Emergent Story Generation: Lessons from Improvisational Theater

An emergent approach to story generation by computer is characterized by a lack of predetermined plot and a focus on character interaction forming the material for stories. A potential problem is that no interesting story emerges. However, improvisational theater shows that – at least for human actors – a predetermined plot is not necessary for creating a compelling story. There are some principles that make a successful piece of improvisational theater more than a random interaction, and these principles may inform the type of computational processes that an emergent narrative architecture draws from. We therefore discuss some of these principles, and show how these are explicitly or implicitly used in story generation and interactive storytelling research. Finally we draw lessons from these principles and ask attention for two techniques that have been little investigated: believably incorporating directives, and late commitment

The Virtual Storyteller: story generation by simulation

The Virtual Storyteller is a multi-agent framework that generates stories based on a concept called emergent narrative. In this paper, we describe the motivation and approach of the Virtual Storyteller, and give an overview of the computational processes involved in the story generation process. We also discuss some of the challenges posed by our chosen approach

Iterative authoring using story generation feedback: debugging or co-creation?

We explore the role that story generation feedback may play within the creative process of interactive story authoring. While such feedback is often used as 'debugging' information, we explore here a 'co-creation' view, in which the outcome of the story generator influences authorial intent. We illustrate an iterative authoring approach in which each iteration consists of idea generation, implementation and simulation. We find that the tension between authorial intent and the partially uncontrollable story generation outcome may be relieved by taking such a co-creation approach

Dramatic Presence in Improvised Stories

Abstract. We investigate how to achieve a sense of dramatic presence (the perception of being “in ” a story, playing the role of one of its characters), with the aim of building systems that can offer the same. Improvisational theatre might serve as a model for this experience, where there is no guiding plot; each of its actors shares responsibility for the collaborative emergence of a story. We describe an experiment in which improv actors attempt to evoke a feeling of dramatic presence for participants who have no improv experience, to find out how we can characterize this experience, and how the improv actors might achieve it. We conclude that the experiment was enjoyable for participants not only because they felt dramatically present, but also because they partook in the collaborative and creative process that generated the drama

Narrative inspiration: using case based problem solving for emergent story generation

We consider a system that can generate stories as a creative system. One approach to building such a system is to simulate and narrate the behaviour of believable characters in a virtual story world. A risk of this approach is that no interesting story emerges. In order to make the behaviour of the characters more interesting from a story perspective, we propose a system that can use example story pieces, written from a plot perspective by a human author, to inspire decisions for characters in an emerging story.\ud On a more philosophical note, we discuss the story generation process in the light of a characterization of creative systems and show that considering an automated story generator as a creative system can help to reveal implicit design choices

A tabletop interactive storytelling system: designing for social interaction

This paper presents the Interactive Storyteller, a multi-user interface for AI-based interactive storytelling, where stories emerge from the interaction of human players with intelligent characters in a simulated story world. To support face-to-face contact and social interaction, we position users around a shared multi-touch table, which very much resembles the social setting of traditional tabletop board games. To our knowledge, the Interactive Storyteller is the first AI-based interactive storytelling system that combines an emergent narrative approach with the social aspects of traditional tabletop board games. We carried out user experiments to investigate to what extent our system supports social interaction. By analysing the interactions of pairs of children with the Interactive Storyteller, we determined which system aspects triggered cooperation and highly social behaviour and which aspects caused players to behave less socially. We also tried to find out whether the use of tangible playing pieces offered any advantages over touch-only interaction, but we did not find any differences between the two

Let's pretend I had a sword: late commitment in emergent narrative

We describe how autonomous character agents that inhabit a story world can make (out-of-character) decisions about its details, filling in the story world as they go. We describe how we model these kind of late commitment decisions, and discuss how we use them to support action selection and to justify the adoption of character goals. Although a rigorous evaluation remains future work, we have implemented the approach presented here and have performed some exploratory testing

Having one\u27s cake and eating it too: Coherence of children\u27s emergent narratives

In the emergent narrative approach to Interactive Storytelling, narratives arise from the interactions between player- or computer-controlled characters in a simulated story world. This approach offers much freedom to the players, but this freedom may come at the cost of narrative structure. In this paper we study stories created by children using a storytelling system based on the emergent narrative approach. We investigate how coherent these stories actually are and which types of character actions contribute the most to story coherence, defined in terms of the causal connectedness of story elements. We find that although the children do produce goal-directed story lines, overall the stories are only partially coherent. This can be explained by the improvisational nature of the children’s storytelling with our system, where the interactive experience of the players is more important than the production of a coherent narrative. We also observe that the communication between the children, external to the system, plays an important role in establishing coherence of the created stories