A Survey on Story Generation Techniques for Authoring Computational Narratives
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paper_title: Interactive narrative: An intelligent systems approach

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Interactive narrative is a form of digital interactive experience in which users create or influence a dramatic storyline through their actions. The goal of an interactive narrative system is to immerse the user in a virtual world such that he or she believes that they are an integral part of an unfolding story and that their actions can significantly alter the direction and/or outcome of the story.In this article we review the ways in which artificial intelligence can be brought to bear on the creation of interactive narrative systems. We lay out the landscape of about 20 years of interactive narrative research and explore the successes as well as open research questions pertaining to the novel use of computational narrative intelligence in the pursuit of entertainment, education, and training.
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paper_title: How can computers be partners in the creative process: classification and commentary on the special issue

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The different ways that computers can be involed in creative work are examined. A classification based on four categories of human-computer interaction to promote creativity is proposed: computers may facilitate (a) the management of creative work, (b) communication between individuals collaborating on creative projects, (c) the use of creativity enhancement techniques, (d) the creative act through integrated human-computer cooperation during idea production. The papers in the Special Issue are discussed according to this classification. Issues to be considered in future work on human-computer interactions for promoting creativity are discussed.
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paper_title: A review of interactive narrative systems and technologies: a training perspective

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As an emerging form of digital entertainment, the interactive narrative has attracted great attention from researchers over the past decade. Recently, there has been an emerging trend to apply interactive narratives to training and simulation. An interactive narrative system allows players to proactively interact with simulated entities in a virtual world and have the ability to alter the progression of a storyline. In simulation-based training, the use of an interactive narrative system enables the possibility to offer engaging, diverse and personalized narratives or scenarios for different training purposes. This paper provides a review of interactive narrative systems and technologies from a training perspective. Specifically, we first propose a set of key requirements in developing interactive narrative systems for simulation-based training. Then we review nine representative existing systems with respect to their system architectures, features and related mechanisms. To examine their applicability to training, we investigate and compare the reviewed systems based on the functionalities and modules that support the proposed requirements. Furthermore, we discuss some open research issues on the future development of interactive narrative technologies for training applications.
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paper_title: Soft architecture machines

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This book is an offspring of Negroponte's "The Architecture Machine, " published by The MIT Press in 1970. As is usually the case where computer systems are involved, the new generation is several orders of magnitude more powerful than even its remarkably mind-extending parent. The last few years have represented a "passing from an idiom to a reality, following (not necessarily consciously) notions set down in "The Architecture Machine" with an uncanny precision. The prognostications of hardware enumerated in wanton fantasy have been achieved and even superseded in the actual Architecture Machine of 1972."The general assumption of this new book is that the architect is an unnecessary and even detrimental middleman between individual, continuously changing needs and the continuous incorporation of those needs into the built environment. The book proposes a new kind of architecture without architects, and even without surrogate architects.The first chapter sets forth generally what is involved in learning to understand both the makings of intelligence and the making of architecture. It reveals polarities in attitudes toward thinking about thinking, and it appraises techniques--real and potential--that lead to meaningful thought about the process.A more direct analysis of architectural design activities is presented in the second chapter. Its goal is to achieve a closer coupling between man and machine, and it proposes sidestepping the traditional division of labor in which man and machine are assigned tasks that they are supposed to be respectively better at. Instead, a joint venture model is suggested: man and machine are treated as equal partners, even as candid good friends.The third chapter moves beyond the architect--beyond the need for an outside designer's intervention between our needs and their fulfillment. It asserts that each individual can be the best architect for his own needs and does not require a paternalistic human or mechanical architect to dictate his final decisions.The last chapter--furthest out of all--looks toward a distant future not only beyond the architect but beyond architecture as we know it. Here architecture machines are not simply used as aids in the design of buildings--they serve as buildings in themselves. Man will live in living, intelligent machines or cognitive physical environments that can immediately respond to his needs or wishes or whims. The possibilities are unlimited and a challenge to any imagination.
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paper_title: First Steps towards a Unified Theory for Interactive Digital Narrative

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As the domain of Interactive Digital Narrative matures, it becomes increasingly important for researchers to understand the conceptual differences and underlying theories in the different approaches. This paper presents new theoretical perspectives on the fragmented theory and practice within the domain and proposes first steps towards a unified theoretical framework for the domain. The paper is informed by the discussions between theorists and practitioners at two workshops held by the authors.
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paper_title: Evaluating the Authorial Leverage of Drama Management

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A drama manager (DM) monitors an interactive experience, such as a computer game, and intervenes to shape the global experience so that it satisfies the author's expressive goals without decreasing a player's interactive agency. Most research on drama management has proposed AI architectures and provided abstract evaluations of their effectiveness; a smaller body of work has also evaluated the effect of drama management on player experience. Little attention has been paid, however, to evaluating the authorial leverage provided by a drama-management architecture: determining, for a given architecture, the additional non-linear story complexity a drama manager affords over traditional scripting methods. In this paper, we propose three criteria for evaluating the authorial leverage of a DM: 1) the script-and-trigger complexity of the DM story policy; 2) the degree of policy change given changes to story elements; and 3) the average story branching factor for DM policies versus script-and-trigger policies for stories of equivalent quality. We apply these criteria to declarative optimization-based drama management (DODM) by using decision tree learning to capture equivalent trigger logic, and show that DODM does in fact provide authorial leverage.
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paper_title: Curveship's automatic narrative style

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Curveship, a Python framework for developing interactive fiction (IF) with narrative style, is described. The system simulates a world with locations, characters, and objects, providing the typical facilities of an IF development system. To these it adds the ability to generate text and to change the telling of events and description of items using high-level narrative parameters, so that, for instance, different actors can be focalized and events can be told out of order. By assigning a character to be narrator or moving the narrator in time, the system can determine grammatical specifics and render the text in a new narrative style. Curveship offers those interested in narrative systems a way to experiment with changes in the narrative discourse; for interactive fiction authors and those who wish to use of the system as a component of their own, it is a way to create powerful new types of narrative experiences. The templates used for language generation in Curveship, the string-with-slots representation, shows that there is a compromise between highly flexible but extremely difficult-to-author abstract syntax representations and simple strings, which are easy to write but extremely inflexible. The development of the system has suggested ways to refine narrative theory, offering new understandings of how narrative distance can be understood as being composed of lower-level changes in narrative and how the order of events is better represented as an ordered tree than a simple sequence.
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paper_title: The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

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Preface 1. Narrative and life: The universality of narrative Narrative and time Narrative perception 2. Defining narrative: The bare minimum Story and narrative discourse The mediation (construction) of story Constituent and supplementary events Narrativity 3. The borders of narrative: Framing narratives Paratexts The outer limits of narrative Is it narrative or is it life itself? 4. The rhetoric of narrative: Causation Normalization Masterplots Narrative rhetoric at work 5. Closure: Conflict: the agon Closure and endings Closure, suspense, and surprise Closure at the level of expectations Closure at the level of questions Absence of closure 6. Narration: a few words on interpretation: The narrator Voice Focalization Distance Reliability Free indirect style Narration on stage and screen 7. Interpretation: The implied author Underreading Overreading Gaps Cruxes Repetition: themes and motifs 8. Three ways to interpret narrative: The question of wholeness in narrative Intentional readings Symptomatic readings Adaptive readings 9. Adaptation across media: Adaptation as creative destruction Duration and pace Character Figurative language Gaps Focalization Constraints of the marketplace 10. Character and self in narrative: Character vs. action Flat and round characters Can characters be real? Types Autobiography Life writing as performative 11. Narrative contestation: A contest of narratives A narrative lattice-work Shadow stories Motivation and personality Masterplots and types Revising cultural masterplots Battling narratives are everywhere 12. Narrative negotiation Critical reading as narrative negotiation Closure one more time The end of closure? Glossary Index.
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paper_title: Style: A Computational and Conceptual Blending-Based Approach

