Getting to the point: Emotion as a necessary and sufficient element of story construction

Clark Elliott and Ernst Melchior

Formal Citation:

Clark Elliott and Ernst Melchior (1995). Getting to the point: Emotion as a necessary and sufficient element of story construction. In AAAI Technical Report for the Spring Symposium on Interactive Story Systems. Stanford University: AAAI.


Abstract:

In this short paper we discuss aspects of storytelling using emotionally sophisticated computer agents. In particular we focus on aspects of emotional interaction as being necessary and sufficient for creating stories. We present the ideas in the framework of an extant collection of multimedia computer programs called loosely, The Affective Reasoner [ Elliott, 1992; Elliott and Ortony, 1992; Elliott and Siegle, 1993; Elliott, 1993; Elliott, 1994b].

Overview: All stories need a point. This will be just as true of interactive fiction as it is of static fiction. One common view is that the point of a story arises largely from failed expectations (c.f. [ Schank, 1986; Schank, 1990 ] ). It is possible, however, that a computational model of stories might be mislead by failed expectations which do not yield stories (e.g., the weather was hot for four straight days in October) , and by stories which actually seem enhanced when our expectations are met (e.g., John Wayne heroica...