Bardic: Generating Multimedia Narrative Reports for Game Logs

Abstract

In this paper we present the system called Bardic, which was developed over three years as the core technology in the Narrative for Sensemaking project, an effort to automatically generate narrative from low-level event data as an aid for sense making. At its core, Bardic is a narrative report generator that uses a logic-based language to represent a story based on event/activity logs. Bardic generates different types of narrative discourse designed to convey different aspects of the underlying data. The system consists of a Unity application that allows users to explore generated stories and select parts of the stories to analyze in detail. In addition to its narrative generation capabilities, the application provides visualization and query capabilities. In this paper we provide screen shots of the application in use, show examples of narrative output produced by Bardic, detail how Bardic generates its output, and discuss the current system's capabilities and limitations.