Interactive fiction system helps people see new meanings in their stories
The House with a Million Windows: Interactive Fiction for Narrative Restorying
Computation and LanguageHuman-Computer Interaction
Summary
When people use AI to write stories, the results can sometimes feel flat or all alike. The authors created a system called The House with a Million Windows that lets users write a story and then see many different versions of it, each written in a different style. This process helps users discover new meanings in their own stories and feel more connected to their personal identity. The system is based on a psychological method called restorying, which encourages people to rethink and reshape their personal narratives.
What this means in practice
- •For mental health professionals: Provide clients with a tool that helps explore personal stories in new ways to support narrative healing and identity development.
- •For creative writers: Offer a writing companion that generates diverse stylistic rewrites, inspiring alternative perspectives and deeper creativity in storytelling.
Authors
Cody Kommers, Sarah G Immel, Drew Hemment, Mina Lee
Abstract
AI-assisted writing can flatten meaning in human storytelling, enabling the production of homogeneous outputs without the intentional effort and sense-making writing entails. To address this challenge, we present The House with a Million Windows (HWAMW), an LLM-based interactive fiction system designed to help users explore both the breadth and depth of potential meanings within their personal stories -- drawing on a psychological paradigm called the restorying intervention. In HWAMW, users play through a text-based narrative in which they tell a story, then encounter a set of LLM-generated "windows" reframing it according to different literary styles. Empirical evidence shows that HWAMW increases users' sense of narrative identity, while an expert review explores how this effect is achieved. Our findings suggest that HWAMW facilitates restorying and offers a valuable paradigm for AI-assisted writing, wherein LLMs do not tell our stories but rather help us see greater potential in the stories we tell.