The gaming folks are interested in formal and quasi-formal theories of narrative, which have been under investigation since the early 20th century in folklore and literary criticism. Story grammars went computtional in the 1970s. See, for example, Mark Riedl, “An Introduction to AI Story Generation”, in The Gradient (2021). Then there’s David Elson’s Columbia U. Disserttion, Modeling Narrative Discourse, 2012 (PDF).
Thanks for the pointers! The overviews in both sources are great. I especially like Rumelhart’s Story Grammar. Though from what I gather from Mark Riedl’s post is that the field is mostly about structure/grammar inherent to stories as objects that exist pretty much in a vacuum, and does not explicitly focus on making connections to some sort of models of agents that communicate using these stories.
Right. It’s possible that what you’re looking for doesn’t exist. Though, come to think of it, you might be interested in the work that David Hays and his students (I’m one of them) did back in the 70s. Hays was interested in stories as a vehicle for defining abstract concepts, which is quite different from autonomous stories. Here’s a paper that reviews some of that work: Abstract Patterns in Stories: From the intellectual legacy of David G. Hays.
The gaming folks are interested in formal and quasi-formal theories of narrative, which have been under investigation since the early 20th century in folklore and literary criticism. Story grammars went computtional in the 1970s. See, for example, Mark Riedl, “An Introduction to AI Story Generation”, in The Gradient (2021). Then there’s David Elson’s Columbia U. Disserttion, Modeling Narrative Discourse, 2012 (PDF).
Thanks for the pointers! The overviews in both sources are great. I especially like Rumelhart’s Story Grammar. Though from what I gather from Mark Riedl’s post is that the field is mostly about structure/grammar inherent to stories as objects that exist pretty much in a vacuum, and does not explicitly focus on making connections to some sort of models of agents that communicate using these stories.
Right. It’s possible that what you’re looking for doesn’t exist. Though, come to think of it, you might be interested in the work that David Hays and his students (I’m one of them) did back in the 70s. Hays was interested in stories as a vehicle for defining abstract concepts, which is quite different from autonomous stories. Here’s a paper that reviews some of that work: Abstract Patterns in Stories: From the intellectual legacy of David G. Hays.