Crowdsourcing Open Interactive Narrative.

TLDR

Interactive narrative lets users shape a story, but existing AI approaches rely on domain models that demand expertise in artificial intelligence and knowledge representation. The paper introduces open interactive narrative, the challenge of creating interactive story experiences on any topic. Scherazade IF learns a domain model from crowdsourced example stories, enabling players to take varied actions while still receiving a coherent narrative. Evaluation shows that Scherazade IF achieves near‑human level authoring.

Abstract

Interactive narrative is a form of digital interactive experience in which users influence a dramatic storyline through their actions. Artificial intelligence approaches to interactive narrative use a domain model to determine how the narrative should unfold based on user actions. However, domain models for interactive narrative require artificial intelligence and knowledge representation expertise. We present open interactive narrative, the problem of generating an interactive narrative experience about any possible topic. We present an open interactive narrative system— Scherazade IF—that learns a domain model from crowdsourced example stories so that the player can perform different actions and still receive a coherent story experience. We report on an evaluation of our system showing near-human level authoring.