Evaluating Accessible Graphical Interfaces for Building Story Worlds

In order to use computational intelligence to assist in narrative generation, domain knowledge of the story world must be defined, a task which is currently confined to experts. In an effort to democratize story world creation, we present an accessible graphical platform for content creators and end users to create a story world, populate it with smart characters and objects, and define narrative events that can be used to author digital stories. The system supports reuse to reduce the cost of content production and enables specification of semantics to enable computer assisted authoring. Additionally, we introduce an iterative, bi-directional workflow, which bridges the gap between story world building and story authoring. Users seamlessly transition between authoring stories and refining the story world definition to accommodate their current narrative. A user study demonstrates the efficacy of our system to support narrative generation.