WHAT-IF: Exploring Branching Narratives by Meta-Prompting Large Language Models

WHAT-IF--Writing a Hero's Alternate Timeline through Interactive Fiction--is a system that uses zero-shot meta-prompting to create branching narratives from a prewritten story. Played as an interactive fiction (IF) game, WHAT-IF lets the player choose between decisions that the large language model (LLM) GPT-4 generates as possible branches in the story. Starting with an existing linear plot as input, a branch is created at each key decision taken by the main character. By meta-prompting the LLM to consider the major plot points from the story, the system produces coherent and well-structured alternate storylines. WHAT-IF stores the branching plot tree in a graph which helps it to both keep track of the story for prompting and maintain the structure for the final IF system. Figure 1: The WHAT-IF user interface, filled with the A video demo of our system can be found here: main character, title, and the plot of the TV show WandaVision https://youtu.be/8vBqjqtupcc.