STORYFIGHTER: A Common Sense Storytelling Game

Chian Chuu and Hana Kim

MAS.964 Final Project

December 12, 2002

Game Screenshot

Outline

Motivation Game Description Implementation Demo Issues Encountered Conclusion Future Work

Motivation

To create an interactive storytelling game that would use common sense knowledge to derive sentences

Utilize Open Mind Common Sense database in interactive computing

StoryFighter Description

Predetermined start state and end state Goal of the user : reach the goal state in a

certain number of steps Goal of the system : prevent the user from

reaching the goal state by issuing taboowords related to the goal state

User and system alternate writing sentences

Implementation

Javascript, IE ActiveX Object, Flash Knowledge base : semantic net, Open

Mind Taboo Words : synonyms and related

words of the goal state

Demo

Issues Encountered

How to maintain coherence with storytelling? Identified relevant words Limited to set sentence patterns Causal reasoning with game-specific

semantic net How to know when the user has reached

the goal state? Search for goal state words inside last

system response sentence, “prison”, “jail”

Conclusion

Hard to maintain coherence in storytelling applications when database doesn’t have contextual information

Cannot be flexible about user input without extensive natural language processing tools

Future Work

Collect more user input to construct more extensive semantic net

Add contextual information to Open Mind Add more storytelling scenarios Possibility of having system vs. multiple

users Processing of system response sentence

(“you” for “John”)

Q&A