Personalized Quest and Dialogue Generation in Role-Playing Games: A Knowledge Graph- and Language Model-based Approach

Trevor Ashby, Braden K. Webb, Gregory Knapp, Jackson Searle, Nancy Fulda

Abstract: Procedural content generation (PCG) in video games offers unprecedented opportunities for customization and user engagement. Working within the specialized context of role-playing games (RPGs), we introduce a novel framework for quest and dialogue generation that places the player at the core of the generative process. Drawing on a hand-crafted knowledge base, our method grounds generated content with in-game context while simultaneously employing a large-scale language model to create fluent, unique, accompanying dialogue. Through human evaluation, we confirm that quests generated using this method can approach the performance of hand-crafted quests in terms of fluency, coherence, novelty, and creativity; demonstrate the enhancement to the player experience provided by greater dynamism; and provide a novel, automated metric for the relevance between quest and dialogue. We view our contribution as a critical step toward dynamic, co-creative narrative frameworks in which humans and AI systems jointly collaborate to create unique and user-specific playable experiences.