text: In the last decade, scenario-based serious-games have become a main tool for learning new skills and capabilities. An important factor in the development of such systems is the overhead in time, cost and human resources to manually create the content for these scenarios. We focus on how to create content for scenarios in medical, military, commerce and gaming applications where maintaining the integrity and coherence of the content is integral for the system's success. To do so, we present an automatic method for generating content about everyday activities through combining computer science techniques with the crowd. We use the crowd in three basic ways: to capture a database of scenarios of everyday activities, to generate a database of likely replacements for specific events within that scenario, and to evaluate the resulting scenarios. We found that the generated scenarios were rated as reliable and consistent by the crowd when compared to the scenarios that were originally captured. We also compared the generated scenarios to those created by traditional planning techniques. We found that both methods were equally effective in generated reliable and consistent scenarios, yet the main advantages of our approach is that the content we generate is more varied and much easier to create. We have begun integrating this approach within a scenario-based training application for novice investigators within the law enforcement departments to improve their questioning skills.
  @cite_18: Telling a story is a difficult task that requires a variety of knowledge and cognitive processes: knowledge about themes, writing techniques, the story world, and presentation; processes such as planning, problem-solving, recall and creativity. This dissertation presents a model of the storytelling process which incorporates theories of creativity, memory and author-level planning. This model has been implemented in a computer program called MINSTREL which tells short, theme-based stories about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. MINSTREL's creativity process is based upon creativity heuristics called Transform-Recall-Adapt Methods (TRAMs). Each TRAM integrates a simple problem transformation which searches the problem-space for new knowledge to apply to a problem with a corresponding adaptation which can adapt any discovered knowledge to the original problem. By using TRAMs to augment the problem-solving process, MINSTREL is able to invent useful new problem solutions. By incorporating creativity into the recall process, MINSTREL makes creativity available to any cognitive process, and permits the use of multiple TRAMs to make creative "leaps". MINSTREL's storytelling process is based upon a model of author-level problem-solving. In addition to a process model of author-level problem-solving, MINSTREL implements four important classes of author-level goals and plans: (1) Thematic, (2) Dramatic, (3) Consistency, and (4) Presentation. MINSTREL uses these goals and plans to tell a number of short stories in the King Arthur domain. MINSTREL is a computational model of the cognitive processes of storytelling and creativity. MINSTREL (1) describes a process model of storytelling, (2) identifies important storytelling goals and plans, (3) identifies fundamental storytelling processes, (4) describes a process model of creativity, (5) explains how a problem-solver can find and adapt old knowledge to create new solutions, (6) identifies useful creativity heuristics, (7) explains creative "leaps", (8) explains the relation of creativity to problem-solving, (9) describes the relationship between memory and creativity, and (10) integrates creativity into a larger cognitive model.
  @cite_9: Narrative, and in particular storytelling, is an important part of the human experience. Consequently, computational systems that can reason about narrative can be more effective communicators, entertainers, educators, and trainers. One of the central challenges in computational narrative reasoning is narrative generation, the automated creation of meaningful event sequences. There are many factors - logical and aesthetic - that contribute to the success of a narrative artifact. Central to this success is its understandability. We argue that the following two attributes of narratives are universal: (a) the logical causal progression of plot, and (b) character believability. Character believability is the perception by the audience that the actions performed by characters do not negatively impact the audience's suspension of disbelief. Specifically, characters must be perceived by the audience to be intentional agents. In this article, we explore the use of refinement search as a technique for solving the narrative generation problem - to find a sound and believable sequence of character actions that transforms an initial world state into a world state in which goal propositions hold. We describe a novel refinement search planning algorithm - the Intent-based Partial Order Causal Link (IPOCL) planner - that, in addition to creating causally sound plot progression, reasons about character intentionality by identifying possible character goals that explain their actions and creating plan structures that explain why those characters commit to their goals. We present the results of an empirical evaluation that demonstrates that narrative plans generated by the IPOCL algorithm support audience comprehension of character intentions better than plans generated by conventional partial-order planners.
  @cite_6: Societ al changes demand educators to apply new pedagogical approaches. Many educational stakeholders feel that serious games could play a key role in fulfilling this demand, and they lick their chops when looking at the booming industry of leisure games. However, current toolkits for developing leisure games show severe shortcomings when applied to serious games. Developing effective serious games in an efficient way requires a specific approach and tool set. This article describes the EMERGO methodology and generic toolkit for developing and delivering scenario-based serious games that are aimed at the acquisition of complex cognitive skills in higher education. Preliminary evaluation results with case developers using the EMERGO methodology and toolkit and with learners using EMERGO cases are presented.
