequences “you’ll never get my flower!”)
What to show to the player
Social space tuning
Stddev of story quality

36. Rich Realization & Deep Social Interaction
Prom Week
SW:TOR
The Sims 3