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This chapter proposes a new approach to style, arising from our work on computational media using structural blending, which enriches the conceptual blending of cognitive linguistics with structure building operations in order to encompass syntax and narrative as well as metaphor. We have implemented both conceptual and structural blending, and conducted initial experiments with poetry, including interactive multimedia poetry, although the approach generalizes to other media. The central idea is to generate multimedia content and analyze style in terms of blending principles, based on our finding that different principles from those of common sense blending are often needed for some contemporary poetic metaphors.
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paper_title: Cinematic Visual Discourse: Representation, Generation, and Evaluation

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In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of an end-to-end camera planning system called Darshak. Darshak automatically constructs cinematic narrative discourse of a given story in a 3-D virtual environment. It utilizes a hierarchical partial-order causal link (POCL) planning algorithm to generate narrative plans that contain story events and camera directives for filming them. Dramatic situation patterns, commonly used by writers of fictional narratives, are formalized as communicative plan operators that provide a basis for structuring the cinematic content of the story's visualization. The dramatic patterns are realized through abstract communicative operators that represent operations on a viewer's beliefs about the story and its telling. Camera shot compositions and transitions are defined in this plan-based framework as execution primitives. Darshak's performance is evaluated through a novel user study based on techniques used to evaluate existing cognitive models of narrative comprehension. Initial study reveals significant effect of the choice of visualization strategies on measured viewer comprehension. It further shows significant effect of Darshak's choice of visualization strategy on comprehension.
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paper_title: The Scratch Programming Language and Environment

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Scratch is a visual programming environment that allows users (primarily ages 8 to 16) to learn computer programming while working on personally meaningful projects such as animated stories and games. A key design goal of Scratch is to support self-directed learning through tinkering and collaboration with peers. This article explores how the Scratch programming language and environment support this goal.
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paper_title: Narrative Exposure Therapy

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Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET; Schauer, Neuner, Elbert 2005/2011) is an evidence-based treatment for trauma spectrum disorders in adult and child survivors of multiple stressors with complex trauma histories. NET was originally developed to treat survivors of war, terror, torture, and abuse. Since oral narratives are an integral part of every human culture worldwide, and imaginal exposure is proven to be a first-line treatment in trauma spectrum disorders, NET ensures healing of trauma symptoms through these components. The testimony approach that is inherent in this treatment enables the survivors to reclaim their life stories and also assists societal repair. Based on these principles, it has been shown that individuals from diverse backgrounds with a high trauma load and broken lifelines, suffering from traumatic stress, significantly benefit from NET. Working through an individual's biography facilitates recognition of the interrelated emotional networks of experiences in cases of multiple, repeated, or continuous trauma and hardship. This helps to build episodic memory and contextual indexing, fosters a sense of identity, and gives deep personal understanding of schemas and social emotions that have evolved across the lifespan. Revisiting and processing socially painful situations whilst supported by active, empathic listening allows for a corrective and healing relationship experience and integration. Subsequently disturbing symptoms significantly decline and the overall health and immune functions as well as social and occupational functionality increase. In Narrative Exposure work survivors can find meaning, testify to human rights violations, regain dignity, and satisfy the need for acknowledgment and validation.
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paper_title: Cognitive Engineering of a Military Multi-Modal Memory Restructuring System

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Several methods have been proposed to treat combat veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Still, a recent review reports on high drop-out and non response rates. This has motivated work into the design of a software application to support and to increase the appeal of traditional face-to-face trauma-focused psychotherapy. The research followed a situated cognitive engineering approach, which included a domain analysis, scenarios and claims analysis based on experts reviews (N=10), user evaluations, and a case study. This resulted in the identification of nine core application functions: (1) provide a flexible way of storytelling, (2) provide a structured way of storytelling, (3) prevent losing track of changed and added events, (4) ensure patient trust, (5) ensure usage for therapists with different backgrounds, (6) ensuring awareness of treatment, (7) provide a personal approach, (8) prevent unexpected exposure to emotional material, (9) and ensure appealing and motivating approach throughout the therapy. These functions formed the basis for the design of a military multi-modal memory restructuring (Military - 3MR) system, which focuses on restructuring and relearning of past events. The system allows patient and therapist to visualise past events using personal photos, narrative text, online geographical maps, webcam snapshots, and patient created 3D virtual worlds. Results of the usability evaluation (N=18) suggests key design features such as the time line, content manage, and the 3D world editor, of an acceptable perceived usability level. Results of a storytelling experiment (N=18) between telling an autobiographical story with or without Military-3MR system, found that with the system, time referencing and event description were more precise, and a smaller time period in the story was covered. In the case study, the veteran suffering from combat-related PTSD was pleased with the system and felt encouraged talking about his past events.
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paper_title: ARGAMAN: Rapid Deployment Virtual Reality System for PTSD Rehabilitation

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The Argaman virtual reality software suite is an innovative, unique solution providing an immersive virtual reality therapeutic system for treatment of PTSD (post- traumatic stress disorder) in people who witnessed or suffered terror attacks or other traumatic experiences. The flexible design of the tool enables custom reconstruction of the scenery as well as specific events for each patient. The complete treatment system projects the therapist into the virtual scene, thus highly improving the overall impact of the treatment. The system editor rapidly simulates in 3D the audio-visual environment where the trauma occurred and provides life-like avatars that imitate people in that vicinity. When using the system, the patient can gradually process the experience with the help of a professional therapist, construct new memories of alternative scenarios, and deal with previously suppressed emotions and cognitions. A central and unique feature of the system is its ability to insert, in real-time, the therapist or other players into the virtual scene, by digitally processing a live video stream according to the blue- screen technique. This process ensures that the concept of personal care in therapy is extended into the virtual world.
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paper_title: INSCAPE: an authoring platform for interactive storytelling

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Interactivity is a key feature of new multimedia content and services. However, the storytelling of these non linear forms of content requires today not only artistic skills but also expertise in specific technical tools, even including software programming. Whatever the form, be in theatre, movie, cartoon, video-games, training and simulation, the process for creating interactive content poses new challenges for authors and production teams. Indeed, this process calls for the combined knowledge of different domains such as cinema, 2D or 3D modelling, animation, cognitive and computer sciences.
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paper_title: How can computers be partners in the creative process: classification and commentary on the special issue

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The different ways that computers can be involed in creative work are examined. A classification based on four categories of human-computer interaction to promote creativity is proposed: computers may facilitate (a) the management of creative work, (b) communication between individuals collaborating on creative projects, (c) the use of creativity enhancement techniques, (d) the creative act through integrated human-computer cooperation during idea production. The papers in the Special Issue are discussed according to this classification. Issues to be considered in future work on human-computer interactions for promoting creativity are discussed.
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paper_title: Movie script markup language

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This paper introduces the Movie Script Markup Language (MSML), a document specification for the structural representation of screenplay narratives for television and feature film drama production. Its definition was motivated by a lack of available structured and open formats that describe dramatic narrative but also support IT-based production methods of audiovisual drama. The MSML specification fully supports contemporary screenplay templates in a structured fashion, and adds provisions for drama manufacturing methods that allow drama crew to define how narrative can be translated to audiovisual material. A timing model based on timed petri nets is included to enable fine-grained event synchronization. Finally, MSML comprises an animation module through which narrative events can drive production elements like 3-D previsualization, content repurposing or studio automation. MSML is currently serialized into XML documents and is formally described by a complement of an XML Schema and ISO Schematron schema. The specification has been developed in close collaboration with actual drama production crew and has been implemented in a number of proof-of-concept demonstrators.
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paper_title: Requiem for a theory: the “story grammar” story

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Abstract Story grammar was a fairly hot topic in artificial intelligence (AI) from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. Now, however, it has virtually disappeared as a research issue in AI. The process of science is one where theories are proposed, experiments are conducted, hypotheses are tested, theories are revised and, ultimately, theories are either accepted or rejected. The story grammar story is surveyed with a view towards describing what it was, and explaining what happened to it, from the perspective of the scientific process.
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paper_title: Interactive Drama, Art and Artificial Intelligence

