The Design of Writing Buddy: A Mixed-Initiative Approach Towards Computational Story Collaboration

The act of writing is often a difficult process; writing partners can be a way to test ideas, provide critiques, and overcome the difficulty of adding words to a blank page. Writing Buddy is an in-development prototype of a mixed-initiative playful tool, intended to serve the role of a digital writing partner by combining the authoring affordances of writing software with the natural curiosity inherent in playable media. In it, players create and arrange dramatic beats to achieve certain story goals. Those dramatic beats are then satisfied through assigning character actions to them. Finally, players pen prose and dialogue to bring those actions to life. Writing Buddy aims to ease the authoring process by offering suggestions based on character simulation and story structure.