DendryScope: Narrative Designer Support via Symbolic Analysis

Abstract

Quality-based narratives (QBN) are hypertexts with extensive implicit linked structure. The observation of one passage can have non-obvious long-range implications for the reachability of other passages, which poses an authoring challenge. To help narrative designers address this issue, we produced an interface which visually summarizes all possible playtraces. Our interface leverages answer set programming to produce a query language over possible playtraces, allowing narrative designers to drill down to interesting scenarios. We introduce this interface through the DendryScope tool, which accepts most QBNs written in the Dendry language. We evaluated DendryScope by interviewing four narrative designers as they used the tool to explore Bee, a notable QBN written by Emily Short.