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Artificial intelligence methods open up new possibilities in art and entertainment, enabling rich and deeply interactive experiences. At the same time as AI opens up new fields of artistic expression, AI-based art itself becomes a fundamental research agenda, posing and answering novel research questions that would not be raised unless doing AI research in the context of art and entertainment. I call this agenda, in which AI research and art mutually inform each other, Expressive AI. Expressive AI takes seriously the problem of building intelligences that robustly function outside of the lab, engaging human participants in intellectually and aesthetically satisfying interactions, which, hopefully, teach us something about ourselves. ::: This thesis describes a specific AI-based art piece, an interactive drama called Facade, and describes the practice of Expressive AI, using Facade, as well as additional AI-based artwork described in the appendices, as case studies. ::: An interactive drama is a dramatically interesting virtual world inhabited by computer-controlled characters, within which the player experiences a story from a first person perspective. Over the past decade, there has been a fair amount of research into believable agents, that is, autonomous characters exhibiting rich personalities, emotions, and social interactions. There has been comparatively little work, however, exploring how the local, reactive behavior of believable agents can be integrated with the more global, deliberative nature of a story plot, so as to build interactive, dramatic worlds. This thesis presents Facade, the first published interactive drama system that integrates character (believable agents), story (drama management) and shallow natural language processing into a complete system. Facade will be publicly released as a free download in 2003. ::: In the Facade architecture, the unit of plot/character integration is the dramatic beat. In the theory of dramatic writing, beats are the smallest unit of dramatic action, consisting of a short dialog exchange or small amount of physical action. As architectural entities, beats organize both the procedural knowledge to accomplish the beat's dramatic action, and the declarative knowledge to sequence the beat in an evolving plot. Instead of conceiving of the characters as strongly autonomous entities that coordinate to accomplish dramatic action through purely local decision-making, characters are instead weakly autonomous—the character's behavioral repertoire dynamically changes as beats are sequenced. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
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paper_title: A Partial Grammar of Eskimo Folktales1

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This is a partial generative grammar of covert but empirically discoverable narrative elements. The grammar is a theory which seeks to account for base narrative sequences in well-formed North Alaskan Eskimo folktales. The narrative elements are hierarchically organized into a categorial component with both context free and context sensitive rules. The theory claims some replicability and predictive power. FOLK NARRATIVE has resisted the dis
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paper_title: Structural Complexity in Fairy Tales

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The Sfudy Of Man, 30%. I {€§?2}; $28-$53; gnxm‘ ENS? C0 Structural Cospiexity is Fairy isles George P. Lakof£* PREFACE This is an inquiry into the structure of discourse through the investigation of an interesting subset of discourses ~~ Russian Fairy Tales. I assume that the study of discourse is ultimately to be part of a formalized theory of linguistic structure. I“sha11 endeavor to show that any adequate theory of the structure of fairy tales must share many formal properties with the transformational linguistic theory that has so far been prooosed by Noam Chomsky and his cow workers. Such a result would be of psychological interest, for it would indicate that an adequate model for the bearer and speaker of the sentences of a language could also be used to describe§ at least in part, the human ability to produce and understand discoursesa This might ultimately Show that the human mind is an extremely efficient device which uses essentially the same mechanism for constructing and undersiasding complicateﬁ discourses as it uses for constructing and understanding iadivieual seetencesg %This paper was sriteee is i§§e while my zemoze escestozg George P? Lakoffr was s graduate siudeet at Eeeiaaa Eniversityr 1 tree: that that eponymoss wozthy would tske it as so eisservice test I as angels to find myself is total agreement sow with shat he wrote then; though there is e certsie selsacholy pleasureﬁ E own, in rewreeeisg even those eassages where we most iiﬁferr ~=~§eorge Laksff, ﬁniversity of California? Eeskeleso
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paper_title: A Morphological Approach to Interactive Storytelling

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Few attempts have yet been made to implement a story engine for guiding interactive drama. Most of them rely on the computer’s ability to generate the story in full detail. By focusing on story guidance at the level of morphological functions as defined by Russian formalist Vladimir Propp, we take a different approach. We do not attempt to provide a model for generating stories in detail. Instead, we expect human authors to create specific interactive scenarios for each function in advance. Our primary concerns are high-level guidance of plot, as well as finding the best compromise between author input and machine generation. By providing access to the story model itself, we allow authors to control the story at all levels of detail. Our first prototype features a wide variety of plots being generated from a limited number of scenes.
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paper_title: A storytelling model for educational games: Hero's interactive journey

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This paper deals with interactive storytelling for games. The principle used in narration is based on Campbell's heroes journey. The paper begins by introducing Campbell analysis and then presents how this model has been transformed in a pattern for interactive storytelling. Then, it shows how this model can be used for educational games. Finally an experimentation is presented showing an implementation of this interactive storytelling in the field of a game using a robot.
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paper_title: What's wrong with story grammars

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Abstract A number of current theories of story understanding are based on the idea of a mentally embodied story grammar. Recent discussions of the adequacy of such theories have been inconclusive. In this paper it is argued that story grammarians have omitted to specify their theories in sufficient detail, and both they and their critics have, therefore, failed to notice certain fundamental inadequacies in those theories. In particular, there has been little discussion of how story structures are computed, and it has not been noted that stories cannot be parsed in the same way as sentences. The reason is that there can be no finite lexicon of story elements containing information about the node categories to which those elements belong. No alternative suggestions about the computation of story structure have been made. A different account of story comprehension is outlined, which dispenses with the parallel between sentence processing and story processing, and which assumes that almost none of the stored knowledge used in story understanding is specific to stories.
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paper_title: Timeline-based navigation for interactive narratives

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Recent progress in narrative generation techniques for Interactive Storytelling supports increasingly longer stories. Consequently, the exploration of such automatically generated narratives for testing or evaluation purposes becomes increasingly difficult due to the many variants, even for stories of a few minutes' length. In this paper, we introduce a hypermedia method that supports the real-time navigation of 3D interactive narratives from their timeline description. The core idea behind our method is that it fully preserves the dynamic nature of the interactive narrative, unlike any form of visual replay or summarising. We illustrate the approach on a fully-implemented interactive narrative and show how it supports the exploration of different generated narratives in a way that assists testing and evaluation.
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paper_title: Interactive narrative: An intelligent systems approach

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Interactive narrative is a form of digital interactive experience in which users create or influence a dramatic storyline through their actions. The goal of an interactive narrative system is to immerse the user in a virtual world such that he or she believes that they are an integral part of an unfolding story and that their actions can significantly alter the direction and/or outcome of the story.In this article we review the ways in which artificial intelligence can be brought to bear on the creation of interactive narrative systems. We lay out the landscape of about 20 years of interactive narrative research and explore the successes as well as open research questions pertaining to the novel use of computational narrative intelligence in the pursuit of entertainment, education, and training.
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paper_title: A Computational Model of Narrative Generation for Surprise Arousal

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This paper describes our effort for a planning-based computational model of narrative generation that is designed to elicit surprise in the reader's mind, making use of two temporal narrative devices: flashback and foreshadowing. In our computational model, flashback provides a backstory to explain what causes a surprising outcome, while foreshadowing gives hints about the surprise before it occurs. Here, we present Prevoyant, a planning-based computational model of surprise arousal in narrative generation, and analyze the effectiveness of Prevoyant. The work here also presents a methodology to evaluate surprise in narrative generation using a planning-based approach based on the cognitive model of surprise causes. The results of the experiments that we conducted show strong support that Prevoyant effectively generates a discourse structure for surprise arousal in narrative.
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paper_title: Digital interactive narrative tools for facilitating communication with children during counseling: a case for audiology

