Emergent games have the particularity to allow more possible situations to emerge than progression games do. Coupled with procedural content generation techniques they also tend to increase the number of possible situations that players can encounter., However, in case the player is not creative or lucky enough these many emergent situations can have a low narrative value. This article addresses this problem through an architecture that gives players more responsibilities towards the story by allowing them to trigger Narrative Processes. A Narrative Process is a script capable of making meaningful modifications to the story in real time. Our proposed architecture relies on an Interpretation Engine whose role is to make sense of the emergent world as it is changing and inform the Narrative Processes with high level story concepts such as actors and places., We first cover the basics of emergent games and interactive narratives and then present the architecture behind the Narrative Processes as well as the Interpretation Engine. We conclude by a discussion of the potential impact of our architecture on the fundamental characteristics of emergent games.

In this paper we present an experimental evaluation of a generic model of cognitive process allowing virtual agents to exhibit anticipatory abilities. This model is included in an agent architecture for agent-based simulations of virtual cities. With user experiments, we show that this mechanism brings about an improvement in the efficiency of the behavior, and check that external observers are able to perceive it. We also confirm that this improvement in efficiency leads, up to a point, to an improvement in believability as judged by human observers. Beyond this level of efficiency, believability reaches a plateau and can even decrease.

We propose a model of cognitive process allowing virtual agents to exhibit anticipatory abilities. With user experiments, we show that this mechanism brings about an improvement in the efficiency of the behavior generated, and check that external observers are able to perceive it. We also confirm that this improvement in efficiency leads, up to a point, to an improvement in believability as judged by human observers. Beyond this level of efficiency, believability reaches a plateau.

This paper is a first step toward the exploration and further development of the narrative possibilities offered by emergent games. First, we present the five characteristics of emergent narratives that we believe to be fundamental: coherence, agency, possibility space, uncertainty and coauthoring. Then, we investigate the presence of these characteristics in various academic experiments. Finally, we describe a novel approach that provides players with high level actions that they can perform in order to manipulate the story in real time.

This paper addresses the issue of hybridization between reactive and cognitive approaches within a single decision-making architecture for virtual agent in an urban simulation. We use a reactive module in order to manage reactive behaviors and agent autonomy, and a cognitive module for anticipation, learning and complex behaviors management. The purpose of the cognitive module is to increase the agent's behavior credibility. The agent's reactive and proactive behaviors are sent to a decision module which is able to integrate, decompose, combine and select an action.

Nous presentons un modele d'environnement semantique pour la simu- lation urbaine. Dans ce types de simulations, les agents representent les individus ou les vehicules dans la ville, qui constitue leur environnement. Notre objectif est de rendre cet environnement comprehensible par les agents, afin de leur permettre de faire des choix d'actions coherents. L'idee que nous adoptons dans notre travail consiste a representer les services pro- poses par l'environnement, c'est-a-dire les services de la ville , dans une ontologie de services. Nous calculons alors pour chaque service une qualite permettant de deduire quel est le meilleur objet en correspondance avec l'action que l'agent veut realiser a un moment donne de la simulation. Nous avons propose une representation de l'environnement qui nous permet de faire un calcul unifie de la qualite des services heterogenes.

We present in this paper a model of semantic representation of a dynamic virtual environment. Our model is embodied into a simulation architecture of a virtual city. The objective is to enable agents to make action decision consistent with the semantic state of their environment. The idea is to represent the services offered by the environment into an ontology of services and deduce the available object that has the best quality of service at any given time of the simulation. For this, we defined a layer of the ontology containing the general concepts of representation of the environment. This representation allows us to apply a unified model of reasoning to infer elements of knowledge useful for decision-making agents.

This paper describes how some mechanisms underlying adaptive behaviors in animals and men may be employed in artificial systems and in industrial applications. Such mechanisms may range from simple reflexes to highly cognitive processes. In particular, the paper describes how current knowledge about motivational systems in animals may be used to build a behavioral engine that is used to animate video-games characters. It also shows how a pedagogical engine capable of modeling human cognitive capacities in a given learning task may be applied to the automatic generation of exercises that fit a child’s current knowledge and needs. Finally, the paper suggests how it is possible to automatically generate neural controllers for satellites or walking robots, which may reconfigure themselves to cope with sudden environmental changes or with internal breakdowns.

This paper describes how the MonaLysa control architecture implements a route following naviga tion strategy Two procedures that allow map building and self positioning are described and experimental results are provided that demon strate that such procedures are robust with re spect to noise This approach is compared to oth ers with similar objectives and directions for fu ture work are outlined