STORY2GAME: Generating (Almost) Everything in an Interactive Fiction Game

TL;DR

STORY2GAME leverages large language models to automatically generate interactive fiction games, including story, world, and action code, enabling open-ended, player-driven gameplay grounded in a dynamically evolving game state.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel method for end-to-end generation of interactive fiction games using LLMs, including dynamic action creation and game state management.

Findings

High success rate in generating playable game code

Effective dynamic action generation accommodating player input

Enables open-ended, grounded interactive storytelling

Abstract

We introduce STORY2GAME, a novel approach to using Large Language Models to generate text-based interactive fiction games that starts by generating a story, populates the world, and builds the code for actions in a game engine that enables the story to play out interactively. Whereas a given set of hard-coded actions can artificially constrain story generation, the ability to generate actions means the story generation process can be more open-ended but still allow for experiences that are grounded in a game state. The key to successful action generation is to use LLM-generated preconditions and effects of actions in the stories as guides for what aspects of the game state must be tracked and changed by the game engine when a player performs an action. We also introduce a technique for dynamically generating new actions to accommodate the player's desire to perform actions that they think of that are not part of the story. Dynamic action generation may require on-the-fly updates to the game engine's state representation and revision of previously generated actions. We evaluate the success rate of action code generation with respect to whether a player can interactively play through the entire generated story.