6 ms·

TropeTwist: Trope-Based Narrative Structure Generation

64 points by paddw 3y ago

saintkaye 3y ago
Someone explain this please
- KineticLensman 3y ago
  ...Games contain tropes (story elements) ...Recognising tropes in a given game can be challenging ...Using them to generate game narratives can be challenging ...Tropetwist can generically describe the story structure of a game ...It can create a graph of a game's story and then variations of the story ...These variations can then be measured in terms of their coherence and interestingness, which in turn affect their playability Or something like that
- skulk 3y ago
  These diagrams from the PDF are cool. They show some Legend of Zelda games and model the structure of their narratives. https://imgur.com/a/zVNaYam https://imgur.com/a/zVNaYam
- ttctciyf 3y ago
  They have created a system for representing "narrative structures" as a set of connected nodes. The nodes are story elements ("tropes") like Hero, MacGuffin, etc., which they have taken from https://tvtropes.org https://tvtropes.org. The connections represent the relationships between the elements, so that their diagram 1b represents: > The HERO’s goal is to get the “Pendant of Courage” (MCG). However, the MCG derives from ENEMY and BAD, so the HERO must overcome them to achieve his goal. This is the "narrative structure" (they say) of the Eastern Palace in Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past. The CAPS words are tropes that you can look up in the paper. Having established this graph representation of narrative structure, they create a set of rules for deriving other graphs, and so other possible narrative structures, from it (a "production grammar" for graphs, if you know the term). They then use an algorithm called MAP-Elites[1] to evaluate the variations for fitness in various aspects such as "interestingness" and "coherence", with the aim of creating a system which can generate narrative structure corresponding to satisfying stories. The structures thus produced don't unambiguously define one linear sequential narrative (because there is no direct temporal sequence given, only the temporal order implied by the node-to-node relationships which are causal in nature.) "The system is ambiguous by design" they say, and later: "the generated graphs could equally describe different stories". They leave the subsequent "interpretation" or realization of the structure graphs as concrete stories to other systems (to be developed) or to human interpreters. 1: https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.04909 https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.04909
- ramses0 3y ago
  Read through the Super-Mario analysis, but refer to the all-caps table down below as you're reading. (HERO, NEO, BAD, DRAKE) They're basically analyzing "tropes" (common storytelling patterns), and doing something similar to advanced procedural dungeon/level generation: https://www.boristhebrave.com/2021/04/10/dungeon-generation-in-unexplored/#Cyclic_Dungeon_Generation https://www.boristhebrave.com/2021/04/10/dungeon-generation-... ...at least this appears to be a first cut at defining a vocabulary for the storytelling aspect of the problem. They refer also to other "Key + Door == Progress" aspects of procedural content generation (ie: make a zone, place a [locked] door to another zone, place a key within the original zone and then recurse). All told, a very interesting area to explore.
altairprime 3y ago
I’m very surprised that this paper wasn’t released by Netflix. It feels like the sort of thing a media company would publish, in the same vein as e.g. Disney/Pixar’s hair and water papers.
- lvncelot 3y ago
  I have the feeling that Pixar's Hair/Water/Snow VFX techniques are even more impressive once you've glanced behind the curtain and understood how they work, and that Netflix's narrative techniques are very much less so.
dporter 3y ago
Community seasons 1-3 were effectively “trope driven development.”
- babyshake 3y ago
  Rick and Morty, also from Dan Harmon, frequently comments on the tropes it is utilizing.
  - jhbadger 3y ago
    That's a clever way of having your cake and eating it too -- use tired old tropes but have the characters comment that they know they're tired old tropes.
    - groovy2shoes 3y ago
      Itself an instance of hanging the lampshade. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging
      - wasimanitoba 3y ago
        every concept will eventually have been expressed or referenced somewhere, so we have a system where every single possible scenario becomes a "trope" with a tidy label. what - aside from gibberish or nonsense - isn't a trope at that point?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dekhn 3y ago
Theory: all modern scripts are in fact simply weighted sums of various trope basis functions. My least favorite is "we have to save the team member, risking our ability to save the planet".
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- flanbiscuit 3y ago
  One trope I often notice in some big-budget films is when the government (or some entity) needs a scientist/specialist's help to save the planet and they introduce this person by walking into the middle of a lecture they are giving. Sometimes that person is seen as a 'quack' at this lecture, sometimes people are actually listening. Gov't approaches said person after lecture ... cut to person walking into secret base type thing Perfect example: Stargate 1994 - when we meet James Spader - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq1RPu2aaU4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq1RPu2aaU4 I know there are more examples of this, I notice it all the time. edit: So James Spader's character is an example of "The Worm Guy", but I wonder if there's a name for the scene itself, something like "fetch the scientist at a lecture" https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWormGuy https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWormGuy
  - dekhn 3y ago
    Basically a weighted sum of https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheProfessor https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheProfessor https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TeenGenius https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TeenGenius https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MadScientist https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MadScientist See also: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LectureAsExposition https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LectureAsExposit...
    - flanbiscuit 3y ago
      Ah yes "Lecture as Exposition" is probably what I'm looking for. That, and this one: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWormGuy https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWormGuy
Sil_E_Goose 3y ago
This paper immediately brings to mind Kurt Vonnegut on the the "shapes of stories": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ

