WhatELSE: Shaping Narrative Spaces at Configurable Level of Abstraction for AI-bridged Interactive Storytelling

TL;DR

WhatELSE is an authoring system that uses AI to shape and control the space of possible narratives in interactive storytelling, allowing authors to better understand and guide AI-generated stories.

Contribution

It introduces a novel system that creates and visualizes narrative possibility spaces from example stories, enhancing author control over AI-driven interactive narratives.

Findings

Authors can perceive and edit narrative spaces effectively.

WhatELSE generates engaging interactive stories at runtime.

The system improves author understanding of narrative boundaries.

Abstract

Generative AI significantly enhances player agency in interactive narratives (IN) by enabling just-in-time content generation that adapts to player actions. While delegating generation to AI makes IN more interactive, it becomes challenging for authors to control the space of possible narratives - within which the final story experienced by the player emerges from their interaction with AI. In this paper, we present WhatELSE, an AI-bridged IN authoring system that creates narrative possibility spaces from example stories. WhatELSE provides three views (narrative pivot, outline, and variants) to help authors understand the narrative space and corresponding tools leveraging linguistic abstraction to control the boundaries of the narrative space. Taking innovative LLM-based narrative planning approaches, WhatELSE further unfolds the narrative space into executable game events. Through a user study (N=12) and technical evaluations, we found that WhatELSE enables authors to perceive and edit the narrative space and generates engaging interactive narratives at play-time.