Artificial Storytelling: where should I look?

Hello,

I am part of a graduate course in computational creativity at Brigham Young University. We're working on an AI research project about computational storytelling, with the goal of improving the quality and creativity of computer-generated narratives. We think that Second Life may be able to help us with this--let me explain some background. (For the short version, skip to the bottom).

One of the ways that people discover great stories is simply by living in the world and watching it. They see stories as they happen, remember them, then retell them to others: often embellished or changed for improved dramatic effect. Nevertheless, the story began as something observed, rather than developed from scratch.

Our goal is to design a system that mimics this: the system watches people and events, discovers which chains of events make sense as good stories, and then tells a story based primarily on what they observed. Naturally, watching the real, physical world is prohibitively difficult. Previous researchers have used simulations to avoid this problem, with artificial people and events in an artificial world. The problem with this is that the kinds of things that can occur are limited by the imagination of the designers of the simulation.

What we'd like to bring to the table is a simulation that a computer has a chance of understanding, but powered by actual people instead of AI agents. In other words, we want to design a system to discover and tell stories based on observing an MMO. This is where Second Life comes in: our goal is to have a computer watch Second Life, see what happens, find interesting stories, and then tell them.


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So, my question to you: where are some good spots to visit in order to observe events that can be made into stories? I don't need anything complicated: for example, a group of players hunting treasure would be just fine. Simple chat or entirely conversation-based roleplay will probably not work, and we'd prefer to avoid adult content. I've spent some time puttering around various spots, but unfortunately have failed to find what I'm looking for yet (SL is huge!) I don't need anything too complicated: just a place to watch where SL denizens can be regularly found doing story-worthy things. Any ideas?

Thanks for your time!

Friday gets earlier every week.

This might be a lot more difficult that it would seem at first.

Most SL interactions occur on at least three levels. Avatar animations and gestures...which are limited, and may or may not actually pertain to what is going on...open chat, and private IMs.

Much of the real interaction takes place in IMs, which your AI (or any third party observer) cannot see.

Some simple stories might be possible, based on things like SL sports. An En Garde fencing match, for example.

"Jules Avatar stepped onto the strip and challenged all comers. Sally Pixels responded to his challenge and faced him, drawing her rapier..."

IMO, anywhere in SL where there are people.

Ye gods . . .

Well, an obvious possibility is an RP area, where there might be more of a narrative "thread" to follow than in most more casual meeting places. I presume you want one that does not centre around "adult activity," so what about something like New Babbage, in Caledon?

But bear in mind that, unlike MMORPGs, SL is not "story driven": it's an open VW environment, where anything can (and often does) happen.

That sounds like a really interesting research project.

Having said that, you might want to be a bit careful in the manner in which you gather your data. You may run into violating the Community Standards portion of the TOS with regards to remotely monitoring conversations if you haven't first received consent from the associated parties as part of your data collection. You might also want to run this by your academic IRB if you haven't thought to do so already.

That narrows it down considerably. What, 10 places..15, tops?

I was on my way in here to say that, but stopped to chat with Scylla and you said it first. That's SO true. Check with those IRB folks and keep your ethics up.

Just go to one of the Linden Office hours. That's artifical storytelling at it's finest.

The obvious place is not inworld, but here.

Pep (Get your text analysis AI to deconstruct and reconstruct any large thread in the RA forum, preferably one started by a hysterical "female".)

Thanks for the responses.



True. Since parsing and understanding chat between people is a completely separate, very difficult, mostly unsolved AI problem, we'd rather focus on stories that can be gleaned from more basic elements. Your fencing example is exactly the kind of thing we had in mind: we want to be able to find story elements based on *actions* more than words.



Good point... we've thought about privacy issues, but haven't figured out all of the details yet. Since we're not interested in conversations (except at maybe the high level of "Bob talked to Sue" this probably won't be a big deal, but we'll make sure everything is on the level.

You might considering getting in touch with communities that revolve around SL adventure games and their ilk. One example I can think of right now is Avalon, a medieval fantasy sim that houses a sort of linear adventure game. There are many others that span various genres with various levels of complexity and interact. I believe this approach would be beneficial because there is usually a complex scripted system in place that handles the player-game interaction, and this may offer the benefit of easily mining data for your system.

Bob TheKnight picks up an "ancient sword". Bob TheKnight saves "the princess". Bob TheKnight kills "the dragon". All events that you could easily tie into the scripts for these places.

However... you'd likely require some level of cooperation between yourself and the developers of these places.