TaleBox: A Mobile Game for Mixed-Initiative Story Creation

TaleBox presents a mobile card game designed for collaborative story creation, in which a group of players take turns appending contributions to a shared narrative using dealt cards. The work positions the game as both an entertainment product and a mixed-initiative content generation system, where human creativity is combined with computational authoring assistance. Its central aim is to make computational storytelling accessible through a playful interface while maintaining narrative coherence.

The architecture relies on a client-server model in which a card hand generation system tracks story progress and selects cards that balance coherence with creative freedom. This system draws on GluNet, an open-source knowledge base integrating lexical resources such as VerbNet and FrameNet, to derive semantic relations and widen the story space with verbs and abstract vocabulary. Stories follow a classical seven-stage structure based on Tobias's master plots, from Status Quo through to Ending, and the system enforces consistency by tracking element states, rejecting actions that contradict them, such as deploying a dead character.

Card selection is governed by genre and role mappings. Genre determines the permissible vocabulary, while role checks guarantee at least one playable action per turn. Verb cards are drawn according to whether the story sits at a Story Point or between points, and remaining cards are filled from the story space and genre vocabulary, with extra cards offered to widen player choice. Hands are dealt without player attribution and discarded after each turn, and a scoring system rewards the most active contributors with the right to select major plot events.

The paper also highlights the game's secondary output: a recorded, openly accessible database of annotated stories searchable by genre, vocabulary, and length, intended for research and other narrative applications. The document reports no formal user study or quantitative evaluation of player experience or story quality.