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In this article we explore the means by which state-of-the-art knowledge on children counseling techniques can be combined with digital interactive narrative tools to facilitate communication with children during counseling sessions. The field of "narrative play therapy" could profit from the reconciliation between free-play and narratives afforded by interactive digital tools in order to promote children's engagement. We present a digital interactive narrative application integrated with a "step-by-step" guide to the counselor, which could be adapted to many different situations and contexts where an adult professional counselor (or therapists) needs to establish a trustful and efficient communication with children. Furthermore, the tool was specifically customized to pediatric audiology counseling. Our evaluation shows that the tool maintains the centrality of the child's perspective thanks to the emergent interactive storytelling process. At the same time the counselor is given the means for obtaining valuable information for guiding and structuring the therapeutic process.
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paper_title: Generation of dilemma-based interactive narratives with a changeable story goal

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This paper describes the Generator of Adaptive Dilemma-based Interactive Narratives (GADIN) system. This system automatically generates interactive narratives which are focused on dilemmas in order to create dramatic tension. The user interacts with the system by making decisions on relevant dilemmas and by freely choosing their own actions. In this paper we introduce the version of GADIN which is able to create a finite story. The narrative finishes - in a manner which is satisfying to the user - when a dynamically determined story goal is achieved. Satisfaction of this goal may involve the user acting in a way which changes the dispositions of other characters. If the user actions cause the goal to become impossible or unlikely then they cause the story goal to be re-selected, thus meaning that the user is able to fundamentally change the overall narrative while still experiencing a coherent narrative and clear ending. This method has been applied within the children's story domain of a dinosaur adventure but is applicable in any domain which makes use of cliched storylines. The story designer is required only to provide genre-specific storyworld knowledge and dilemmas.
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paper_title: Applying planning to interactive storytelling: Narrative control using state constraints

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We have seen ten years of the application of AI planning to the problem of narrative generation in Interactive Storytelling (IS). In that time planning has emerged as the dominant technology and has featured in a number of prototype systems. Nevertheless key issues remain, such as how best to control the shape of the narrative that is generated (e.g., by using narrative control knowledge, i.e., knowledge about narrative features that enhance user experience) and also how best to provide support for real-time interactive performance in order to scale up to more realistic sized systems. Recent progress in planning technology has opened up new avenues for IS and we have developed a novel approach to narrative generation that builds on this. Our approach is to specify narrative control knowledge for a given story world using state trajectory constraints and then to treat these state constraints as landmarks and to use them to decompose narrative generation in order to address scalability issues and the goal of real-time performance in larger story domains. This approach to narrative generation is fully implemented in an interactive narrative based on the “Merchant of Venice.” The contribution of the work lies both in our novel use of state constraints to specify narrative control knowledge for interactive storytelling and also our development of an approach to narrative generation that exploits such constraints. In the article we show how the use of state constraints can provide a unified perspective on important problems faced in IS.
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paper_title: Towards consistency in interactive storytelling: Tension arcs and dead-ends

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Interactive storytelling (IS) systems are an emerging class of interactive entertainment applications with an emphasis on narrative aspects. One of the approaches used to develop IS applications is based on planning algorithms. This article describes two mechanisms that can be introduced to planning-based IS in order to solve two problems that are inherent in this approach. The first is a technique to control the pace at which a story evolves, so that the story that is generated follows a specific tension arc. The second is a method that makes it possible to avoid dead-ends in a story by intervening to justify previous events. These mechanisms help to produce a more enjoyable user experience, since their use tends to result in stories with higher narrative consistency. Results from experiments with users suggest that the proposed mechanisms improve both of the aspects addressed by this article.
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paper_title: Procedural authorship: A case study of the interactive drama Façade

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essence of the computer as a representational m edium is procedurality - the ability of the computer to enga ge in arbitrary mechanical processes to which observers can ascribe meaning. Taking full representational advantage of the compu ter thus requires procedurally literate authorship, that is, artists and writers who are able to think about and work within computational frameworks; in the extreme case of developing new modes of computational expression, authors must be highly pr oficient in the use of general purpose programming languages. We examine issues of procedural authorship using the interacti ve drama Facade as a case study. Facade's explicit design goal is to provide the player with local and global agency ove r the evolution of the dramatic experience; this requires a level o f procedurality previously not implemented in interactive narrative . of a process. In the extreme case of developing new modes of computational expression, authors must be highly pr oficient in the use of general purpose programming languages, used to construct new languages and tools specialized for the new rep resentational mode. In this paper we provide a case-study, using the in teractive drama Facade , of this last case of procedural authorship. Facade represents a new mode of computational representati on, interactive drama , combining the game-like pleasure of moment- by-moment interaction with believable characters, with the story- like pleasure of participating in and influencing a long-term dramatic progression. As procedural authors, we und ertook several design-plus-programming tasks: deconstructi ng a dramatic narrative into a hierarchy of story and behavior pi eces; designing an AI (artificial intelligence) architecture, and c ollection of special purposes languages within the architecture, that respond to and integrate the player's moment-by-moment interactions to reconstruct a real-time dramatic performance from t hose pieces; and writing an engaging, compelling story within th is new framework. This paper makes a case for the importance of proce dural authorship, describes the design goals of Facade and how these goals could only be met through a highly procedural approach to interactive narrative, and finally describes Facade's architecture, content organization, and the experience of authori ng within this framework.
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paper_title: Interactive Storytelling: A Player Modelling Approach

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In recent years, the fields of Interactive Storytelling and Player Modelling have independently enjoyed increased interest in both academia and the computer games industry. The combination of these technologies, however, remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present PaSSAGE (Player-Specific Stories via Automatically Generated Events), an interactive storytelling system that uses player modelling to automatically learn a model of the player's preferred style of play, and then uses that model to dynamically select the content of an interactive story. Results from a user study evaluating the entertainment value of adaptive stories created by our system as well as two fixed, pre-authored stories indicate that automatically adapting a story based on learned player preferences can increase the enjoyment of playing a computer role-playing game for certain types of players.
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paper_title: Analysis of ReGEN as a Graph-Rewriting System for Quest Generation

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Using procedural narrative generation in video games provides a flexible way to extend game play and provide more depth to the game world at low cost to the developers. Current examples of narrative generation in commercial games, however, tend to be simplistic, resulting in repetitive and uninteresting stories. In this paper, we develop a system for narrative generation using a context-aware graph-rewriting framework. We use a graph representation of the game world to create narratives which reflect and modify the current world state. Using a novel set of metrics to evaluate narrative quality, we validate our approach by comparing our generated narratives to other procedurally generated stories, as well as to authored narratives from commercially successful and critically praised games. The results show that our narratives compare favorably to the authored narratives. Our metrics provide a new approach to narrative analysis, and our system provides a unique and practical approach to story generation.
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paper_title: Novice-friendly authoring of plan-based interactive storyboards

paper_content:

Story Canvas is a visual authoring tool for the creation of interactive, generative stories. Aimed at authors without a technical background in computational storytelling, our system takes an existing author goal-based narrative planning architecture and adds a highly visual authoring and reading interface to the technology, using the language of storyboards and comics as a framework for both authoring and interacting with the resulting narratives. In this paper we describe Story Canvas and its evolution from our previous authoring work, including how our interface choices have been driven by our previous experiences with non-technical authors, and describe the details of translating the visual authoring constructs into story plans within the story generator.
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paper_title: Story Telling as Planning and Learning

paper_content:

Abstract The generation of extended plots for melodramatic fiction is an interesting task for Artificial Intelligence research, one that requires the application of generalization techniques to carry out fully. UNIVERSE is a story-telling program that uses plan-like units, ‘plot fragments’, to generate plot outlines. By using a rich library of plot fragments and a well-developed set of characters, UNIVERSE can create a wide range of plot outlines. In this paper we illustrate how UNIVERSE's plot fragment library is used to create plot outlines and how it might be automatically extended using explanation-based generalization methods. Our methods are based on analysis of a television melodrama, including comparisons of similar stories.
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paper_title: Setting the scene: playing digital director in interactive storytelling and creation

paper_content:

