Quests are a fundamental storytelling mechanism used by computer role-playing games (RPGs) to engage and involve players in the game's narrative. Although RPGs have evolved in many ways in the last years, their basic narrative structure is still based on static plots manually created by game designers. This project explores the generation of dynamic and interactive quests for games using hierarchical task decomposition, planning under nondeterminism, player modeling, and genetic algorithms.

Fear is a basic human emotion that can be triggered by different situations, which vary from person to person. However, game developers usually design horror games based on a general knowledge about what most players fear, which does not guarantee a satisfying horror experience for everyone. When a horror game aims at intensifying the fear evoked in individual players, having useful information about the fears of the current player is vital to promote more frightening experiences. This project explores new methods to create adaptive horror games by using player modeling techniques to identify what individual players fear and adapt the content of the game to intensify the fear evoked in players.

In almost all forms of storytelling, the background and the current state of mind of the audience members predispose them to experience a given story from a uniquely personal perspective. However, traditional story writers usually construct their narratives based on the average preferences of their audience, which does not guarantee satisfying narrative experiences for its members. This project explores user modeling and adaptive storytelling to generate individualized interactive narratives based on the preferences of users.

An intriguing phenomenon in human storytelling - inexhaustible source of inspiration for digital storytelling - is our ability to still recognize a story that the narrator has felt free to change to a considerable extent. However, observing how folktales have appeared and been disseminated through different countries along the centuries, we shall notice that our favourite stories have evolved no less dramatically in the course of the oral storytelling tradition. Founded on the classification of types and motifs contained in the Index of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, this research project attempts to understand how narrative variants emerge in order to create new narrative generation methods.