6 ms·

The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes

108 points by ehudla 10y ago

6stringmerc 10y ago
Interesting. Also reminds me of the Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant screenwriting guide (excellent) which posits there is one - only one - blockbuster movie format, and it's most easily seen in Die Hard. Introduce likeable character - get them stuck in trouble - get them unstuck.
ominous 10y ago
As expected, given the title, this[0] lecture by Vonnegut is mentioned in the article. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ
- monk_e_boy 10y ago
  Do you have any more of these? Since reading Dan Harmons story structure I have enjoyed American television a lot more. http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_Basic_Shit http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_...
  - proksoup 10y ago
    That linked series specifically and Dan Harmon's approach there is my favorite approach to these topics. I wanted to also share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth Joseph Campbell's very similar work that I think Dan gives credit to somewhere in that 101 series.
  - mcguire 10y ago
    Any interest in: http://www.matthewjockers.net/2015/02/02/syuzhet/ http://www.matthewjockers.net/2015/02/02/syuzhet/
fovc 10y ago
Read this quickly, but my immediate thought when I saw the PCA result vectors was that they resembled the Fourier basis. Given a relatively slow-moving set of signals (which I think these are, given the 10,000 word sliding window), wouldn't you expect the PCA to give you exactly this? In other words, what is the null hypothesis here and is it rejected?
- ggggtez 10y ago
  I think the idea is, of you compare short fiction to the Harry Potter graph, most stories have simple emotional arcs, rather than complicated back and forth. Though, if you limit the word length allowed... I wonder how they deal with "it was the best of times. it was the worst of times"...
  - schoen 10y ago
    You could mess up pretty easily at a local level with missed negations. For example, John Lennon's song "Imagine" invites people to envision a world without various things; if you assign negative sentiment to those things, you might infer that the song overall had very negative affect. Or religious prophecies about a future era in which people wouldn't have to suffer from various afflictions.
    - mcguire 10y ago
      Jockers, in one of his posts, argues that it's less of a problem than you might think because it's a local problem that just adds noise to the data. Plus, his different sentiment analysis techniques seem to more-or-less agree. On the other hand, he tells of showing a graph to his son, of a book his son had read, and being told the graph was completely wrong for part of the book---it turns out that part of the book was written from the antagonist's viewpoint and the "emotional valence" was apparently inverted. See one of the follow-ups to http://www.matthewjockers.net/2015/02/02/syuzhet/ http://www.matthewjockers.net/2015/02/02/syuzhet/.
      - schoen 10y ago
klue07 10y ago
Am I missing something? The result for the 6 main emotional arcs basically enumerates all the possible permutations of rise and fall of length 1, 2, and 3 which seems pretty obvious. Length 1: rise, fall Length 2: rise-fall, fall-rise Length 3: rise-fall-rise, fall-rise-fall (must be interchanging because for example fall-fall-rise would probably just be considered fall-rise)
- ggggtez 10y ago
  I agree... the figures were all just permutations of rise and fall. When all you have is one measure (average word happiness) I don't really see what else you can draw. I guess the main contribution is that many stories have relatively simple rise-fall curves, and don't often change their emotional state more than 3 times.
- sago 10y ago
  I thought the same, and as per fovc's comment, below, I think what their statistical analysis did was basically a coarse fourier transform. In the Harry Potter example you can see that a higher frequency is very significant. But the exact frequency is probably rather arbitrary from book to book, whether there are ten peaks or five, say. So I'd imagine, over lots of texts, any particular higher frequencies is less significant, leaving the lowest modes to dominate, as you point out. So overall, a rather uninspiring result, I felt. Though if we're both missing something, it would be good to know!
  - Pyramus 10y ago
    Very uninspiring indeed! Let me know if you are interested in investigating this properly.
  - hbosch 10y ago
    A note some HNers might find tangentially interesting: in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Fourier transforms are a bedrock concept for the titular entertainment, which is considered such a perfect piece of media that it is lethally addictive. How nice it was to see this post about "shapes of narrative" be compared to Fourier transforms for a IJ nerd!
mynegation 10y ago
In the article they review several story plot taxonomies. Interesting that they do not include the one according to Borges that he describes in "Four cycles": (1) city sieged and defended (2) story of return (3) search (of treasure) (4) sacrifice of a god. Probably not the most complete taxonomy, but likely most dramatic one.
- glup 10y ago
  (5) story plots that belong to the Emperor
  - mcguire 10y ago
    (6) those that tremble as if mad?
joeld42 10y ago
This seemed interesting because I am working on visual story structure diagramming software (looking for beta users btw), but I wasn't very impressed with their results. Basically the only interesting conclusion I could see was "stories need emotional movement", e.g. there were no examples where things were happy or sad and continued at the same level throughout the events of the story. I couldn't tell if this could even identify the stories shape from their sentiment graph -- e.g. if you fed it "Cinderella" could it identify the "Rags to Riches" plot that they identify? It would be neat to see if you could extract and identify plot points -- deaths, fights, breakups, betrayals, (maybe with some of those newfangled neural network thinggies) and look for patterns there. Still, it's encouraging to see people working on this. Maybe the results seem basic because this field is still unstudied. I expect software tools for storytelling to change a lot in the coming years with all the exciting new work in natural language processing and machine learning.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
stcredzero 10y ago
I wonder if there is something like this applicable to pacing in video games? I wonder if video games could be adaptively paced based on user input?
- Retra 10y ago
  Video games are already adaptively paced based on user input.
- joeld42 10y ago
  Valve's "Left 4 Dead" had a system like this called the "AI director" that was pretty well-received. See the part about "Generate Dramatic Game Pacing" http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2009/ai_systems_of_l4d_mike_booth.pdf http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2009/ai_systems_of...
tuhins 10y ago
Good stuff! Great to see people working on this.
codezero 10y ago
This is awfully fun, I never saw Rom-coms the same after I noticed the trend of get together, break up, then get back together again (rise, fall, raise) in this paper.
mcguire 10y ago
Last year, Matthew Jockers, an English professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, had a series of blog posts on the subject[1]---I haven't heard of any actual publications from the work---that was pretty interesting. I haven't read this paper yet (this post is falling off HN too fast!) but his technique was to use sentence-level sentiment analysis to get a time-varying signal, rub a Fourier transform against it, cut off all but the lowest frequencies, and returned it to the time domain to draw pretty pictures. He, too, came up with six basic arcs, I think, probably for the same reason that klue07 mentions but using statistics against a bunch of books. There was a certain amount of press coverage at the time. The R package, syuzhet, is available on github[2]. Also, you can look at my notes on playing wiht syuzhet and R[3]. [1] Starting with http://www.matthewjockers.net/2015/02/02/syuzhet/ http://www.matthewjockers.net/2015/02/02/syuzhet/ [2] https://github.com/mjockers/syuzhet https://github.com/mjockers/syuzhet [3] http://maniagnosis.crsr.net/2015/08/exploring-syuzhet.html http://maniagnosis.crsr.net/2015/08/exploring-syuzhet.html http://maniagnosis.crsr.net/2015/08/syuzhet-prodding-frequency-domain.html http://maniagnosis.crsr.net/2015/08/syuzhet-prodding-frequen...