Abstract Interactive digital storytelling promises to be a new artistic discipline. But what does the artwork look like? And how much control does the artist have over the final result? By searching for the right answers, we draw several approaches from diverse fields such as filmmaking, game design, autonomous agents, psychology, and narrative intelligence. We first give a definition of interactive storytelling that includes a scope between authorship and emergent narrative, and present two example projects with different emphases. Then, we introduce a multi-level concept for an experimental stage that can be used to explore interactive storytelling at varying degrees of flexibility versus predetermination. Instead of inventing the ultimate virtual narrator, we suggest developing layers of run-time engines that allow authors to work with directions on each single layer separately—from selecting high-level dramatic structures down to directing animated actors. The concept of underlying models at each level is explained in detail by the example of a story model implementation. Further, we show variations of level adjustments causing graded degrees of semi-autonomy. First results of this experimental stage are presented, and the primary future tasks are pointed out.
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paper_title: A Modular Approach To Story Generation

paper_content:

One way of characterising texts is in terms of the discourse structures on which they appear to be built. Each type of text, or genre, e.g. the sports report, the recipe, the sermon, the proverb, will have associated with it a characteristic organisation of units. In this paper, a general model of the structure of one text type, the story, is described. This model forms the basis of a program which combines the general story structure principles with rules governing a particular sub-genre, the Old French epic, in order to generate story summaries.
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paper_title: Versu—A Simulationist Storytelling System

paper_content:

Versu is a text-based simulationist interactive drama. Because it uses autonomous agents, the drama is highly replayable: you can play the same story from multiple perspectives, or assign different characters to the various roles. The architecture relies on the notion of a social practice to achieve coordination between the independent autonomous agents. A social practice describes a recurring social situation, and is a successor to the Schankian script. Social practices are implemented as reactive joint plans, providing affordances to the agents who participate in them. The practices never control the agents directly; they merely provide suggestions. It is always the individual agent who decides what to do, using utility-based reactive action selection.
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paper_title: A Computational Model of Plan-Based Narrative Conflict at the Fabula Level

paper_content:

Conflict is an essential element of interesting stories. In this paper, we operationalize a narratological definition of conflict and extend established narrative planning techniques to incorporate this definition. The conflict partial order causal link planning algorithm (CPOCL) allows narrative conflict to arise in a plan while maintaining causal soundness and character believability. We also define seven dimensions of conflict in terms of this algorithm's knowledge representation. The first three-participants, reason, and duration-are discrete values which answer the “who?” “why?” and “when?” questions, respectively. The last four-balance, directness, stakes, and resolution-are continuous values which describe important narrative properties that can be used to select conflicts based on the author's purpose. We also present the results of two empirical studies which validate our operationalizations of these narrative phenomena. Finally, we demonstrate the different kinds of stories which CPOCL can produce based on constraints on the seven dimensions.
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paper_title: Automated scenario generation: Toward tailored and optimized military training in virtual environments

paper_content:

Scenario-based training exemplifies the learning-by-doing approach to human performance improvement. In this paper, we enumerate the advantages of incorporating automated scenario generation technologies into the traditional scenario development pipeline. An automated scenario generator is a system that creates training scenarios from scratch, augmenting human authoring to rapidly develop new scenarios, providing a richer diversity of tailored training opportunities, and delivering training scenarios on demand. We introduce a combinatorial optimization approach to scenario generation to deliver the requisite diversity and quality of scenarios while tailoring the scenarios to a particular learner's needs and abilities. We propose a set of evaluation metrics appropriate to scenario generation technologies and present preliminary evidence for the suitability of our approach compared to other scenario generation approaches.
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paper_title: On the use of reincorporation in interactive drama

paper_content:

Marlinspike is an interactive drama system. It produces a story by playing short pre-authored story components called scenes in response to the actions of a human player. Marlinspike selects the next scene to play so as to reincorporate—or narratively build upon—as much of the story-so-far as possible. In accordance with an Aristotelian definition of narrative unity, this reincorporation serves to make earlier events—particularly the player's actions— narratively necessary to the finished story. An evaluation with human players of Marlinspike's novel reincorporation feature produced mixed results. On the one hand, reincorporation does indeed produce internal story structures that are more unified and that include more of the players' significant actions. However, the players themselves did not report a correspondingly improved experience of either story quality or story-level agency.
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paper_title: MEXICA: A computer model of a cognitive account of creative writing

paper_content:

MEXICA is a computer model that produces frameworks for short stories based on the engagement-reflection cognitive account of writing. During engagement MEXICA generates material guided by content and rhetorical constraints, avoiding the use of explicit goals or story-structure information. During reflection the system breaks impasses, evaluates the novelty and interestingness of the story in progress and verifies that coherence requirements are satisfied. In this way, MEXICA complements and extends those models of computerised story-telling based on traditional problem-solving techniques where explicit goals drive the generation of stories. This paper describes the engagement-reflection account of writing, the general characteristics of MEXICA and reports an evaluation of the program.
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paper_title: Minstrel: a computer model of creativity and storytelling

paper_content:

Telling a story is a difficult task that requires a variety of knowledge and cognitive processes: knowledge about themes, writing techniques, the story world, and presentation; processes such as planning, problem-solving, recall and creativity. This dissertation presents a model of the storytelling process which incorporates theories of creativity, memory and author-level planning. This model has been implemented in a computer program called MINSTREL which tells short, theme-based stories about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. ::: MINSTREL's creativity process is based upon creativity heuristics called Transform-Recall-Adapt Methods (TRAMs). Each TRAM integrates a simple problem transformation which searches the problem-space for new knowledge to apply to a problem with a corresponding adaptation which can adapt any discovered knowledge to the original problem. By using TRAMs to augment the problem-solving process, MINSTREL is able to invent useful new problem solutions. By incorporating creativity into the recall process, MINSTREL makes creativity available to any cognitive process, and permits the use of multiple TRAMs to make creative "leaps". ::: MINSTREL's storytelling process is based upon a model of author-level problem-solving. In addition to a process model of author-level problem-solving, MINSTREL implements four important classes of author-level goals and plans: (1) Thematic, (2) Dramatic, (3) Consistency, and (4) Presentation. MINSTREL uses these goals and plans to tell a number of short stories in the King Arthur domain. ::: MINSTREL is a computational model of the cognitive processes of storytelling and creativity. MINSTREL (1) describes a process model of storytelling, (2) identifies important storytelling goals and plans, (3) identifies fundamental storytelling processes, (4) describes a process model of creativity, (5) explains how a problem-solver can find and adapt old knowledge to create new solutions, (6) identifies useful creativity heuristics, (7) explains creative "leaps", (8) explains the relation of creativity to problem-solving, (9) describes the relationship between memory and creativity, and (10) integrates creativity into a larger cognitive model.
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paper_title: A genetic algorithm approach to interactive narrative generation

paper_content:

We discuss the design of the Hybrid Evolutionary-Fuzzy Time-based Interactive (HEFTI) storytelling engine. HEFTI uses genetic algorithms at its core to recombine and evaluate story components generated from a set of story templates. The system allows authors to rely on HEFTI to perform recombination, mutation and selection operations that generate logically congruent variants of the original story via traversal, generation and deletion of (links in) the story elements.
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paper_title: Story Plot Generation based on CBR

paper_content:

In this paper we present a system for automatic story generation that reuses existing stories to produce a new story that matches a given user query. The plot structure is obtained by a case-based reasoning (CBR) process over a case base of tales and an ontology of explicitly declared relevant knowledge. The resulting story is generated as a sketch of a plot described in natural language by means of natural language generation (NLG) techniques.
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paper_title: Planning-Based Narrative Generation in Simulated Game Universes

paper_content:

