Network Traversal as an Aid to Plot Analysis and Composition

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Narrative and storytelling have become central issues in the new generation of video games. In this paper, we propose a modelling strategy to combine a chosen repertoire of story variants of the same narrative pattern into a network structure. We follow a Computational Narratology orientation and aim at two complementary objectives: (1) the analysis of narrative sub-genres extracted from literary genres; and (2) the interactive composition of new narratives by non-professional writers. We found convenient to partition the network according to the episodes of the narrative, thus allowing to generate summary networks, which are useful to analyse and identify narrative patterns. We developed a prototype tool and applied it to a set of four radically distinct variants of the popular Little Red Riding Hood folktale. The proposed method is of much interest towards the composition of stories in Interactive Storytelling systems, as well as an authoring asset for the construction of game narratives.