Using PaSSAGE, we adapted the Little Red Riding Hood (LRRH) to fit the structure of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth. The terms in quotes below (such as "Home" or "Trial") indicate the phases of the monomyth that have been written for so far.
In the PaSSAGE version of LRRH, Red (as the player) starts off at "Home" and gets "Called to Adventure" (Mother asks her to deliver medicine to Grandma’s house). She then faces a "Guardian at the Threshold" between her world and beyond (meeting the Wolf at the forest’s edge), and overcomes a minor "Trial" along the way forward (picking flowers for Grandma). Upon reaching Grandma’s house, Red suffers an "Ordeal" at the hands of the Wolf, after which she and Grandma are ultimately rescued by the Woodsman, ending the story.
PaSSAGE adds interactivity to LRRH by expanding the set of possible events for each phase of the story, and choosing between them based on its learned model of the current player’s preferences. For example, instead of a mission of mercy (to go help Grandma) as their "Call to Adventure", reward-seeking players might learn of a merchant in the next town who will pay handsomely for the delivery of a load of local goods; instead a mission to pick flowers, a more combative player might find bandits waiting in ambush as their "Trial" to overcome. Furthermore, to dynamically choose which actors should play the roles of the bandits in the forest, PaSSAGE draws from the set of non-player characters in Red’s village, preferentially choosing those with whom Red (again, as the player) had previously established an unfriendly rapport. Thus far, we have created two alternative events for each phase and five possible story endings, allowing for twenty different experiences in terms of sequences of events, and even more variation when different characters are cast for the events’ roles. Try it out at ICIDS’09!
Tags: Storyworlds