108 points by ehudla 10y ago

Interesting. Also reminds me of the Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant screenwriting guide (excellent) which posits there is one - only one - blockbuster movie format, and it's most easily seen in Die Hard. Introduce likeable character - get them stuck in trouble - get them unstuck.

ominous 10y ago

As expected, given the title, this[0] lecture by Vonnegut is mentioned in the article. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ

monk_e_boy 10y ago
Do you have any more of these? Since reading Dan Harmons story structure I have enjoyed American television a lot more. http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_Basic_Shit http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_...
- proksoup 10y ago
  That linked series specifically and Dan Harmon's approach there is my favorite approach to these topics. I wanted to also share https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth Joseph Campbell's very similar work that I think Dan gives credit to somewhere in that 101 series.
- mcguire 10y ago
  Any interest in: http://www.matthewjockers.net/2015/02/02/syuzhet/ http://www.matthewjockers.net/2015/02/02/syuzhet/

fovc 10y ago

Read this quickly, but my immediate thought when I saw the PCA result vectors was that they resembled the Fourier basis. Given a relatively slow-moving set of signals (which I think these are, given the 10,000 word sliding window), wouldn't you expect the PCA to give you exactly this? In other words, what is the null hypothesis here and is it rejected?

ggggtez 10y ago
I think the idea is, of you compare short fiction to the Harry Potter graph, most stories have simple emotional arcs, rather than complicated back and forth. Though, if you limit the word length allowed... I wonder how they deal with "it was the best of times. it was the worst of times"...
- schoen 10y ago
  You could mess up pretty easily at a local level with missed negations. For example, John Lennon's song "Imagine" invites people to envision a world without various things; if you assign negative sentiment to those things, you might infer that the song overall had very negative affect. Or religious prophecies about a future era in which people wouldn't have to suffer from various afflictions.
  - mcguire 10y ago
    Jockers, in one of his posts, argues that it's less of a problem than you might think because it's a local problem that just adds noise to the data. Plus, his different sentiment analysis techniques seem to more-or-less agree. On the other hand, he tells of showing a graph to his son, of a book his son had read, and being told the graph was completely wrong for part of the book---it turns out that part of the book was written from the antagonist's viewpoint and the "emotional valence" was apparently inverted. See one of the follow-ups to http://www.matthewjockers.net/2015/02/02/syuzhet/ http://www.matthewjockers.net/2015/02/02/syuzhet/.
    - schoen 10y ago

