TY - GEN
T1 - Story Designer
T2 - 17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, FDG 2022
AU - Alvarez, Alberto
AU - Font, Jose
AU - Togelius, Julian
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Owner/Author.
PY - 2022/9/5
Y1 - 2022/9/5
N2 - Narratives are a predominant part of games, and their design poses challenges when identifying, encoding, interpreting, evaluating, and generating them. One way to address this would be to approach narrative design in a more abstract layer, such as narrative structures. This paper presents Story Designer, a mixed-initiative co-creative narrative structure tool built on top of the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer (EDD) that uses tropes, narrative conventions found across many media types, to design these structures. Story Designer uses tropes as building blocks for narrative designers to compose complete narrative structures by interconnecting them in graph structures called narrative graphs. Our mixed-initiative approach lets designers manually create their narrative graphs and feeds an underlying evolutionary algorithm with those, creating quality-diverse suggestions using MAP-Elites. Suggestions are visually represented for designers to compare and evaluate and can then be incorporated into the design for further manual editions. At the same time, we use the levels designed within EDD as constraints for the narrative structure, intertwining both level design and narrative. We evaluate the impact of these constraints and the system's adaptability and expressiveness, resulting in a potential tool to create narrative structures combining level design aspects with narrative.
AB - Narratives are a predominant part of games, and their design poses challenges when identifying, encoding, interpreting, evaluating, and generating them. One way to address this would be to approach narrative design in a more abstract layer, such as narrative structures. This paper presents Story Designer, a mixed-initiative co-creative narrative structure tool built on top of the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer (EDD) that uses tropes, narrative conventions found across many media types, to design these structures. Story Designer uses tropes as building blocks for narrative designers to compose complete narrative structures by interconnecting them in graph structures called narrative graphs. Our mixed-initiative approach lets designers manually create their narrative graphs and feeds an underlying evolutionary algorithm with those, creating quality-diverse suggestions using MAP-Elites. Suggestions are visually represented for designers to compare and evaluate and can then be incorporated into the design for further manual editions. At the same time, we use the levels designed within EDD as constraints for the narrative structure, intertwining both level design and narrative. We evaluate the impact of these constraints and the system's adaptability and expressiveness, resulting in a potential tool to create narrative structures combining level design aspects with narrative.
KW - Graph Grammars
KW - Mixed-Initiative Co-Creativity
KW - Narrative Structure
KW - Procedural Content Generation
KW - Story Generation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85142339970&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85142339970&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3555858.3555929
DO - 10.1145/3555858.3555929
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85142339970
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
BT - Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, FDG 2022
A2 - Karpouzis, Kostas
A2 - Gualeni, Stefano
A2 - Fowler, Allan
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 5 September 2022 through 8 September 2022
ER -