The Simpsons did it: Exploring the film trope space and its large scale structure

Abstract

Creating a story is a challenging task due to the the complex relations between the parts that make it up, which is why many new stories are built on those cohesive elements or patterns, called tropes that have been shown to work in the past. A trope is a recurring storytelling device or pattern, or sometimes a meta-element, used by the authors to express ideas that the audience can recognize or relate to, such as the Hero’s Journey. Discovering tropes and how they cluster in popular works and doing it at scale to generate new plots may benefit writers; in this paper, we analyze them and use a principled procedure to identify trope combinations, or communities, that could possible be successful. The degree of development of these different communities can help us identify areas that are under-developed and, thus, susceptible to such a type of development. To detect these communities, with their associated degree of development and interest, we propose a methodology based on scientometric and complex network analysis techniques. As a secondary objective, we will obtain a general perspective in the trope and films network: the tropesphere. We have used a dataset of 10,766 movies and 25,776 tropes associated with them, together with rating, genres and popularity. Our analysis has shown that not only there are different trope communities associated with specific genres, and that there are significant differences between the rating and popularity of these communities but also there are differences on the level of development between them: emerging/declining, specific, transversal or motor.

TropeTwist: Trope-based Narrative Structure Generation

“…One typical approach for the generation of content and stories is the use of patterns representing different elements such as level design patterns [9], [30], quest patterns and common quests in games [25], [31]- [33], or identifying fundamental units and assembling them based on various pre-conditions [34], [35]. A particular type of pattern is tropes, which are concepts that are recurrently used in transmedia storytelling [14], [15]. Horswill [36] focused on constructing an expressive language that could encode plot tropes as story fragments, composing a database of fragments combined sequentially with a planner.…”

“…In storytelling, a trope [14] is a convention or figure of speech that the storyteller assumes to be easily recognizable by the audience. TV tropes is an online wiki and repository that compiles, curates, and describes several thousand tropes in many sorts of media [15].…”

“…D int is calculated as the weighted sum (w 0 = 0.4, w 1 = 0.2, w 2 = 0.4) of the normalized cumulative quality of APDs, PPs, and PTs within an NG (eq. 14).…”

“…This paper presents TropeTwist, a system that uses Tropes [13], [14] extracted from TvTropes [15], [16] as patterns, and fundamental unit, which when combined can compose structures further representing other composed tropes. Common narrative structures can be identified and defined using TropeTwist, defining generic aspects of a story, leading to the identification of events, roles, and narrative elements, and a novel way to create and generate narratives.…”

The perception of palaeontology in commercial off-the-shelf video games and an assessment of their potential as educational tools

“…Within the context of this paper, a "trope" is a recurring theme or motif that occurs across video games. Although many tropes are considered clichés, they are still commonly used throughout popular entertainment as recognisable touchstones to provide familiarity to the audience (see García-Sánchez, 2021). Many tropes seen in COTS video games are shared across the entertainment industry (especially in television and film); however, due to the interactive medium of video games, some tropes are unique to the format.…”