Flexible story generation with norms and preferences in computer role playing games

Interactive storytelling is a strength of table-top role playing games as they are facilitated by a game master (GM) who directs the narrative and devises game scenarios. One difficulty with the implementation is the large amount of time, effort and specialist skills that can be required for the creation of such an agent. This paper presents a method for developers to shape the narrative by defining game behaviour in terms of norms and preferences. The system was evaluated with both a case study and a user experiment that showed the users found the system to be both user friendly and suitable for development of games.