An agent-based social simulation is one way to add a story to simulated game universes within the game mechanics while preserving the autonomy of nonplay characters (NPCs). In this paper, we add a social reasoning element behind NPC actions to make their plans more story like. An AI planner is developed to combine plan search and logic inference about others' minds. An NPC agent equipped with the planner uses actions to change others' minds, and uses such mental changes to achieve its goal. We review the question of whether stories do arise from agent-based simulations by examining actual narrative segments generated by our NPC agents, and by an experimental exploration of the frequencies and lengths of narrative segments. A story facilitator, named divine intervention operator service (DIOS), makes stories happen when they are impossible via on-the-fly adjustment of character personalities.
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paper_title: Emotional Input for Character-based Interactive Storytelling

paper_content:

In most Interactive Storytelling systems, user interaction is based on natural language communication with virtual agents, either through isolated utterances or through dialogue. Natural language communication is also an essential element of interactive narratives in which the user is supposed to impersonate one of the story's characters. Whilst techniques for narrative generation and agent behaviour have made significant progress in recent years, natural language processing remains a bottleneck hampering the scalability of Interactive Storytelling systems. In this paper, we introduce a novel interaction technique based solely on emotional speech recognition. It allows the user to take part in dialogue with virtual actors without any constraints on style or expressivity, by mapping the recognised emotional categories to narrative situations and virtual characters feelings. Our Interactive Storytelling system uses an emotional planner to drive characters' behaviours. The main feature of this approach is that characters' feelings are part of the planning domain and are at the heart of narrative representations. The emotional speech recogniser analyses the speech signal to produce a variety of features which can be used to define ad-hoc categories on which to train the system. The content of our interactive narrative is an adaptation of one chapter of the XIXth century classic novel, Madame Bovary, which is well suited to a formalisation in terms of characters' feelings. At various stages of the narrative, the user can address the main character or respond to her, impersonating her lover. The emotional category extracted from the user utterance can be analysed in terms of the current narrative context, which includes characters' beliefs, feelings and expectations, to produce a specific influence on the target character, which will become visible through a change in its behaviour, achieving a high level of realism for the interaction. A limited number of emotional categories is sufficient to drive the narrative across multiple courses of actions, since it comprises over thirty narrative functions. We report results from a fully implemented prototype, both in terms of proof of concept and of usability through a preliminary user study.
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paper_title: A Survey on Procedural Modelling for Virtual Worlds

paper_content:

Procedural modelling deals with semi-automatic content generation by means of a program or procedure. Among other advantages, its data compression and the potential to generate a large variety of detailed content with reduced human intervention, have made procedural modelling attractive for creating virtual environments increasingly used in movies, games and simulations. We survey procedural methods that are useful to generate features of virtual worlds, including terrains, vegetation, rivers, roads, buildings and entire cities. In this survey, we focus particularly on the degree of intuitive control and of interactivity offered by each procedural method, because these properties are instrumental for their typical users: designers and artists. We identify the most promising research results that have been recently achieved, but we also realize that there is far from widespread acceptance of procedural methods among non-technical, creative professionals. We conclude by discussing some of the most important challenges of procedural modelling.
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paper_title: Assisted news reading with automated illustration

paper_content:

We all had the problem of forgetting about what we just read a few sentences before. This comes from the problem of attention and is more common with children and elderly. People feel either bored or distracted by something more interesting. This paper proposes an application to help people reading news by illustrating the news story. The application provides mechanisms to (1) select the best illustration for each scene and (2) to select the set of illustrations to improve the story sequence. The application proposed in this technical demo aims at improving the user's attention when reading news articles. The application implements several information processing techniques to generate an audio-visual presentation of the text news article.
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paper_title: SceneMaker: intelligent multimodal visualization of natural language scripts

paper_content:

Producing plays, films or animations is a complex and expensive process involving various professionals and media. Our proposed software system, SceneMaker, aims to facilitate this creative process by automatically interpreting natural language film/play scripts and generating multimodal, animated scenes from them. During generation of story content, SceneMaker will give particular attention to emotional aspects and their reflection in fluency and manner of actions, body posture, facial expressions, speech, scene composition, timing, lighting, music and camera work. Related literature and software on Natural Language Processing, in particular textual affect sensing, affective embodied agents, visualisation of 3D scenes and digital cinematography are reviewed. In relation to other work, SceneMaker will present a genre-specific text-to-animation methodology which combines all relevant expressive modalities and is made accessible via web-based and mobile platforms. In conclusion, SceneMaker will enhance the communication of creative ideas providing quick pre-visualisations of scenes.
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paper_title: Carsim: A System To Visualize Written Road Accident Reports As Animated 3D Scenes

paper_content:

This paper describes a system to create animated 3D scenes of car accidents from reports written in Swedish. The system has been developed using news reports of varying size and complexity. The text-to-scene conversion process consists of two stages. An information extraction module creates a structured representation of the accident and a visual simulator generates and animates the scene. ::: ::: We first describe the overall structure of the text-to-scene conversion and the structure of the representation. We then explain the information extraction and visualization modules. We show snapshots of the car animation output and we conclude with the results we obtained.
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paper_title: Script Visualization (ScriptViz): a smart system that makes writing fun ∗

paper_content:

We have built the first version of ScriptVis v.1.0 that allows users to visualize their screenplays in real time via animated graphics. Our system consists of a text understanding module, a high-level planning module and a scene generator. The user can input a screenplay as a set of well-formed English sentences via a graphic user interface. The text understanding module interprets the input sentences and triggers the high-level planner to construct a plan of actions for the appropriate agents. Then the agents execute the plans, and the scene generator renders the scene as the story evolves. Our system provides the user with a powerful tool to visualize his screenplays (stories) in the form of computer graphics, which makes writing story fun for students as well as for screenplay writers.
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paper_title: Creating interactive driver experiences with the scenario markup language

paper_content:

Serious games became an important device for increasing the awareness of issues that are important to society. One such issue is the environmental impact of driving. To support the training and wide promotion of eco-friendly driving, an appropriate platform and tools are needed. In this paper, we present the Scenario Markup Language (SML), a simple yet expressive language for authoring realistic traffic situations. This effort is part of a novel framework for automatically generating complex scenarios in the transport domain. In particular, SML facilitates the scripting of behavioral driver studies in multi-user online three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds.
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paper_title: Toward supporting stories with procedurally generated game worlds

paper_content:

Computer role playing games engage players through interleaved story and open-ended game play. We present an approach to procedurally generating, rendering, and making playable novel games based on a priori unknown story structures. These stories may be authored by humans or by computational story generation systems. Our approach couples player, designer, and algorithm to generate a novel game using preferences for game play style, general design aesthetics, and a novel story structure. Our approach is implemented in Game Forge, a system that uses search-based optimization to find and render a novel game world configuration that supports a sequence of plot points plus play style preferences. Additionally, Game Forge supports execution of the game through reactive control of game world logic and non-player character behavior.
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paper_title: OpenEnergySim: A 3D Internet Based Experimental Framework for Integrating Traffic Simulation and Multi-User Immersive Driving

paper_content:

In recent years, the use of computer-based simulations in the transportation domain has become increasingly important to analyze and test measures for Intelligent Transport System (ITS) policies. Simulators were built to address several aspects of transport, including traffic, driving experience, and pedestrian behavior. However, as the majority of available simulators are single-user stand-alone systems, traffic engineers cannot easily analyze more complex phenomena, such as the interaction between multiple human drivers or pedestrians. Furthermore, this limitation makes it difficult to collect large-scale behavioral data, which is necessary to draw valid conclusions on driving behavior. Emerging virtual world technology offers a convenient alternative. As a networked multi-user framework that allows users to immerse in the virtual world via a graphical self-representation (an 'avatar'), it allows to develop integrated simulation applications that are conveniently accessible by Internet. In this paper, we present OpenEnergySim, a virtual world based visualization application that integrates traffic simulation and immersive multi-user driving.
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paper_title: The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

paper_content:

