[HN Gopher] TropeTwist: Trope-Based Narrative Structure Generation
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TropeTwist: Trope-Based Narrative Structure Generation
Author : paddw
Score : 48 points
Date : 2023-06-15 13:51 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| dekhn wrote:
| Theory: all modern scripts are in fact simply weighted sums of
| various trope basis functions.
|
| My least favorite is "we have to save the team member, risking
| our ability to save the planet".
| keville wrote:
| It's not even "all modern scripts", it's just "all scripts":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots
| [deleted]
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| One trope I often notice in some big-budget films is when the
| government (or some entity) needs a scientist/specialist's help
| to save the planet and they introduce this person by walking
| into the middle of a lecture they are giving. Sometimes that
| person is seen as a 'quack' at this lecture, sometimes people
| are actually listening. Gov't approaches said person after
| lecture ... cut to person walking into secret base type thing
|
| Perfect example: Stargate 1994 - when we meet James Spader -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq1RPu2aaU4
|
| I know there are more examples of this, I notice it all the
| time.
|
| edit:
|
| So James Spader's character is an example of "The Worm Guy",
| but I wonder if there's a name for the scene itself, something
| like "fetch the scientist at a lecture"
|
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWormGuy
| dekhn wrote:
| Basically a weighted sum of
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheProfessor
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TeenGenius
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MadScientist
|
| See also: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Lecture
| AsExposit...
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| Ah yes "Lecture as Exposition" is probably what I'm looking
| for.
|
| That, and this one:
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWormGuy
| dekhn wrote:
| Amusingly, the trope is both validated, and somewhat
| modified in the original Indiana Jones movie;
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR7Kh77aNnU and the next
| scene, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT3m4LXq3b4
|
| (and of course, that film established many modern tropes,
| such as https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Secre
| tGovernment... top men. top.... men.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| 1981 - Raiders of the Lost Ark
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR7Kh77aNnU
|
| because who doesn't want to be Harrison Ford
| altairprime wrote:
| I'm very surprised that this paper _wasn't_ released by Netflix.
| It feels like the sort of thing a media company would publish, in
| the same vein as e.g. Disney /Pixar's hair and water papers.
| lvncelot wrote:
| I have the feeling that Pixar's Hair/Water/Snow VFX techniques
| are even more impressive once you've glanced behind the curtain
| and understood how they work, and that Netflix's narrative
| techniques are very much less so.
| saintkaye wrote:
| Someone explain this please
| KineticLensman wrote:
| ...Games contain tropes (story elements)
|
| ...Recognising tropes in a given game can be challenging
|
| ...Using them to generate game narratives can be challenging
|
| ...Tropetwist can generically describe the story structure of a
| game
|
| ...It can create a graph of a game's story and then variations
| of the story
|
| ...These variations can then be measured in terms of their
| coherence and interestingness, which in turn affect their
| playability
|
| Or something like that
| ramses0 wrote:
| Read through the Super-Mario analysis, but refer to the all-
| caps table down below as you're reading. (HERO, NEO, BAD,
| DRAKE)
|
| They're basically analyzing "tropes" (common storytelling
| patterns), and doing something similar to advanced procedural
| dungeon/level generation:
| https://www.boristhebrave.com/2021/04/10/dungeon-generation-...
|
| ...at least this appears to be a first cut at defining a
| vocabulary for the storytelling aspect of the problem.
|
| They refer also to other "Key + Door == Progress" aspects of
| procedural content generation (ie: make a zone, place a
| [locked] door to another zone, place a key within the original
| zone and then recurse).
|
| All told, a very interesting area to explore.
| skulk wrote:
| These diagrams from the PDF are cool. They show some Legend of
| Zelda games and model the structure of their narratives.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/zVNaYam
| ttctciyf wrote:
| They have created a system for representing "narrative
| structures" as a set of connected nodes. The nodes are story
| elements ("tropes") like Hero, MacGuffin, etc., which they have
| taken from https://tvtropes.org. The connections represent the
| relationships between the elements, so that their diagram 1b
| represents:
|
| > The HERO's goal is to get the "Pendant of Courage" (MCG).
| However, the MCG derives from ENEMY and BAD, so the HERO must
| overcome them to achieve his goal.
|
| This is the "narrative structure" (they say) of the Eastern
| Palace in Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past. The CAPS words are
| tropes that you can look up in the paper.
|
| Having established this graph representation of narrative
| structure, they create a set of rules for deriving other
| graphs, and so other possible narrative structures, from it (a
| "production grammar" for graphs, if you know the term).
|
| They then use an algorithm called MAP-Elites[1] to evaluate the
| variations for fitness in various aspects such as
| "interestingness" and "coherence", with the aim of creating a
| system which can generate narrative structure corresponding to
| satisfying stories.
|
| The structures thus produced don't unambiguously define one
| linear sequential narrative (because there is no direct
| temporal sequence given, only the temporal order implied by the
| node-to-node relationships which are causal in nature.) "The
| system is ambiguous by design" they say, and later: "the
| generated graphs could equally describe different stories".
|
| They leave the subsequent "interpretation" or realization of
| the structure graphs as concrete stories to other systems (to
| be developed) or to human interpreters.
|
| 1: https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.04909
| Sil_E_Goose wrote:
| This paper immediately brings to mind Kurt Vonnegut on the the
| "shapes of stories": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ
| [deleted]
| dporter wrote:
| Community seasons 1-3 were effectively "trope driven
| development."
| babyshake wrote:
| Rick and Morty, also from Dan Harmon, frequently comments on
| the tropes it is utilizing.
| jhbadger wrote:
| That's a clever way of having your cake and eating it too --
| use tired old tropes but have the characters comment that
| they _know_ they 're tired old tropes.
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