Analysing the Narrative Paradox through Formal Models and Properties in Interactive Narrative

Jules Clerc, Mohamed Sallak, Domitile Lourdeaux, Marc Ravaine

Interactive narratives aim to let players influence the unfolding of a story while preserving a coherent and satisfying narrative progression. This creates a central tension, commonly described as the narrative paradox, between player autonomy and narrative control. Experience Managers (EMs) manage the story by determining how the narrative progresses in response to player behaviour. Although this paradox is widely discussed, it is rarely modelled in a way that supports systematic analysis, simulation, and comparison across management strategies. This paper proposes a formal framework for modelling and analysing the narrative paradox as a trade-off between interdependent properties shaped by EM decisions. We represent interactive narrative behaviour through an extended state-transition system in which world states are connected by player actions and system events. From this model, we formalize key properties involved in the paradox such as the player agency, EM controllability, author intent, and robustness, and define quantitative indicators derived from simulated plans. These indicators make it possible to compare EM strategies according to their ability to balance freedom,…