My research

Over the years I have found myself interested in a lot of research topics ranging from combinatorics, to intelligence analysis, to human computer interaction. Given an army of researchers to work with, I would pursue most of them in depth. Unfortunately, since I am a Ph.D. student for now I am forced to choose one for my dissertation. Peruising the titles of my publications will give you and idea of some of my research interests.

The choice I've made is to study Interactive Virtual Experiences. The specific experiences that I am interested in are characterized by three components:

  1. A model for the experience. The model provides the rules that govern the interaction, the setting, and a context for the player to know what is acceptable. For example, the model could be a neighborhood environment. Houses and stores will be a part of it, players will know from the real world that conversations, dinner parties, mowing the lawn, etc. are acceptable and combat, violence, etc. are not. Further, the choice of rules will determine what is necessary for the player to succeed and how they can pursue success.
  2. A set of goals defined by the author of the experience. The choice of model provides a broad set of potential interactions. In many cases, especially when the experience is for training or education, only some subset of those interactions are desirable or consistent with the author's views of what should occur.
  3. An affordance for the player to exercise self-agency. Self-agency is the ability for the player to act in accordance with their own goals for the interaction and be free from unnecessary or unwanted constraints. Self-agency often manifests itself as an opportunity for players to pursue their own goals.
Given the space of all possible interactions a player can have with a computer, the choice of model provides a restriction bias on the set of possible interactions. The specification of the author's goals provides a preference bias over the space of interactions consistent with the model. The player's self-agency affords goal-directed exploration of the space. In the event that the player's goals do not align well with the author's goals threats exist. A visual representation of the model, author's goals, player's self-agency-driven exploration, and the resulting threats is depicted in the image below. The degree of these threats is motivation for what is referred to as Drama Management.


Motivation for drama management

A drama manager (DM) is an agent of the author that is tasked with shaping the player's experience. The image below depicts a schematic of the types of interactive virtual experiences I study. The author, as part of defining the model, creates an environment that the player interacts with and creates a set of non-player characters (NPCs) that populate and interact with the environment as well. The author also creates the DM to directly control or influence the NPCs as well as the environment. All of the DM's actions are in an attempt to get the player to pursue the goals they have that are consistent with the author's goals.

Schematic depiction of an interactive virtual experience

To accomplish all of this, my research draws on ideas from various fields: the authoring process and evaluation platform I am developing are inspired by ideas from computer game design; the DM's decision making process is an algorithmic process which draws on ideas from artificial intelligence and machine learning; and the actions the DM can take are designed using theories of influence and persuasion from social psychology.

If you are interested in some more detail, please feel free to contact me.

Last update 8 - 11 - 2008