Intentionally Generating Choices in Interactive Narratives

Interactive stories face a famous “authorial bottleneck.” Two existing approaches to this problem are story management systems, such as drama managers, and interactive narrative generators. Existing work leverages well-understood qualities of linear narrative such as suspense to generate content, but interactivity brings new capacities, like the ability to make a player experience regret. These interactive poetics arise from the player’s ability to make choices, and depend heavily on the structure of the choices that are presented to the player. This system description paper presents a system that creates choices by reasoning about their structure, and describes the architecture that enables it to do so.