Abstract. This paper gives an overview of the UK network RIDERSResearch in Interactive Drama Environments, Role-Play and Story-telling, running for 36 months from September 2011. It discusses the three central themes of RIDERS: theoretical work on the conflict between interactivity and narrative content, problems, issues and tools relating to authoring, and directions in evaluation. It gives a brief overview of the current position in each of these areas and suggests how RIDERS activity might be able to contribute to them. Finally it summarises the overall RIDERS programme of activity.

Abstract. In this technical paper, we describe an implementation of Distributed Drama Management (DDM). DDM is a concept which involves synthetic actor agents in an Emergent Narrative scenario acting on both an in-character level, which reflects the concerns of the characters, and an out-of-character level, which reflects the concerns of a storyteller. By selecting the most "dramatically appropriate" action from a set of autonomously proposed actions, Distributed Drama Management aims to retain the benefits of Emergent Narrative such as believability and agility of response to user actions, but attempts to provide a structurally and emotionally consistent experience.