TropeTwist: Trope-based Narrative Structure Generation

Games are complex, multi-faceted systems that share common elements This paper presents TropeTwist, a preliminar system that uses and underlying narratives, such as the conflict between a Tropes [21, 54] extracted from TvTropes [26, 46] as patterns and fundamental hero and a big bad enemy or pursuing a goal that requires overcoming units, which when combined can compose structures further challenges. However, identifying and describing these elements representing other composed tropes. Common narrative structures together is non-trivial as they might differ in certain properties can be identified and defined using TropeTwist. TropeTwist and how players might encounter the narratives. Likewise, generating can define generic aspects of a story, leading to the identification of narratives also pose difficulties when encoding, interpreting, events, roles, and narrative elements, as well as a novel way to form and evaluating them. To address this, we present TropeTwist, a narratives. As a proof-of-concept, we built, analyzed, and described trope-based system that can describe narrative structures in games structurally three game examples shown in figure 1, top row. in a more abstract and generic level, allowing the definition of We propose graph grammars as indirect encoding of narrative games' narrative structures and their generation using interconnected graphs and the use of the Multi-dimensional Archive of Phenotypic tropes, called narrative graphs. To demonstrate the system, Elites (MAP-Elites) [40] to generate novel variations (shown we represent the narrative structure of three different games. in figure 1, bottom row) using the proof-of-concept examples as We use MAP-Elites to generate and evaluate novel quality-diverse roots. Simultaneously, we propose metrics to evaluate the resulting narrative graphs encoded as graph grammars, using these three narrative graphs' coherence, cohesion, and interestingness.