A Review of Agency Architectures in Interactive Drama Systems

This paper provides a review of the interactive drama field, attempting to create a taxonomy for classifying system affordances for emergence and authorial control, referred to in this paper as "agency architecture". The classification of interactive drama systems according to a spectrum of agency architectures, helps to identify open questions in the field, providing a better understanding of which architectures would benefit from greater attention from the research community. In this paper, several key interactive drama systems from the field's literature are categorised by agency architecture. This is followed by a summary and analysis of their architectural classifications, alongside justifications for their assigned categories. It is then concluded with the identification of a number of research gaps, revealed by the compiled classifications, that highlight potential future research questions.