klue07 10y ago

Am I missing something? The result for the 6 main emotional arcs basically enumerates all the possible permutations of rise and fall of length 1, 2, and 3 which seems pretty obvious. Length 1: rise, fall Length 2: rise-fall, fall-rise Length 3: rise-fall-rise, fall-rise-fall (must be interchanging because for example fall-fall-rise would probably just be considered fall-rise)

ggggtez 10y ago
I agree... the figures were all just permutations of rise and fall. When all you have is one measure (average word happiness) I don't really see what else you can draw. I guess the main contribution is that many stories have relatively simple rise-fall curves, and don't often change their emotional state more than 3 times.
sago 10y ago
I thought the same, and as per fovc's comment, below, I think what their statistical analysis did was basically a coarse fourier transform. In the Harry Potter example you can see that a higher frequency is very significant. But the exact frequency is probably rather arbitrary from book to book, whether there are ten peaks or five, say. So I'd imagine, over lots of texts, any particular higher frequencies is less significant, leaving the lowest modes to dominate, as you point out. So overall, a rather uninspiring result, I felt. Though if we're both missing something, it would be good to know!
- Pyramus 10y ago
  Very uninspiring indeed! Let me know if you are interested in investigating this properly.
- hbosch 10y ago
  A note some HNers might find tangentially interesting: in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Fourier transforms are a bedrock concept for the titular entertainment, which is considered such a perfect piece of media that it is lethally addictive. How nice it was to see this post about "shapes of narrative" be compared to Fourier transforms for a IJ nerd!

mynegation 10y ago

In the article they review several story plot taxonomies. Interesting that they do not include the one according to Borges that he describes in "Four cycles": (1) city sieged and defended (2) story of return (3) search (of treasure) (4) sacrifice of a god. Probably not the most complete taxonomy, but likely most dramatic one.

glup 10y ago
(5) story plots that belong to the Emperor
- mcguire 10y ago
  (6) those that tremble as if mad?

joeld42 10y ago

This seemed interesting because I am working on visual story structure diagramming software (looking for beta users btw), but I wasn't very impressed with their results. Basically the only interesting conclusion I could see was "stories need emotional movement", e.g. there were no examples where things were happy or sad and continued at the same level throughout the events of the story. I couldn't tell if this could even identify the stories shape from their sentiment graph -- e.g. if you fed it "Cinderella" could it identify the "Rags to Riches" plot that they identify? It would be neat to see if you could extract and identify plot points -- deaths, fights, breakups, betrayals, (maybe with some of those newfangled neural network thinggies) and look for patterns there. Still, it's encouraging to see people working on this. Maybe the results seem basic because this field is still unstudied. I expect software tools for storytelling to change a lot in the coming years with all the exciting new work in natural language processing and machine learning.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

stcredzero 10y ago

I wonder if there is something like this applicable to pacing in video games? I wonder if video games could be adaptively paced based on user input?

Retra 10y ago
Video games are already adaptively paced based on user input.
joeld42 10y ago
Valve's "Left 4 Dead" had a system like this called the "AI director" that was pretty well-received. See the part about "Generate Dramatic Game Pacing" http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2009/ai_systems_of_l4d_mike_booth.pdf http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2009/ai_systems_of...

tuhins 10y ago

Good stuff! Great to see people working on this.

codezero 10y ago

This is awfully fun, I never saw Rom-coms the same after I noticed the trend of get together, break up, then get back together again (rise, fall, raise) in this paper.

mcguire 10y ago

Last year, Matthew Jockers, an English professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, had a series of blog posts on the subject[1]---I haven't heard of any actual publications from the work---that was pretty interesting. I haven't read this paper yet (this post is falling off HN too fast!) but his technique was to use sentence-level sentiment analysis to get a time-varying signal, rub a Fourier transform against it, cut off all but the lowest frequencies, and returned it to the time domain to draw pretty pictures. He, too, came up with six basic arcs, I think, probably for the same reason that klue07 mentions but using statistics against a bunch of books. There was a certain amount of press coverage at the time. The R package, syuzhet, is available on github[2]. Also, you can look at my notes on playing wiht syuzhet and R[3]. [1] Starting with http://www.matthewjockers.net/2015/02/02/syuzhet/ http://www.matthewjockers.net/2015/02/02/syuzhet/ [2] https://github.com/mjockers/syuzhet https://github.com/mjockers/syuzhet [3] http://maniagnosis.crsr.net/2015/08/exploring-syuzhet.html http://maniagnosis.crsr.net/2015/08/exploring-syuzhet.html http://maniagnosis.crsr.net/2015/08/syuzhet-prodding-frequency-domain.html http://maniagnosis.crsr.net/2015/08/syuzhet-prodding-frequen...