Curveship's automatic narrative style

Abstract

Curveship, a Python framework for developing interactive fiction (IF) with narrative style, is described. The system simulates a world with locations, characters, and objects, providing the typical facilities of an IF development system. To these it adds the ability to generate text and to change the telling of events and description of items using high-level narrative parameters, so that, for instance, different actors can be focalized and events can be told out of order. By assigning a character to be narrator or moving the narrator in time, the system can determine grammatical specifics and render the text in a new narrative style. Curveship offers those interested in narrative systems a way to experiment with changes in the narrative discourse; for interactive fiction authors and those who wish to use of the system as a component of their own, it is a way to create powerful new types of narrative experiences. The templates used for language generation in Curveship, the string-with-slots representation, shows that there is a compromise between highly flexible but extremely difficult-to-author abstract syntax representations and simple strings, which are easy to write but extremely inflexible. The development of the system has suggested ways to refine narrative theory, offering new understandings of how narrative distance can be understood as being composed of lower-level changes in narrative and how the order of events is better represented as an ordered tree than a simple sequence.

Generating Game Narratives with Focalization and Flashbacks

“…All of the research mentioned above either deals with story planning, or with presentation of the story using audio and video or 3D animation. One of few systems handling focalization and flashbacks in written narratives is Curveship (Montfort 2007;2011), a framework for generating interactive fiction using different narrative styles. Curveship supports focalization by different actors and telling events in non-chronological order, including the use of flashbacks.…”

Merits of a Temporal Modal Logic for Narrative Discourse Generation

“…a retelling of the story from the point of view of a particular character. Montfort describes how his interactive fiction system uses focalization to e.g., inform the player when their character refuses to perform a particular action versus when other characters do so (Montfort 2011). Jhala and Young (2010) use stories represented as POCL plans as input to a camera planning system called Darshak to generate movie output for the story.…”

Physiologically Driven Storytelling: Concept and Software Tool

“…More recently, Twine [64] proposed a web-based graphical programming interface to write interactive fiction. Moreover, research in interactive fiction and natural language processing resulted in projects where a whole text could evolve based on the user's input, as in [42]. Yet, such complex environments are difficult to conceive due to the important number of rules that must be programmed.…”