The last 5 years have seen an explosion of work on AI support for interactive narrative. And yet for all this work, the field has produced shockingly few playable systems. I will argue that this is unhealthy for the field and that we must expose our work to the test of real audiences. We need to make the AI equivalents of the experimental films of the early 20th century. However, doing so will require broadening both our research methodologies and our evaluation criteria; sometimes we will have to think like artists as well as engineers. I'll discuss some of the issues involved with this and some early steps we can take to try to solve them.

Ian Horswill is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University. He is a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, where he is Director of the Division of Graphics and Interactive Media, and was Director of Northwestern's Animate Arts Program. His research interests include interactive entertainment technologies, and cognitive modeling for virtual characters, particularly modeling of emotion and personality. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993. He has been the chair of the standing committee of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's Fall and Spring Symposium Series, as well as the 2009 International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games.