MENTA: how to balance authorial intention and user agency in virtual environments

Overview & Synopsis

We aim to create an artificial intelligence based virtual environment to train medical team leaders to rescue injured people after a mass casualty. In this paper, we describe a resilient and adaptive engine, MENTA, to orchestrate dynamically various training situations and various virtual teammates. MENTA is in charge of the narrative control by proposing a set of adjustments that satisfies narrative objectives chosen by the trainer. These adjustments take the form of a prescribed scenario that is generated by MENTA via a planning engine that we have coupled with fuzzy cognitive maps. This approach tackles the problem of a set of objectives that are often contradictory: user agency, authorial intention and resilience.