Abstract
Story sifting techniques, which aim to excavate potentially compelling microstories from vast chronicles of storyworld events, present a promising solution to the challenges of interactive emergent narrative. However, current sifting techniques (which rely on large numbers of hand-specified story sifting patterns to identify compelling microstories) are limited by their inability to determine which of many sifting pattern matches are likely to be the most interesting to a human interactor. We present a higher-level story sifting heuristic that addresses this problem by identifying sifting pattern matches that are especially unlikely from a statistical perspective, and illustrate how this heuristic leads to the surfacing of more interesting microstories.
M. Dickinson—Independent
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Max Kreminski conducted part of this research while in residence at Stochastic Labs.
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Kreminski, M., Dickinson, M., Wardrip-Fruin, N., Mateas, M. (2022). Select the Unexpected: A Statistical Heuristic for Story Sifting. In: Vosmeer, M., Holloway-Attaway, L. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13762. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22298-6_18
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