TropeTwist: Trope-Based Narrative Structure Generation

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

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

It's not even "all modern scripts", it's just "all scripts":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots

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.

...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

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

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. 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

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-...

...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.

Rick and Morty, also from Dan Harmon, frequently comments on the tropes it is utilizing.