a morphological approach to interactive storytelling

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.