It’s IF Comp time!

And you know what that means. I’m setting this blog back to summary-feed RSS so that I can post reviews as I go along without exporting spoilers to Planet-IF. But I encourage you all to check out the competition too. And congratulations to all the authors, and thanks to Stephen Granade and his technical supporters in putting the comp together for another year. I’m looking forward to playing through this batch.

Drama Management with Anchorhead-based Test Case

Manu Sharma, Santi Ontañón, Manish Mehta, and Ashwin Ram are publishing some research into drama management using a simplified version of Anchorhead (with a choose-your-own-adventure interface rather than a text parser).

The full paper is worth a read (though fairly technical), but the gist is that they proceeded by taking a series of cases from players, determining which players liked which subplots. They then designed a drama manager that would compare the current player’s behavior against its cases, determine which subplots this player was likely to be most interested in, and hint the player in the direction of those subplots. The result appears to be a better experience especially for non-gamers, though some players (especially the more experienced ones) disliked being over-hinted in the direction of things they would enjoy.

When no confident predictions can be made from player predictions, the drama management model falls back on author-defined rules about what to present when.

I have a bunch of minor quibbles with particulars of the study, but found the conclusions intriguing.

Continue reading “Drama Management with Anchorhead-based Test Case”

Speaking of contests

“Citizens for Global Solutions” (about which, I confess, I knew essentially nothing until today) has posted a contest for interactive fiction dealing with global concerns and their solutions. (That includes human rights issues, global warming, nuclear proliferation, etc.) Their definition of interactive fiction is a bit different from mine, but it sounds as though text-based IF would count among the things they’re looking for.

There are cash prizes ($2000 first place, $1000 second place, $500 third place, plus a people’s choice award). Submissions are due November 17th.