Vignette-Based Story Planning: Creativity Through Exploration and Retrieval

Storytelling is a pervasive part of our daily lives and culture that is being applied to computational systems for entertainment, education, and training. Because of the prevalence of story in non-interactive media such as books and movies, as well as interactive media such as computer games, automated generation of narrative content is an essential component of making computers creative. We describe artificial intelligence planning as a model of narrative creation and then detail how the retrieval and reuse of vignettes can facilitate the creation of narratives within the planning framework. Vignettes are fragments of story that exemplify certain familiar narrative situations. We show how this new approach to story generation is capable of exploring a larger space of creative solutions and can create more valuable stories.