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Chapter 27TOWARDS INTEGRATING PLOT ANDCHARACTER FOR INTERACTIVE DRAMAMichael Mateas and Andrew SternComputer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University and www.interactivestory.netAbstractThe authors are currently engaged in a three year collaboration to build an interactivestory world integrating believable agents and interactive plot. This paperprovides a brief description of the project goals and design requirements, discussesthe problem of autonomy in the context of story-based believable agents,and describes an architecture that uses the dramatic beat as a structural principleto integrate plot and character.1. IntroductionInteractive drama concerns itself with building dramatically interesting virtualworlds inhabited by computer-controlled characters, within which the user(hereafter referred to as the player) experiences a story from a first person perspective[7]). Over the past decade there has been a fair amount of research intobelievable agents, that is, autonomous characters exhibiting rich personalities,emotions, and social interactions ([12]; [8]; [5]; [4]; [9]; [1]). There has beencomparatively little work, however, exploring how the local, reactive behaviorof believable agents can be integrated with the more global, deliberative natureof a story plot, so as to build interactive, dramatic worlds ([16]; [2]). The authorsare currently engaged in a three year collaboration to build an interactive storyworld integrating believable agents and interactive plot. This paper providesa brief description of the project goals and design requirements, discusses theproblem of autonomy in the context of story-based believable agents, and finallydescribes an architecture that uses the dramatic beat as a structural principle tointegrate plot and character.