Dear Leader’s Happy Story Time: A Party Game Based on Automated Story Generation

Abstract

Players in Dear Leader’s Happy Story Time are placed in the role of contestants in a reality TV show where they are forced to audition for roles in the upcoming film of the host, a deranged billionaire who has inexplicably been elected president.  The stories are produced by a story generator that combines stock plots and characters to produce kitsch story outlines.  The players then collaborate to improvise a camp performance of the outline.  The game design provides a context for experimenting with automatic story generation within a narrative game, as well as an opportunity for experimenting with knowledge representation schemes for expressing the tropes of popular narrative.  The story generator uses a higher-order logic for describing tropes, and an HTN planning algorithm based on Nau et al.’s SHOP.