CharacterChat: Supporting the Creation of Fictional Characters through Conversation and Progressive Manifestation with a Chatbot

TL;DR

CharacterChat is a chatbot designed to assist writers in creating and developing fictional characters through guided prompts and open conversation, enhancing early-stage character development.

Contribution

It introduces a novel interactive system combining rule-based prompts and language models to support character creation in a user-centered way.

Findings

Benefits for early character creation stages

Challenges due to limited conversational capabilities

User insights from qualitative studies

Abstract

We present CharacterChat, a concept and chatbot to support writers in creating fictional characters. Concretely, writers progressively turn the bot into their imagined character through conversation. We iteratively developed CharacterChat in a user-centred approach, starting with a survey on character creation with writers (N=30), followed by two qualitative user studies (N=7 and N=8). Our prototype combines two modes: (1) Guided prompts help writers define character attributes (e.g. User: "Your name is Jane."), including suggestions for attributes (e.g. Bot: "What is my main motivation?") and values, realised as a rule-based system with a concept network. (2) Open conversation with the chatbot helps writers explore their character and get inspiration, realised with a language model that takes into account the defined character attributes. Our user studies reveal benefits particularly for early stages of character creation, and challenges due to limited conversational capabilities. We conclude with lessons learned and ideas for future work.