Computational approaches to narrative : week 1

Create a system for generating stories

Playing Her Story game as an asian person remind me a lot of one Japanese short story called “Rashomon” by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Rashoman is a story which telling a murder by 4 different people in 4 different perspectives. Both Her Story and Rashomon has similar narrative style which the narrator/setting is telling the reader/player a little bit about the end(what/who) of the story but let the reader/player explore freely in each event that happened in between to find the truth or the “why” of the story.

This narrative for me is obviously using the Kishotenketsu structure which the conflict of the events is a paradox and has no right or wrong answer it and what I got from both story is more like a moment of anatta ( no-self or void in Bhuddhism )

And since story is somehow a sequence of event and narrative discourse, I think I could create a system for generate stories by brake down the structure into parts and put “random” into each part.

To create a system, I try to brake my understanding of Kishotenketsu structure into 3 parts; which is the story setting, the narrators and the events. Then I decided to use basic cards and dice rolling method to create my story generating system which firstly you have to fill all the cards with random word ( - each card has different colour to indicate a specific category) then you will roll the dice to pick the card, and after that you have to use all cards that was selected to generate new stories by connect each event in the card together under the nature of your character and the location setting.

Here is a sketch of my story generating system