Welcome!

This is the home of PaSSAGE, a multidisciplinary research project spanning the fields of Computer Science, Psychology, Mythology, and Narratology. By combining the techniques of psychological modelling and profiling with lessons learned from the telling of myths, we aim to create an automated system which mimics the improvised, attentive, and creative process of interactive storytelling.

Storytelling and Modelling in Games

During an ideal interactive story, the audience plays an integral role in the development of the story's plot, as their reactions to story events help to guide the storyteller's decisions. Many modern video games strive to tell stories with high audience (player) interaction, but the potential variations of plot in such games are often minimal, leaving players feeling as though their actions change nothing. Similarly, many other video games perform some form of modelling or profiling of the player, but to date this information has only been significantly used to dynamically adjust the difficulty of combat-oriented games, leaving the plots of their stories as determined beforehand.

PaSSAGE: Interactive Storytelling with Player Modelling

With PaSSAGE, we explore the intersection of Interactive Storytelling and Player Modelling in the context of commercial video games, specifically in the Role-Playing genre. Like the Game Master of traditional pen-and-paper role-playing games, PaSSAGE observes a player's reactions to in-game events, builds a model of that player's style of play, and chooses subsequent events in the story to best suit the modelled player. Current work focuses on automatically bringing consistency to the roles played by non-player characters in a story, with respect to their previous interactions with the current player.