Evaluating the Use of Action Templates to Create Suspense in Narrative Planning

Abstract

The IRIS story generation system is a narrative planner that is designed to create suspenseful stories at the story-action level. It uses a set of action templates that are injected into the planning process to create suspense around a given goal. The action templates were evaluated independent of the rest of the IRIS system against a series of other techniques designed to create suspense. Results show that it is possible to use these set of action templates to create localized moments of suspense in a story at the story-action level without the need for discourse-level suspense.