All automatic text generating systems must confront problems of sentence content and surface form, while systems that generate complete discourse face the additional difficulty of maintaining a logical and coherent flow of ideas. Noninteractive systems must further be able to address these difficulties without human provocation or control. This paper outlines a computer program that addresses these problems through the process of telling stories. Coherent story text is generated by taking advantage of an analogy between game-playing and story-telling.
An environment is created where characters must escape from difficult predicaments, and the exploits of the characters and their attempts to solve problems are used as input for the generation of natural language text. Logical story plots emerge from the adoption of game-playing strategies as a model for planning speech acts.