Villanelle: Towards Authorable Autonomous Characters in Interactive Narrative

Innovations in intelligent narrative technologies have continued to accelerate, but elude adoption by a broad and diverse audience of storytellers. Authoring accessibility for these technologies is an open challenge, largely due to tensions between story adaptability and author control, explainability, and predictability. We describe ongoing efforts on the Villanelle project, an approach to autonomous character authoring that integrates scripting with generativity, using a logic-based foundation that unifies these approaches with reasoning principles that carry through the authoring process. We outline our proposal for thinking about authoring languages rather than tools, describe our proposal for such a language, and discuss current implementation progess, including a block-based authoring tool and two ongoing game projects using the framework. We discuss key design challenges and a future roadmap for accessible autonomous character authorship.

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