Preface 1. Narrative and life: The universality of narrative Narrative and time Narrative perception 2. Defining narrative: The bare minimum Story and narrative discourse The mediation (construction) of story Constituent and supplementary events Narrativity 3. The borders of narrative: Framing narratives Paratexts The outer limits of narrative Is it narrative or is it life itself? 4. The rhetoric of narrative: Causation Normalization Masterplots Narrative rhetoric at work 5. Closure: Conflict: the agon Closure and endings Closure, suspense, and surprise Closure at the level of expectations Closure at the level of questions Absence of closure 6. Narration: a few words on interpretation: The narrator Voice Focalization Distance Reliability Free indirect style Narration on stage and screen 7. Interpretation: The implied author Underreading Overreading Gaps Cruxes Repetition: themes and motifs 8. Three ways to interpret narrative: The question of wholeness in narrative Intentional readings Symptomatic readings Adaptive readings 9. Adaptation across media: Adaptation as creative destruction Duration and pace Character Figurative language Gaps Focalization Constraints of the marketplace 10. Character and self in narrative: Character vs. action Flat and round characters Can characters be real? Types Autobiography Life writing as performative 11. Narrative contestation: A contest of narratives A narrative lattice-work Shadow stories Motivation and personality Masterplots and types Revising cultural masterplots Battling narratives are everywhere 12. Narrative negotiation Critical reading as narrative negotiation Closure one more time The end of closure? Glossary Index.
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paper_title: Open-World Planning for Story Generation

paper_content:

The ability to generate narrative is of importance to computer systems that wish to use story effectively for entertainment, training, or education. One way to generate narrative is to use planning. However, story planners are limited by the fact that they can only operate on the story world provided, which impacts the ability of the planner to find a solution story plan and the quality and structure of the story plan if one is found. We present a planning algorithm for story generation that can nondeterministically make decisions about the description of the initial story world state in a least-commitment fashion.
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paper_title: Proactive Mediation in Plan-Based Narrative Environments

paper_content:

In interactive plan-based narrative environments, users' actions must be monitored to ensure that conditions necessary for the execution of narrative plans are not compromised. In the Zocalo system, management of user actions has been performed on a reactionary basis by a process called mediation. In this paper, we describe an extension to this approach, proactive mediation, which calculates responses to user input in an anticipatory manner. A proactive mediation module accepts as input a plan describing the actions being performed by the user (generated by a plan recognition system) and identifies portions of that plan that jeopardize the causal structure of the overall narrative. Once these portions are identified, proactive mediation generates modifications to the narrative plan structure that avoid the unwanted interaction between user and story. This extension to the original mediation algorithm provides more responses to a user's actions and generates responses that are tailored to the user's activity.
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paper_title: Story planning as exploratory creativity: Techniques for expanding the narrative search space

paper_content:

The authoring of fictional stories is considered a creative process. The purpose of most story authoring is not to invent a new style or genre of story that will be accepted by the population but to invent a single narrative that is novel enough to be tellable. Computational story generation systems are more limited than human authors in the space of narratives that can be considered because it is often the case that story generation systems are constrained to operate within a fixed representation of the story world. These limitations can impact whether a story generation system is considered creative or not. In this paper, we describe a story planning system, Fabulist. Fabulist however is constrained by the world model input by the system user. We present two algorithms that enable story planning systems such as Fabulist to break outside the bounds of the initial world model in order to search a larger space of narratives.
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paper_title: Managing interaction between users and agents in a multi-agent storytelling environment

paper_content:

This paper describes an approach for managing the interaction of human users with computer-controlled agents in an interactive narrative-oriented virtual environment. In these kinds of systems, the freedom of the user to perform whatever action she desires must be balanced with the preservation of the storyline used to control the system's characters. We describe a technique, narrative mediation, that exploits a plan-based model of narrative structure to manage and respond to users' actions inside a virtual world. We define two general classes of response to situations where users execute actions that interfere with story structure: accommodation and intervention. Finally, we specify an architecture that uses these definitions to monitor and automatically characterize user actions, and to compute and implement responses to unanticipated activity. The approach effectively integrates user action and system response into the unfolding narrative, providing for the balance between a user's sense of control within the story world and the user's sense of coherence of the overall narrative.
---
paper_title: M.: A Fabula Model for Emergent Narrative

paper_content:

In this paper we present our continuing efforts to generate narrative using a character-centric approach. In particular we discuss the advantages of explicitly representing the emergent event sequence in order to be able to exert influence on it and generate stories that ‘retell' the emergent narrative. Based on a narrative distinction between fabula, plot and presentation, we make a first step by presenting a model based on story comprehension that can capture the fabula, and show how it can be used for the automatic creation of stories.
---
paper_title: A Phone That Cures Your Flu: Generating Imaginary Gadgets in Fictions with Planning and Analogies

paper_content:

Most computational story generation systems lack the ability to generate new types of imaginary objects that play functional roles in stories, such as lightsabers in Star Wars. We present an algorithm that generates such imaginary objects, which we call gadgets, in order to extend the ontological expressivity of existing, planning-based story generation systems. The behavior of a gadget is represented as a plan including typical events that happen when the gadget is used. Our algorithm creates gadgets by extrapolating and merging one or more commonly known objects in order to achieve a narrative goal provided by an existing story generator. We extend partial-order planning to establish open conditions based on analogies between concepts related respectively to common objects and the gadget. We show the algorithm is capable of generating gadgets created by human.
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paper_title: Crowdsourcing interactive fiction games

paper_content:

Procedural generation of games has become an active research field. We present a system that automatically generates an interactive fiction (IF) by learning from crowdsourced corpora of example stories. We ask crowd workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk to write short stories about a given situation with simple language, from which a plot graph is learned, containing plot events, temporal precedence and mutual exclusion relations between the events. The plot graph describes an IF where players and non-player characters choose from executable events as determined by the plot graph. We demonstrate an IF learned from the domain of bank robbery.
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paper_title: How can computers be partners in the creative process: classification and commentary on the special issue

paper_content:

The different ways that computers can be involed in creative work are examined. A classification based on four categories of human-computer interaction to promote creativity is proposed: computers may facilitate (a) the management of creative work, (b) communication between individuals collaborating on creative projects, (c) the use of creativity enhancement techniques, (d) the creative act through integrated human-computer cooperation during idea production. The papers in the Special Issue are discussed according to this classification. Issues to be considered in future work on human-computer interactions for promoting creativity are discussed.
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paper_title: Creating Characters in a Story-Telling Universe

paper_content:

Abstract Extended story generation, i.e., the creation of continuing serials, presents difficult and interesting problems for Artificial Intelligence. We present here the first phase of the development of a program, UNIVERSE, that will ultimately tell extended stories. In particular, after describing our overall model of story telling, we present a method for creating universes of characters appropriate for extended story generation. This method concentrates on the need to keep story-telling universes consistent and coherent . We also describe the information that must be maintained for characters and interpersonal relationships, and the use of stereotypical information about people to help motivate trait values. The use of historical events for motivation is also described. Finally, we present an example of a character generated by UNIVERSE.
---
paper_title: Open-World Planning for Story Generation

paper_content:

The ability to generate narrative is of importance to computer systems that wish to use story effectively for entertainment, training, or education. One way to generate narrative is to use planning. However, story planners are limited by the fact that they can only operate on the story world provided, which impacts the ability of the planner to find a solution story plan and the quality and structure of the story plan if one is found. We present a planning algorithm for story generation that can nondeterministically make decisions about the description of the initial story world state in a least-commitment fashion.
---
paper_title: Story Generation After TALE-SPIN

paper_content:

TALE-SPIN, the last major AI attempt at story generation, approached the problem of making up atoriea primarily from the perspective of an impartial world simulator. AUTHOR is a program (under development) which generates atoriea as a creative reasoner in pursuit of her own narrative goals. It is thus intended to simulate an author's mind as ahe makes up a story, rather than the world as things happen in it. The four major forces driving the story generation process, according to the AUTHOR model, are (1) author intentionality, (2) conceptual reformulation, (3) reminding, and (4) the opportunity enhancement metagoal.
---
paper_title: Proactive Mediation in Plan-Based Narrative Environments

paper_content:

