A Morphological Approach to Interactive Storytelling

Few attempts have yet been made to implement a story engine for guiding interactive drama. Most of them rely on the computer's ability to generate the story in full detail.By focusing on story guidance at the level of morphological functions defined by Russian formalist Vladimir Propp, we take a different approach. We do not attempt toprovide a model for generating stories in detail. Instead we expect human authors to create spe-cific interactive scenarios for each function in advance. Our primaryconcerns are high-level guidance of plot as well as finding the best compromise between author input and machine generation. By providing access to the story modelitself, we allow authors to control the story at all levels of detail. Our first prototype features a wide variety of plots being generated from a limited number of scenes.