Incorporating authorial intent into generative narrative systems

One of the major themes to emerge in interactive narra-tive research is authorability and authorial intent. With interactive narratives, the human author is not present at run-time. Thus authoring interactive narratives is often a process of anticipating user actions in differ-ent contexts and using computational mechanisms and data structures for responding to the participant. Gen-erative approaches to interactive narrative, in which an automated narrative generation system assumes some of the authoring responsibility, further decouple the human designer from the participants experience. We describe a general mechanism, called author goals, which can be used by human authors to assert authorial intent over generative narrative systems