Story Designer Towards a Mixed-Initiative Tool to Create Narrative Structures

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Story Designer: Towards a Mixed-Initiative Tool to Create

Narrative Structures

Alberto Alvarez

Malmö University, Game Lab

Malmö, Sweden

alberto.alvarez@mau.se

Jose Font

Malmö University, Game Lab

Malmö, Sweden

jose.font@mau.se

Julian Togelius

New York University

New York, USA

julian@togelius.com

Figure 1: The Story Designer screen in the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer. In the center, there is the main narrative graph

being edited by the designer. to the right, the suggestion grid using the Interactive Constrained MAP-Elites (IC MAP-Elites), the

possible dimensions to be used, and two inspected suggestions. At the bottom, Story Designer presents some extra information

regarding tness, interestingness, and coherence, for the designer’s convenience.

ABSTRACT

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 ap-

proach 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 vi-

sually 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 con-

straints 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.

KEYWORDS

Story Generation, Procedural Content Generation, Narrative Struc-

ture, Mixed-Initiative Co-Creativity, Graph Grammars

1 INTRODUCTION

Games are multifaceted content that intertwines gameplay, mechan-

ics, audio, level, graphics, and narrative facets [

]. Narrative has

been linked as a key facet to connect dierent components in games

arXiv:2210.09294v1 [cs.HC] 11 Oct 2022

, , Alvarez. et al

such as level design [

], and to create meaningful interactions with

depth and context [

]. Thus, narrative in games has been a

focus of study [

] and its generation has been approached

in dierent ways and with dierent techniques [8,9,21,46,49].

Patterns are a common approach to narrative and other facets.

The focus then has been on extracting common narrative aspects

to ease the identication, encoding, and generation of narrative in

dierent forms [

]. However, it remains a challenge

to dene certain narrative aspects more aligned with the structure

and overarching goals of the game given what type of content is

generated, as well as using these to design and compare among

games. One approach would be to change the abstraction level at

which the narrative is designed. Instead of focusing on the details,

quests, or plot, one could focus on the structure. Narrative structures

can be used to describe how a story is to be developed, as argued by

Barthes [

], and to create an abstract representation that reveals

common structures among them, such as Propp’s 31 “narremes" [

One approach to generate narrative structures is TropeTwist [

which uses tropes, narrative conventions found across many media

types [19,50], as patterns to design these structures.

This paper presents Story Designer, a mixed-initiative co-creative

(MI-CC) narrative structure tool built on top of the Evolutionary

Dungeon Designer (EDD) using the TropeTwist system. Story De-

signer uses tropes as building blocks for designers to compose

complete narrative structures by interconnecting them in graph

structures called narrative graphs. Story Designer lets designers

create narrative graphs and assist them with a suggestion grid that

uses the Interactive Constrained MAP-Elites (IC MAP-Elites) [

]. By

having an MI-CC system to design narrative structures, designers

could ideate and prototype their structures while the system adapts

and suggest novel narratives, making use of patterns, optimizing

coherence, and situating the narrative structures along dimensions

of interest for designers. At the same time, IC MAP-Elites can take

advantage and use the designer’s structure as a proxy to evaluate

subjective characteristics such as interestingness, which has been

the subject of several studies [32,42,44].

As Story Designer is implemented in EDD and based on the link

between level design and narrative, we make use of the designed

dungeon to create constraints over the narrative generation, eec-

tively intertwining both facets. We assess Story Designer with four

controlled and simulated experiments, three premade structures

of dierent games, and one step by step design that showcase the

possibilities within the system. All experiments were tested with

and without level design constraints and using a pair of dimen-

sions and all dimensions during the search. Our results indicate

that IC MAP-Elites have consistency and stability in generating

content and that delimiting the search space with additional level

constraints, while limiting the diversity and generation of complex

structures, guides better the search.

2 RELATED WORK

There is by now a large body of research on procedurally generating

various types of game content [

]. While the literature on PCG

in general is far too voluminous to survey here, it should be noted

that PCG methods of dierent kinds have been developed for a

wide variety of content, not just game levels. Narrative, quests,

and plots have been generated using dierent approaches such

as planning [

], grammars [

], machine learning [

], and

patterns [

]. Further, several approaches have been proposed

to generate multiple facets of games, in particular level geometry

together with rules, music, lighting, sound etc [

–

]. More relevantly to the current project, several papers have

proposed ways of co-generating narrative and levels [

In tandem with research on automatically and autonomously

generating game content and narrative, there has been a consid-

erable amount of work “mixed-initiative” systems, which allow a

human designer to co-create content with algorithms. In the do-

main of level generation for games, a number of systems have been

developed that allow a human to receive suggestions, feedback,

or constraints from an AI systems. These include systems for co-

creating platform game levels [

], strategy maps [

], and certain

aspects of narrative [28,29].

The core algorithm employed in the current paper is MAP-Elites,

a quality-diversity algorithm that seeks to illuminate a space of pos-

sible problem solutions [

]. While essentially a type of evolution-

ary algorithms, MAP-Elites, like other quality-diversity algorithms,

do not seek to nd a single best solution but rather a set of solutions

that vary along certain specied measures. The measures dene a

grid, where each cell is the best solution that has been found within

certain values of the measures. These measures can be dened in

many ways; for game levels, they might include the density of a

level, its diculty for a particular type of agent, its symmetry etc.

MAP-Elites has been used in multiple recent AI-based game design

systems [4,7,13,14,27].

3 STORY DESIGNER

Story Designer is a new system integrated in EDD, which presents a

visual interface for mixed-initiative narrative structure generation.

It makes extensive use of the TropeTwist system as foundation to

build narrative graphs and assess them by identifying trope patterns.

The user manually designs a story structure by adding and intercon-

necting nodes in a graph, which seeds an evolutionary algorithm

(EA) that generates story structure suggestions that can be incor-

porated into the user’s design. This continuous co-creative design

process implements the Interactive Constrained MAP-Elites (IC

MAP-Elites) approach presented in [

], providing quality-diverse

suggestions across several feature-dimensions.

Story Designer is interconnected with the level design facet in

EDD. This means that the narrative graphs that can be developed

and that can be generated and suggested are constrained by the

content that exists in the levels. For instance, if the designer adds

two NPCs besides the Hero, then the system could at most, use

three character nodes to represent them, or if the designer adds a

boss enemy and a quest item, this would mean that the boss enemy

could be represented as one of the villain nodes (e.g., Enemy, Big

Bad, or Dragon) and the quest item as a possible Plot Device.

3.1 TropeTwist

TropeTwist [

] is a system that uses tropes [

], narrative

conventions easily recognizable by the audience, as patterns that

combine to compose narrative structures. These structures dene

generic aspects of a story, leading to the identication of events,

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StoryDesigner:TowardsaMixed-InitiativeTooltoCreateNarrativeStructuresAlbertoAlvarezMalmöUniversity,GameLabMalmö,Swedenalberto.alvarez@mau.seJoseFontMalmöUniversity,GameLabMalmö,Swedenjose.font@mau.seJulianTogeliusNewYorkUniversityNewYork,USAjulian@togelius.comFigure1:TheStoryDesignerscreenintheEvolu...

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