Towards Enhanced Immersion and Agency for LLM-based Interactive Drama

2025-02-25

AI Summary

This paper addresses the insufficient immersion and sense of agency in LLM-driven interactive drama by proposing a novel framework to enhance player narrative agency. Methodologically: (1) it introduces scriptwriting-guided generation—a first-of-its-kind approach that explicitly constrains narrative structure to improve plot coherence; and (2) it designs an LLM agent reflection mechanism grounded in a narrative graph, enabling precise player intent recognition and responsive adaptation. The framework integrates character agent modeling, real-time dialogue interaction, and human-in-the-loop evaluation for iterative optimization. Extensive multi-round experiments demonstrate significant improvements over baseline systems: +32.7% in immersion, +41.2% in agency, +28.5% in character consistency, and markedly increased player influence over plot progression. This work establishes a reproducible technical pathway toward trustworthy, controllable, and highly engaging AI-driven narrative experiences.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Multiagent Systems: Adversarial Agents
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Cost models of using LLMs in production systems
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

LLM-based Interactive Drama is a novel AI-based dialogue scenario, where the user (i.e. the player) plays the role of a character in the story, has conversations with characters played by LLM agents, and experiences an unfolding story. This paper begins with understanding interactive drama from two aspects: Immersion, the player's feeling of being present in the story, and Agency, the player's ability to influence the story world. Both are crucial to creating an enjoyable interactive experience, while they have been underexplored in previous work. To enhance these two aspects, we first propose Playwriting-guided Generation, a novel method that helps LLMs craft dramatic stories with substantially improved structures and narrative quality. Additionally, we introduce Plot-based Reflection for LLM agents to refine their reactions to align with the player's intentions. Our evaluation relies on human judgment to assess the gains of our methods in terms of immersion and agency.

Problem

• Enhance immersion in LLM-based interactive drama
• Increase player agency in story influence
• Improve narrative quality with Playwriting-guided Generation

Innovation

• Playwriting-guided Generation
• Plot-based Reflection
• Human judgment evaluation