Sharing Authoring with Algorithms: Procedural Generation of Satellite Sentences in Text-based Interactive Stories

As both a fiction writer and a computer scientist, I want the interactive stories I create to be meaningfully interactive: choices should matter. To avoid laborious hand-authoring of variations, procedural content generation (PCG) seems appealing; but PCG has been less successful in producing compelling narrative text than in other realms. To address this problem, I consider the minimum amount of PCG that might make a human-authored story computationally interesting but still authorially sound. The resulting research prototype generates "satellite" sentences (which moderate pacing and reestablish context within dialogue scenes) within otherwise hand-authored scenes in a complete interactive story.