(Re)telling chess stories as game content

Procedural story generation is an active and increasingly important area of interactive entertainment. Some of the most difficult challenges with the concept are generation and managing of dramatic elements with high degree of variation that are both internally consistent and entertaining. If an authoring system could access a large repository of proven sets of domain specific dramatic action sequences with guaranteed internal structure, consistency and known entertainment value, could it generate unique stories with the same drama in a different domain? We consider chess games as activities capable of being dramatic and entertaining in their own domain. Chess can inspire the same kind of audience reaction as novels, plays, and films. It is subject to the same kind of cultural intrigue. In this paper, we use chess games as drama-producing events to generate traditional stories in multiple genres that contain no chess-specific content. Our system accepts chess games in Portable Game Notation (PGN) and outputs text stories in any of the supported genres: Romeo and Juliet, Star Wars (rebels versus empire), zombie story and combat story. We find that to a significant degree audiences familiar with chess can correctly match a story to the chess game it was generated from, suggesting some level of transfer with respect to dramatic elements.