IT Tools for Player-Driven Narrative in Open-World
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Abstract
In open-world games, classical tools of dramatic analysis – the three-act structure, Freytag's pyramid, the hero's journey – fail to describe the actual gameplay experience: players gain freedom to choose the traversal order of modular content, making authorial control over pacing impossible. This paper introduces the concept of storytelling literacy – a player competency encompassing recognition of the emotional register of content, conscious pacing construction through activity sequencing, and narrative framing of one's own gameplay trajectory. Based on a formal model of player narrative state – an adaptation of the story-object/phase/facet/threshold-state formalism – we propose an architecture for an IT system supporting player-driven narrative. The system comprises a Narrative State Engine (feedback loop between action telemetry and the content subsystem), trajectory visualization tools for players, narrative coverage analysis tools for designers, and an adaptive content generation module based on large language models.
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