Seven Design Challenges for Fully-realized Experience Management

Drama Managers, a specific type of the more general Experience Manager, have become a common subject of study in the interactive narrative literature. With a range of representational and computational approaches, authors have repeatedly developed techniques that enable computers to generate, reason about, and adapt narratives in an interactive virtual setting. In order to fully realize an experience manager, seven representational and computational problems need to be solved, generally on a case-by-case basis. In other words, the choice to use an Experience Manager is the choice to model the design as, and implement solutions to, seven inter-dependent design problems. We explicitly articulate those design problems and provide a number of examples of methods that both motivate the design problems as well as illustrate a range of approaches to solving them.