The automatic generation of narrative plot is extremely difficult. Approaches to this have illustrated that, in general, the managing of constraints is burdensome (c.f. the work of Janet Murray at MIT, and Peter Weyhrauch at CMU). Guaranteeing a consistent, plausible, plot can easily degenerate into the classic AI search problem. Our approach to this problem is entirely different, wherein the external plot steps remain constant, and the overall narrative sequence in the external world is static, but where the meaning of the unfolding scenarios for the participating characters varies greatly. In addition, narrative explanations, such as might be provided by a narrator in a play, also vary greatly with the different interpretations.
In our current work we are primarily interested in presenting interesting, novel, scenarios that at least maintain believability. That there are other aspects that might be useful down the road, such as selecting particular story-morphs to promote a desired point of view, and integrating this work with other story-generation technologies, goes without saying. We do not discuss such applications in this paper.