  @cite_0: Learners may develop expertise by experiencing numerous different but relevant situations. Computer games and virtual simulations can facilitate these training opportunities, however, because of the relative difficulty in authoring new scenarios, the increasing need for new and different scenarios becomes a bottleneck in the learning process. Furthermore, a one-size-fits-all scenario may not address all of the abilities, needs, or goals of a particular learner. To address these issues we present a novel technique, Automated Scenario Adaptation, to automatically “rewrite” narrative scenario content to suit individual learners’ needs and abilities and to incorporate recent changes from real world learning needs. Scenario adaptation acts as problem generation for intelligent tutoring systems, producing greater learning opportunities that facilitate engagement and continued learner involvement.
  @cite_23: 
  @cite_15: Conflict is an essential element of interesting stories, but little research in computer narrative has addressed it directly. We present a model of narrative conflict inspired by narratology research and based on Partial Order Causal Link (POCL) planning. This model informs an algorithm called CPOCL which extends previous research in story generation. Rather than eliminate all threatened causal links, CPOCL marks certain steps in a plan as non-executed in order to preserve the conflicting subplans of all characters without damaging the causal soundness of the overall story.
  @cite_16: Interactive storytelling is a privileged application of intelligent visual actor technology. The authors introduce their character-based interactive storytelling prototype that uses hierarchical task network planning techniques, which support story generation and any-time user intervention.
  @cite_10: Hundreds of millions of people play computer games every day. For them, game content—from 3D objects to abstract puzzles—plays a major entertainment role. Manual labor has so far ensured that the quality and quantity of game content matched the demands of the playing community, but is facing new scalability challenges due to the exponential growth over the last decade of both the gamer population and the production costs. Procedural Content Generation for Games (PCG-G) may address these challenges by automating, or aiding in, game content generation. PCG-G is difficult, since the generator has to create the content, satisfy constraints imposed by the artist, and return interesting instances for gamers. Despite a large body of research focusing on PCG-G, particularly over the past decade, ours is the first comprehensive survey of the field of PCG-G. We first introduce a comprehensive, six-layered taxonomy of game content: bits, space, systems, scenarios, design, and derived. Second, we survey the methods used across the whole field of PCG-G from a large research body. Third, we map PCG-G methods to game content layers; it turns out that many of the methods used to generate game content from one layer can be used to generate content from another. We also survey the use of methods in practice, that is, in commercial or prototype games. Fourth and last, we discuss several directions for future research in PCG-G, which we believe deserve close attention in the near future.
  @cite_12: Interactive Narrative is an approach to interactive entertainment that enables the player to make decisions that directly affect the direction and or outcome of the narrative experience being delivered by the computer system. Interactive narrative requires two seemingly conflicting requirements: coherent narrative and user agency. We present an interactive narrative system that uses a combination of narrative control and autonomous believable character agents to augment a story world simulation in which the user has a high degree of agency with narrative plot control. A drama manager called the Automated Story Director gives plot-based guidance to believable agents. The believable agents are endowed with the autonomy necessary to carry out directives in the most believable fashion possible. Agents also handle interaction with the user. When the user performs actions that change the world in such a way that the Automated Story Director can no longer drive the intended narrative forward, it is able to adapt the plot to incorporate the user's changes and still achieve dramatic goals.
summary: The development of serious games for training is a complex and time-consuming process @cite_6 . While early works considered a whole story creation without getting any real-time input from the user @cite_23 @cite_18 , the later works focus on interactive narratives where the user is part of the story and can affect the plotline @cite_16 @cite_9 @cite_15 @cite_12 . Some works use also hybrid methods whereby a predefined plot is created and an autonomic agent can later add to or adapt the plot in real-time @cite_0 . However, these studies focus on the general plot of the story but not on the story's details, which were almost exclusively manually created by content experts. A second important direction is the Procedural Content Generation (PCG) for Games discipline. However, while there has been significant in PCG generation for serious games in the past decade, to date, tools for textual content generation are still lacking @cite_10 . To address this need, we created a framework for generating coherent scenarios, which include a sequence of activity events (activities) and also the activities' descriptions (narratives).