Governing narrative events with tropes as institutional norms

Abstract

A narrative world can be viewed as a form of society in which characters follow a set of social norms whose collective function is to guide the characters through (the creation of) a story arc and reach some conclusion. By modelling the rules of a narrative using norms, we can govern the actions of agents that act out the characters in a story. Agents are given sets of permitted actions and obligations to fulfil based on their and the story’s current situation. However, a way to describe stories in terms of social norms is needed. Existing formalisms for narrative do not work at multiple layers of abstraction, and do not provide a rich enough vocabulary for describing stories. We use story tropes as a means of building reusable story components with which we describe the social norms that govern our storyworld agents.