Using Values to Turn Agents into Characters

Systems for interactive storytelling and drama rely on agent theories to model characters, and adopt various techniques to cope with non-determinism at the story level, such as story models, combining them according to sophisticate architectural designs. However, a consolidated approach has not emerged yet, that fully reconciles these two dimensions. In this paper, we propose a unifying framework to accommodate the tension between story control and character behavior. By using a model of agent to analyze a classical example, we show that this tension cannot be solved by discharging the distinguishing properties of agency. Rather, we claim that the accurate modeling of agency is a prerequisite to the success of any attempt to solve this tension, together with the possibility for the author to state the story direction in terms of explicitly declared values.