Download PDF<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nAbstract<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
This paper reports on an experiment in formalizing and implementing \u201cstory-sifting\u201d heuristics to automatically identify likely \u201cinteresting stories\u201d from a large mass of events transpiring from the Chroniqueur<\/em> procedural social simulation. Following preliminary experimentation with various concepts inspired by narratology, we proceeded to formally evaluate \u201cunexpectedness\u201d and \u201cdramatic situations\u201d as key heuristics to sample six stories from a simulation run and rendered each as two short stories, one written by a human author and the other by a LLM (in order to help distinguish the effect of narrative from story). These were scored by 24 participants for narrative appreciation. Inconclusive results about heuristics making any significant difference prompted self-reflection on what makes emergent narratives interesting (in a distinct way from traditional fiction), pointing both at \u201cstory effects\u201d (some selected event chains constituting better story material) and \u201cnarrative effect\u201d (better narrativization being able to cope with poor story material).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jonathan Lessard, Stephen Friedrich, Samuel Par\u00e9-Chouinard, and Leila Kosseim. 2026. Narrative Gold Digging: Sifting and Narrating Stories from a Procedural Simulation. In Foundations of Digital Games (FDG \u201926), August 10\u201313, 2026, Copenhagen, Denmark. ACM. Download PDF Abstract This paper reports on an experiment in formalizing and implementing \u201cstory-sifting\u201d heuristics to automatically identify likely \u201cinteresting stories\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pgc_meta":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paper"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lablablab.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lablablab.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lablablab.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lablablab.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lablablab.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=778"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lablablab.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":780,"href":"https:\/\/www.lablablab.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions\/780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lablablab.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lablablab.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lablablab.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}