R14: Travel, an Interactive Audio Narrative

As artificial intelligence (AI) technology continues to develop,^* new ways of authoring new kinds of interactive experiences emerge. Each year at the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) conference, a series of playable experience projects highlight new roles for AI in interactive media.

^*Saying "technology continues to develop" makes it sound like the technology is growing by itself. Obviously, it is actually creative human efforts that push this technology forward. Lucky you to be at the literally number-one institution in the world for technical games research: http://www.kmjn.org/game-rankings/

Today's reading comes from the 2017 iteration of the conference. That year, Adam (in collaboration with two undergraduates getting independent study credit) presented a puzzle game that used AI to check and advise the player's reasoning. The system could teach you tricks for Sudoku that even the system's designers didn't know beforehand. You can play the game here, but it's not the focus of the reading assignment at hand: https://proofdoku.com/

Another project in the same Playable Experiences track of the conference offered a new kind of interactive fiction. As in Façade, the player can advance the story by saying whatever they want (rather than choosing from a visible menu of options). However, in the newly presented system, authoring additional content was as easy as writing additional English text (rather than the computer science PhD-level authoring for Façade). Further, the interaction could be driven by your audible voice rather than typed text -- more deeply immersing the player in the role of the protagonist.

Read the section of this Playable Experiences report about Traveler (about 1 full page of text starting in the third page of the pdf): https://adamsmith.as/papers/AIIDE17-playable-experiences.pdf

Then read this (4-page) paper comparing text and speech interaction in Travel: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3172944.3172999

You can play Traveler and few other interactive audio fictions here: https://dine.ict.usc.edu/audio.html (you really do have to be using the Google Chrome browser for the audio interaction to work). One of the example stories, Driving Home, is available in both audio and text form (in case your audio setup isn't working or you don't have Google Chrome): https://dine.ict.usc.edu/drivinghome.html

Interestingly, Driving Home is part of an experimental exposure therapy intervention for obsessive-compulsive disorder. It's not a game for entertainment (it's actually pretty dark and intentionally anxiety provoking). The emotional impacts of art is in full effect in this experimental psychology project.