Reconstructing Persistent Worlds from Narratives for Narrative-Grounded Interactive Experiences
arXiv:2608.04037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Designing narrative-grounded interactive experiences remains labor-intensive because interactive content must align with the underlying world implied by the narrative. Existing approaches formulate problems such as narrative planning, scene generation, and gameplay generation, each constructing computational representations tailored to specific downstream tasks rather than explicitly reconstructing and maintaining the persistent world that grounds them. We investigate reconstructing explicit persistent worlds from narrative descriptions as the central computational objective for narrative-grounded interactive realization. Rather than treating the world as an implicit by-product of downstream generation, our approach reconstructs and maintains persistent entities, locations, semantic relationships, and evolving world states while inferring only the contextual information required to support coherent interactive experiences. To investigate this perspective, we develop a reference prototype that reconstructs structured persistent world representations from narrative descriptions and subsequently instantiates playable tile-based environments. Through three representative case studies spanning a procedural scenario, an original fantasy narrative, and an adapted public-domain story, we demonstrate the feasibility of reconstructing persistent worlds and show how a shared world representation supports coherent gameplay while remaining grounded in the source narrative. By explicitly reconstructing persistent worlds prior to interactive realization, this work bridges computational narrative understanding and interactive content generation, providing a semantic foundation for AI-assisted game authoring, mixed-initiative design, educational simulations, and narrative-grounded interactive experiences.
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[Submitted on 3 Aug 2026]
Title:Reconstructing Persistent Worlds from Narratives for Narrative-Grounded Interactive Experiences
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Abstract:Designing narrative-grounded interactive experiences remains labor-intensive because interactive content must align with the underlying world implied by the narrative. Existing approaches formulate problems such as narrative planning, scene generation, and gameplay generation, each constructing computational representations tailored to specific downstream tasks rather than explicitly reconstructing and maintaining the persistent world that grounds them.
We investigate reconstructing explicit persistent worlds from narrative descriptions as the central computational objective for narrative-grounded interactive realization. Rather than treating the world as an implicit by-product of downstream generation, our approach reconstructs and maintains persistent entities, locations, semantic relationships, and evolving world states while inferring only the contextual information required to support coherent interactive experiences.
To investigate this perspective, we develop a reference prototype that reconstructs structured persistent world representations from narrative descriptions and subsequently instantiates playable tile-based environments. Through three representative case studies spanning a procedural scenario, an original fantasy narrative, and an adapted public-domain story, we demonstrate the feasibility of reconstructing persistent worlds and show how a shared world representation supports coherent gameplay while remaining grounded in the source narrative.
By explicitly reconstructing persistent worlds prior to interactive realization, this work bridges computational narrative understanding and interactive content generation, providing a semantic foundation for AI-assisted game authoring, mixed-initiative design, educational simulations, and narrative-grounded interactive experiences.
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Graphics (cs.GR); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.04037 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2608.04037v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.04037
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: Yi-Chun Chen [view email] [v1] Mon, 3 Aug 2026 20:06:13 UTC (2,391 KB)
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