Professor Earns Test-of-Time Award at AI and Computer Gaming Conference
One of the top conferences for AI and computer games is recognizing a School of Interactive Computing professor with its first-ever test-of-time award.
At its event this week in Alberta, Canada, the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) is honoring Professor Mark Riedl. The award also honors University of Utah Professor and Division of Games Chair Michael Young, Riedl’s Ph.D. advisor.
Riedl studied under Young at North Carolina State University.
Their 2005 paper, From Linear Story Generation to Branching Story Graphs, highlighted the challenges of using AI to create interactive gaming narratives in which user actions influence the story’s progression.
In 2005, computer game systems that supported linear, non-branching games were widely used. Riedl introduced an innovative mathematical formula for interactive stories ranging from choose-your-own-adventure novels to modern computer games.
“We didn’t use the term ‘generative AI’ back then, but I was working on AI for the generation of creative artifacts,” Riedl said. “This was before we had practical deep learning or large language models.
“One of the reasons this paper is still relevant 20 years later is that it didn’t just present a technology, it attempted to provide a framework for solving a grand challenge in AI.”
That challenge is still ongoing, Riedl said. Game designers continue to struggle with balancing story coherence against the amount of narrative control afforded to users.
“When users exercise a high degree of control within the environment, it is likely that their actions will change the state of the world in ways that may interfere with the causal dependencies between actions as intended within a storyline,” Riedl and Young wrote in the paper.
“Narrative mediation makes linear narratives interactive. The question is: Is the expressive power of narrative mediation at least as powerful as the story graph representation?”
AIIDE is being held this week at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta. Riedl will receive the award on Wednesday.
Main Photo: Mark Riedl speaks during the 2025 Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society, hosted by the School of Interactive Computing. Photo by Terence Rushin/College of Computing.
