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