WHAT-IF: Exploring Branching Narratives by Meta-Prompting Large Language Models

Runsheng "Anson" Huang, Lara J. Martin, Chris Callison-Burch
12/13/2024
cs.CL

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Abstract

WHAT-IF -- Writing a Hero's Alternate Timeline through Interactive Fiction -- is a system that uses zero-shot meta-prompting to create branching narratives from a prewritten story. Played as an interactive fiction (IF) game, WHAT-IF lets the player choose between decisions that the large language model (LLM) GPT-4 generates as possible branches in the story. Starting with an existing linear plot as input, a branch is created at each key decision taken by the main character. By meta-prompting the LLM to consider the major plot points from the story, the system produces coherent and well-structured alternate storylines. WHAT-IF stores the branching plot tree in a graph which helps it to both keep track of the story for prompting and maintain the structure for the final IF system. A demo of WHAT-IF can be found at https://what-if-game.github.io/.

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Cite this paper

@article{huang2024whatif,
  title  = {WHAT-IF: Exploring Branching Narratives by Meta-Prompting Large Language Models},
  author = {Runsheng "Anson" Huang and Lara J. Martin and Chris Callison-Burch},
  year   = {2024},
  eprint = {2412.10582},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10582v3}
}

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