64 points by paddw 3y ago

saintkaye 3y ago

Someone explain this please

KineticLensman 3y ago
...Games contain tropes (story elements) ...Recognising tropes in a given game can be challenging ...Using them to generate game narratives can be challenging ...Tropetwist can generically describe the story structure of a game ...It can create a graph of a game's story and then variations of the story ...These variations can then be measured in terms of their coherence and interestingness, which in turn affect their playability Or something like that
skulk 3y ago
These diagrams from the PDF are cool. They show some Legend of Zelda games and model the structure of their narratives. https://imgur.com/a/zVNaYam https://imgur.com/a/zVNaYam
ttctciyf 3y ago
They have created a system for representing "narrative structures" as a set of connected nodes. The nodes are story elements ("tropes") like Hero, MacGuffin, etc., which they have taken from https://tvtropes.org https://tvtropes.org. The connections represent the relationships between the elements, so that their diagram 1b represents: > The HERO’s goal is to get the “Pendant of Courage” (MCG). However, the MCG derives from ENEMY and BAD, so the HERO must overcome them to achieve his goal. This is the "narrative structure" (they say) of the Eastern Palace in Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past. The CAPS words are tropes that you can look up in the paper. Having established this graph representation of narrative structure, they create a set of rules for deriving other graphs, and so other possible narrative structures, from it (a "production grammar" for graphs, if you know the term). They then use an algorithm called MAP-Elites[1] to evaluate the variations for fitness in various aspects such as "interestingness" and "coherence", with the aim of creating a system which can generate narrative structure corresponding to satisfying stories. The structures thus produced don't unambiguously define one linear sequential narrative (because there is no direct temporal sequence given, only the temporal order implied by the node-to-node relationships which are causal in nature.) "The system is ambiguous by design" they say, and later: "the generated graphs could equally describe different stories". They leave the subsequent "interpretation" or realization of the structure graphs as concrete stories to other systems (to be developed) or to human interpreters. 1: https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.04909 https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.04909
ramses0 3y ago
Read through the Super-Mario analysis, but refer to the all-caps table down below as you're reading. (HERO, NEO, BAD, DRAKE) They're basically analyzing "tropes" (common storytelling patterns), and doing something similar to advanced procedural dungeon/level generation: https://www.boristhebrave.com/2021/04/10/dungeon-generation-in-unexplored/#Cyclic_Dungeon_Generation https://www.boristhebrave.com/2021/04/10/dungeon-generation-... ...at least this appears to be a first cut at defining a vocabulary for the storytelling aspect of the problem. They refer also to other "Key + Door == Progress" aspects of procedural content generation (ie: make a zone, place a [locked] door to another zone, place a key within the original zone and then recurse). All told, a very interesting area to explore.

altairprime 3y ago

I’m very surprised that this paper wasn’t released by Netflix. It feels like the sort of thing a media company would publish, in the same vein as e.g. Disney/Pixar’s hair and water papers.

lvncelot 3y ago
I have the feeling that Pixar's Hair/Water/Snow VFX techniques are even more impressive once you've glanced behind the curtain and understood how they work, and that Netflix's narrative techniques are very much less so.

dporter 3y ago

Community seasons 1-3 were effectively “trope driven development.”

babyshake 3y ago
Rick and Morty, also from Dan Harmon, frequently comments on the tropes it is utilizing.
- jhbadger 3y ago
  That's a clever way of having your cake and eating it too -- use tired old tropes but have the characters comment that they know they're tired old tropes.
  - groovy2shoes 3y ago
    Itself an instance of hanging the lampshade. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging
    - wasimanitoba 3y ago
      every concept will eventually have been expressed or referenced somewhere, so we have a system where every single possible scenario becomes a "trope" with a tidy label. what - aside from gibberish or nonsense - isn't a trope at that point?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dekhn 3y ago

Theory: all modern scripts are in fact simply weighted sums of various trope basis functions. My least favorite is "we have to save the team member, risking our ability to save the planet".

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
flanbiscuit 3y ago
One trope I often notice in some big-budget films is when the government (or some entity) needs a scientist/specialist's help to save the planet and they introduce this person by walking into the middle of a lecture they are giving. Sometimes that person is seen as a 'quack' at this lecture, sometimes people are actually listening. Gov't approaches said person after lecture ... cut to person walking into secret base type thing Perfect example: Stargate 1994 - when we meet James Spader - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq1RPu2aaU4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq1RPu2aaU4 I know there are more examples of this, I notice it all the time. edit: So James Spader's character is an example of "The Worm Guy", but I wonder if there's a name for the scene itself, something like "fetch the scientist at a lecture" https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWormGuy https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWormGuy
- dekhn 3y ago
  Basically a weighted sum of https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheProfessor https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheProfessor https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TeenGenius https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TeenGenius https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MadScientist https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MadScientist See also: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LectureAsExposition https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LectureAsExposit...
  - flanbiscuit 3y ago
    Ah yes "Lecture as Exposition" is probably what I'm looking for. That, and this one: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWormGuy https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWormGuy

Sil_E_Goose 3y ago

This paper immediately brings to mind Kurt Vonnegut on the the "shapes of stories": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