In interactive plan-based narrative environments, users' actions must be monitored to ensure that conditions necessary for the execution of narrative plans are not compromised. In the Zocalo system, management of user actions has been performed on a reactionary basis by a process called mediation. In this paper, we describe an extension to this approach, proactive mediation, which calculates responses to user input in an anticipatory manner. A proactive mediation module accepts as input a plan describing the actions being performed by the user (generated by a plan recognition system) and identifies portions of that plan that jeopardize the causal structure of the overall narrative. Once these portions are identified, proactive mediation generates modifications to the narrative plan structure that avoid the unwanted interaction between user and story. This extension to the original mediation algorithm provides more responses to a user's actions and generates responses that are tailored to the user's activity.
---
paper_title: Managing interaction between users and agents in a multi-agent storytelling environment

paper_content:

This paper describes an approach for managing the interaction of human users with computer-controlled agents in an interactive narrative-oriented virtual environment. In these kinds of systems, the freedom of the user to perform whatever action she desires must be balanced with the preservation of the storyline used to control the system's characters. We describe a technique, narrative mediation, that exploits a plan-based model of narrative structure to manage and respond to users' actions inside a virtual world. We define two general classes of response to situations where users execute actions that interfere with story structure: accommodation and intervention. Finally, we specify an architecture that uses these definitions to monitor and automatically characterize user actions, and to compute and implement responses to unanticipated activity. The approach effectively integrates user action and system response into the unfolding narrative, providing for the balance between a user's sense of control within the story world and the user's sense of coherence of the overall narrative.
---
paper_title: M.: A Fabula Model for Emergent Narrative

paper_content:

In this paper we present our continuing efforts to generate narrative using a character-centric approach. In particular we discuss the advantages of explicitly representing the emergent event sequence in order to be able to exert influence on it and generate stories that ‘retell' the emergent narrative. Based on a narrative distinction between fabula, plot and presentation, we make a first step by presenting a model based on story comprehension that can capture the fabula, and show how it can be used for the automatic creation of stories.
---
paper_title: Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling

paper_content:

As a game designer or new media storyteller, you know that the story is everything. However, figuring out how to tell it interactively-and in a way that keeps your audience coming back for more-can be challenging. Here to help you out (and to open your mind to ever more creative ways of producing those stories) is the man who created the cult publication The Art of Computer Game Design and who has devoted much of his career to that very topic: Chris Crawford. To highlight the path for future gains in the quest for a truly interactive story, Chris provides a solid sampling of what doesn't work, contrasting unsuccessful methodologies with those that hold promise for the future. Throughout you'll find examples of contemporary games that rely on different technologies-and learn the storytelling lessons to be garnered from each of the past methodologies. Within the context of interactive storytelling, Chris explores ways of providing conflict and challenge, the difference between low- and high-interactivity designs, the necessity to move beyond purely visual thinking (so that the player is engaged on multiple levels), and more.
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paper_title: Curveship's automatic narrative style

paper_content:

Curveship, a Python framework for developing interactive fiction (IF) with narrative style, is described. The system simulates a world with locations, characters, and objects, providing the typical facilities of an IF development system. To these it adds the ability to generate text and to change the telling of events and description of items using high-level narrative parameters, so that, for instance, different actors can be focalized and events can be told out of order. By assigning a character to be narrator or moving the narrator in time, the system can determine grammatical specifics and render the text in a new narrative style. Curveship offers those interested in narrative systems a way to experiment with changes in the narrative discourse; for interactive fiction authors and those who wish to use of the system as a component of their own, it is a way to create powerful new types of narrative experiences. The templates used for language generation in Curveship, the string-with-slots representation, shows that there is a compromise between highly flexible but extremely difficult-to-author abstract syntax representations and simple strings, which are easy to write but extremely inflexible. The development of the system has suggested ways to refine narrative theory, offering new understandings of how narrative distance can be understood as being composed of lower-level changes in narrative and how the order of events is better represented as an ordered tree than a simple sequence.
---
paper_title: MEXICA: A computer model of a cognitive account of creative writing

paper_content:

MEXICA is a computer model that produces frameworks for short stories based on the engagement-reflection cognitive account of writing. During engagement MEXICA generates material guided by content and rhetorical constraints, avoiding the use of explicit goals or story-structure information. During reflection the system breaks impasses, evaluates the novelty and interestingness of the story in progress and verifies that coherence requirements are satisfied. In this way, MEXICA complements and extends those models of computerised story-telling based on traditional problem-solving techniques where explicit goals drive the generation of stories. This paper describes the engagement-reflection account of writing, the general characteristics of MEXICA and reports an evaluation of the program.
---
paper_title: Creating interactive driver experiences with the scenario markup language

paper_content:

Serious games became an important device for increasing the awareness of issues that are important to society. One such issue is the environmental impact of driving. To support the training and wide promotion of eco-friendly driving, an appropriate platform and tools are needed. In this paper, we present the Scenario Markup Language (SML), a simple yet expressive language for authoring realistic traffic situations. This effort is part of a novel framework for automatically generating complex scenarios in the transport domain. In particular, SML facilitates the scripting of behavioral driver studies in multi-user online three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds.
---
paper_title: Style: A Computational and Conceptual Blending-Based Approach

paper_content:

This chapter proposes a new approach to style, arising from our work on computational media using structural blending, which enriches the conceptual blending of cognitive linguistics with structure building operations in order to encompass syntax and narrative as well as metaphor. We have implemented both conceptual and structural blending, and conducted initial experiments with poetry, including interactive multimedia poetry, although the approach generalizes to other media. The central idea is to generate multimedia content and analyze style in terms of blending principles, based on our finding that different principles from those of common sense blending are often needed for some contemporary poetic metaphors.
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paper_title: Movie script markup language

paper_content:

This paper introduces the Movie Script Markup Language (MSML), a document specification for the structural representation of screenplay narratives for television and feature film drama production. Its definition was motivated by a lack of available structured and open formats that describe dramatic narrative but also support IT-based production methods of audiovisual drama. The MSML specification fully supports contemporary screenplay templates in a structured fashion, and adds provisions for drama manufacturing methods that allow drama crew to define how narrative can be translated to audiovisual material. A timing model based on timed petri nets is included to enable fine-grained event synchronization. Finally, MSML comprises an animation module through which narrative events can drive production elements like 3-D previsualization, content repurposing or studio automation. MSML is currently serialized into XML documents and is formally described by a complement of an XML Schema and ISO Schematron schema. The specification has been developed in close collaboration with actual drama production crew and has been implemented in a number of proof-of-concept demonstrators.
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Title: A Survey on Story Generation Techniques for Authoring Computational Narratives

Section 1: INTRODUCTION
Description 1: This section introduces the paper, discussing the role of computers in narrative creation and the collaboration between human authors and computational systems, known as the mixed-initiative approach.

Section 2: TERMINOLOGY
Description 2: This section discusses the terminology related to computational narrative and the categorization of the field, including definitions of narrative components and degrees of automation.

Section 3: MANUAL AUTHORING
Description 3: This section explores systems and tools designed to facilitate narrative authoring while minimizing the computer's perceived influence, focusing on interactive stories, educational tools, and therapeutic uses.

Section 4: PLOT GENERATION
Description 4: This section surveys various approaches to automated plot generation, including plot templates, constrained plot generation, and automated plot generation with manual space.

Section 5: SPACE GENERATION
Description 5: This section discusses the systems and techniques focused on generating the story space, examining how structured plots can be visualized in 2D or 3D environments and procedural generation of virtual worlds.

Section 6: STORY GENERATION
Description 6: This section examines systems that automate both plot and space generation, including planning-based systems, space modification techniques, and emergent story generation.

Section 7: DISCUSSION
Description 7: This section discusses the lack of space generation techniques in computational narrative research, potential directions for future research, and the integration of plot and space.

Section 8: CONCLUSION
Description 8: This section concludes the paper, summarizing the state of research in story generation, identifying current challenges, and highlighting promising directions for future research.