NarrativePlay: Interactive Narrative Understanding

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce NarrativePlay, a novel system that allows users to role-play a fictional character and interact with other characters in narratives such as novels in an immersive environment. We leverage LLMs to generate human-like responses, guided by personality traits extracted from narratives. The system incorporates auto-generated visual display of narrative settings, character portraits, and character speech, greatly enhancing user experience. Our approach eschews predefined sandboxes, focusing instead on main storyline events extracted from narratives from the perspective of a user-selected character. NarrativePlay has been evaluated on two types of narratives, detective and adventure stories, where users can either explore the world or improve their favorability with the narrative characters through conversations.