Creating Hybrid Interactive Narrative Systems with LLM: From Formal Description to Evaluation
Abstract: Interactive narratives let users shape a story while an Experience Manager (EM) keeps it coherent, balancing player freedom against authorial control. Large Language Models now enable a new generation of hybrid EMs, which combine run-time generation from free-text input with symbolic narrative control. However, their heterogeneity makes them hard to compare: A manager's behaviour is generally tied to the unique and specific scenario in which it operates, and much of its decision-making takes place outside of any explicit and verifiable structure. We address this with an LLM-based narrative platform whose managers are interchangeable modules operating over a shared symbolic world model of facts, operations, and goals. Because every applied operation carries explicit preconditions and effects, each session can be analysed as a plan through a common state-transition representation and evaluated, independently of how the manager works internally, with shared indicators of four properties: player agency, EM controllability, author intent, and robustness. We implement three contrasting managers, based respectively on open generation, Monte Carlo repair, and autonomous characters, and compare them through functional analysis on an interactive Little Red Riding Hood scenario. The results show that no manager dominates on every property, giving authors and EM designers a concrete basis to select a manager according to their priorities.