Interactive drama allows people to participate actively in a dynamically unfolding story, by playing a character or by exerting directorial control. Because of its potential of providing interesting stories as well as allowing user interaction, interactive drama has been recognized as a promising tool for providing both pedagogy and entertainment.

One of my key contributions is a framework, Thespian, for authoring and simulating interactive dramas. Thespian models emotions in virtual characters and the user, and social normative behaviors in conversations. Thespian provides automated means for configuring virtual characters through linear story scripts, and thus supports faster development of interactive dramas in the face of open-ended user interaction. Thespian has been successfully used to build various interactive dramas.

I am currently working on my dissertation. My proposed work for my dissertation contains extensions to the existing Thespian framework to support two common design goals in interactive dramas: manipulating the user's affective state and enhancing the user's experience of presence in the fictional world. In existing frameworks for interactive dramas, these goals are usually not systematically supported and their achievement is usually depended on the human author's effort of designing the interactive experience appropriately. I propose to build a director agent for reaching these goals. The director agent can manipulate the virtual characters' behaviors while not affecting the coherency of narrative or the automated authoring process. Part of my work deals with identifying people's emotional states though their physiological responses. This information will be used by the director agent for building a closed-loop control on user's affective experience in the interactive drama.