In earlier work we introduced the idea that what makes many stories interesting is not what happens, but how characters in the story feel about what happens [Elliott & Melchior1995]. We showed how the thematic core of a story could be greatly transformed by changing the appraisals that characters make of a static sequence of external events [Elliott1992b]. In this current set of exercises we formalized this process. First we studied narratives based on real life, and analyzed them using the Affective Reasoner paradigm. Next we created large numbers of similar, albeit different, stories (hereafter referred to as story-morphs) which shared the same external plot steps, but which contained widely varied emotion responses, on the parts of the characters, to these external events. Lastly, we used Affective Reasoner display characters to present realizations of randomly chosen story-morphs for subjects, and did a preliminary analysis on the results.
Because of the large number of plausible story-morphs that can, in theory, be generated automatically from a single narrative, this mechanism has promise for use with interactive fiction, and interactive characters.
The background context in which the Affective Reasoner character agents operate is covered elsewhere and will not be discussed here, but c.f. [Elliott1992a, Elliott1997, Elliott1993, Elliott1994a, Marquis & Elliott1994, Elliott & Siegle1993, Elliott & Ortony1992, Elliott1994b]. For works on related topics see [Elliott1994a, Bates, A. Bryan Loyall, & Reilly1992, Reeves1991, Nass & Sundar1994, Nagao & Takeuchi1994, Simon1967].