Story Planning as Exploratory Creativity 1 Story Planning as Exploratory Creativity: Techniques for Expanding the Narrative Search Space Mark O. RIEDL Institute for Creative Technologies University of Southern California 13274 Fiji Way, Marina del Rey, CA 90292 USA
[email protected] R. Michael YOUNG Department of Computer Science North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC 27695 USA
[email protected] Abstract The authoring of fictional stories is considered a creative process. The purpose of most story authoring is not to invent a new style or genre of story that will be accepted by the population but to invent a single narrative that is novel enough to be tellable. Computational story generation systems are more limited than human authors in the space of narratives that can be considered because it is often the case that story generation systems are constrained to operate within a fixed representa- tion of the story world. These limitations can impact whether a story generation system is considered creative or not. In this paper, we de- scribe a story planning system, Fabulist. Fabulist however is constrained by the world model input by the system user. We present two algorithms that enable story planning systems such as Fabulist to break outside the bounds of the initial world model in order to search a larger space of narratives. Keywords Exploratory Creativity, Story Generation, Narrative Intel- ligence 2 Mark O. RIEDL and R.M. YOUNG §1 Introduction Narrative as entertainment, in the form of oral, written, or visual stories, plays a central role in our social and leisure lives.