1. EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIO The Future of Gaming Unfolding the Future of Interactive Storytelling UC Santa Cruz School of Engineering michaelm@cs.ucsc.edu 20 May 2007 Michael Mateas

2. EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIOUC SANTA CRUZ Storytelling

3. EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIOUC SANTA CRUZ Artificial Intelligence

4. EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIOUC SANTA CRUZ Game AI : The future of games  As a new medium games are still in their infancy, focused predominantly on physical action  Artificial Intelligence enables games that…  Comment on the full range of human experience through playable simulations of people and social situations  Deeply respond to interaction  Radically customize themselves to individual players

5. EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIOUC SANTA CRUZ Return of the King

6. EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIOUC SANTA CRUZ American Beauty?

7. EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIOUC SANTA CRUZ Need story and character AI Plot structure Tension/Complexity Time Exposition Inciting incident Rising action Crisis Climax Falling action Denouement Characters Personality Emotion Self motivation Change Social relationships Consistency Illusion of life

8. EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIOUC SANTA CRUZ Façade

9. EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIOUC SANTA CRUZ Technology and design areas  Autonomous characters  Personality and behavior representations  Emotion modeling  Computational acting  Drama management  Story modeling  Dynamic sequencing and intervention  Language & interface  Enabling rich communication for the player

10. EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIOUC SANTA CRUZ Standard interactive story approaches

11. EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIOUC SANTA CRUZ Story authorship and interaction The story graph  Author has control but  All interaction paths must be pre-coded by author  Can only make very small stories  Bits of story can’t be incrementally added

12. EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIOUC SANTA CRUZ Drama management  Policy for “story piece” selection  An alternative to explicitly coded links Story library Selection policy Actual sequence

13. EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIOUC SANTA CRUZ Optimization-based drama management Plot points Story moves Evaluation function (story goodness) Sequence so far Project possible futures Evaluate projected histories Backup projected history evaluations Pick DM move with highest backed up evaluation

14. EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIOUC SANTA CRUZ Authoring AI-based storytelling

15. EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIOUC SANTA CRUZ Expressive Intelligence Studio

16. EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIOUC SANTA CRUZ Video games: Birth of a new medium  Games are the cinema of the 21 st century  UC Santa Cruz is moving to become a leader in education and research in this new medium  The creation of the first game degree program in the UC system  Cutting edge technical and design research in games  UCSC’s unique interdisciplinary environment makes it a natural home for this work  Computer game design is inherently interdisciplinary

17. EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIOUC SANTA CRUZ CS: Computer Game Design  Video games have quickly become one of the biggest mainstream drivers of hardware and software advances  The cutting edge of real-time physics simulation, animation, distributed systems, ever more sophisticated AI…  A technically focused degree program  Strong core of computer science  Additional depth courses in game design and artistic aspects  Creating future leaders who can radically innovate  Strong numbers  99 students starting program Fall 2007  118 students starting Fall 2008  Now largest program in the School of Engineering ping.exe Cyberspace exploration game by UCSC student Nicholas Kent