Improvisational Computational Storytelling in Open Worlds

Improvisational storytelling involves one or more people interacting in real-time to create a story without advanced notice of topic or theme. Human improvisation occurs in an open-world that can be in any state and characters can perform any behaviors expressible through natural language. We propose the grand challenge of computational improvisational storytelling in open-world domains. The goal is to develop an intelligent agent that can sensibly co-create a story with one or more humans through natural language. We lay out some of the research challenges and propose two agent architectures that can provide the basis for exploring the research issues surrounding open-world human-agent interactions.