Interactive Story Generation for Writers: Lessons Learned from the Wide Ruled Authoring Tool

The authoring of interactive, generative narrative is a task that typically requires an extensive multi-disciplinary background in computational and narrative theory. Wide Ruled is an authoring tool that aims to address this problem by providing a friendly, intuitive, story-centric interface to an author-goal driven textbased story planner. Over the past two years, this system has been used repeatedly by technical and non-technical users in multiple classroom settings, and evolved into a widely used and publically available story authoring system. In this work, we describe the successes and failures of Wide Ruled, and how it provides a critical evolutionary step in developing a truly usable, writerfriendly, and practical interactive story authoring environment.