Event relations in plan-based plot composition

Abstract

The process of plot composition in the context of interactive storytelling is considered under a fourfold perspective, in view of syntagmatic, paradigmatic, antithetic and meronymic relations between the constituent events. These relations are shown to be associated with the four major tropes of semiotic research. A conceptual model and set of facilities for interactive plot composition and adaptation dealing with the four relations is described. To accommodate antithetic relations, corresponding to the irony trope, our plan-based approach leaves room for the unplanned. A simple storyboarding prototype tool has been implemented to conduct experiments.

Storytelling Variants: The Case of Little Red Riding Hood

“…We shall characterize the interactions that may occur among types, also involving motifs, by way of semiotic relations, taking an approach we applied before to the conceptual modelling of both literary genres and business information systems [12,25,20]. We distinguish four kinds of semiotic relations, associated with the so-called four master tropes [6,10], whose significance has been cogently stressed by a literary theory scholar, Jonathan Culler, who regards them "as a system, indeed the system, by which the mind comes to grasp the world conceptually in language" [15, p. 72…”

Conceptual Model and System for Genre-Focused Interactive Storytelling

“…The impact on the audience very much depends on how events are combined. Furtado [6] suggests that at least four concerns are involved in plot composition: a) the plot must be formed by a coherent sequence of events; b) for each position in the sequence, several alternative choices should apply; c) non-trivial interesting sequences must permit unexpected shifts along the way; and d) one may need to go down to details to better visualize the events or, conversely, to summarize detailed event sequences. These concerns have led to the identification of four relations between pairs of events that play a basic role in a story, and to the introduction of a fourfold perspective of plot composition in the context of IS.…”

A Plot-Manipulation Algebra to Support Digital Storytelling

“…Instances of facts such as home and gender, are fixed, not being affected by any operation. Of special interest are the usercontrolled facts which, though immune to operations, could be, as suggested in [11], manipulated through arbitrary directives. In our example, loves is user controlled.…”

“…These concerns led us to identify, drawing on linguistic and semiotic work [22,7,9], four relations between events, namely syntagmatic, paradigmatic, antithetic, and meronymic relations [11]. It turns out that such relations hold as a consequence of the conventions regulating the chosen narrative genre.…”