Evolving Interactive Narrative Worlds

Justus Robertson, John Heiden, Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera

Abstract: An interactive narrative is bound by the context of the world where its story takes place. However, most work in interactive narrative generation takes its story world design and mechanics as given, which abdicates a large part of story generation to an external world designer. In this paper, we close the story world design gap with an evolutionary search framework for generating interactive narrative worlds and mechanics. Our framework finds story world designs that accommodate multiple distinct player roles. We evaluate our system with an action agreement ratio analysis that shows worlds generated by our framework provide a greater number of in-role action opportunities compared to story worlds randomly sampled from the generative space.