# IBSEN: Director-Actor Agent Collaboration for Controllable and Interactive Drama Script Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01093 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01093/

## Key facts

- Cited by 35 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 16 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Multimodal and embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/multimodal-and-embodied-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [ChatGPT Outperforms Crowd-Workers for Text-Annotation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15056/) (2023)
- [Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10158/) (2023)
- [Exploring Large Language Models for Communication Games: An Empirical Study on Werewolf](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04658/) (2023)
- [Plan-And-Write: Towards Better Automatic Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05701/) (2018)
- [Co-Writing Screenplays and Theatre Scripts with Language Models: An Evaluation by Industry Professionals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14958/) (2022)
- [Learning to Speak and Act in a Fantasy Text Adventure Game](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03094/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models are Superpositions of All Characters: Attaining Arbitrary Role-play via Self-Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12474/) (2024)
- [Do Massively Pretrained Language Models Make Better Storytellers?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10705/) (2019)
- [MetaAgents: Large Language Model Based Agents for Decision-Making on Teaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06500/) (2023)
- [Exploring Controllable Text Generation Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01822/) (2020)
- [LARP: Language-Agent Role Play for Open-World Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17653/) (2023)
- [Open-world Story Generation with Structured Knowledge Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04634/) (2022)
- [Pre-trained Language Models as Prior Knowledge for Playing Text-based Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08408/) (2021)
- [Controlled Cue Generation for Play Scripts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06953/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [From LLM Reasoning to Autonomous AI Agents: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19678/) (2025)
- [Lifelong Learning of Large Language Model based Agents: A Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07278/) (2025)
- [RoleBreak: Character Hallucination as a Jailbreak Attack in Role-Playing Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16727/) (2024)
- [Depression Diagnosis Dialogue Simulation: Self-improving Psychiatrist with Tertiary Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15084/) (2024)
- [Thinking in Character: Advancing Role-Playing Agents with Role-Aware Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01748/) (2025)
- [Multi-Mission Tool Bench: Assessing the Robustness of LLM based Agents through Related and Dynamic Missions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02623/) (2025)
- [BookWorld: From Novels to Interactive Agent Societies for Creative Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14538/) (2025)
- [Revealing and Mitigating the Challenge of Detecting Character Knowledge Errors in LLM Role-Playing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11726/) (2024)
- [Towards Enhanced Immersion and Agency for LLM-based Interactive Drama](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17878/) (2025)
- [The Rise of Darkness: Safety-Utility Trade-Offs in Role-Playing Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20757/) (2025)
- [CML-Bench: A Framework for Evaluating and Enhancing LLM-Powered Movie Scripts Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06231/) (2025)
- [R2: A LLM Based Novel-to-Screenplay Generation Framework with Causal Plot Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15655/) (2025)
- [Multi-level Value Alignment in Agentic AI Systems: Survey and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09656/) (2025)
- [C3-Bench: The Things Real Disturbing LLM based Agent in Multi-Tasking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18746/) (2025)
- [Constella: Supporting Storywriters' Interconnected Character Creation through LLM-based Multi-Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05820/) (2025)
- [Instruction-Driven Game Engine: A Poker Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13441/) (2024)
- [AgentTutor: Empowering Personalized Learning with Multi-Turn Interactive Teaching in Intelligent Education Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04219/) (2025)
- [From Personas to Plot: Character-Grounded Multi-Agent Story Generation for Long-Form Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00918/) (2026)
- [LLM Agents for Deliberative Collaboration: A Study on Joint Decision Making Under Partial Observability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06157/) (2026)
- [Narrative-Driven Travel Planning: Geoculturally-Grounded Script Generation with Evolutionary Itinerary Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14456/) (2025)
- [Pastiche Novel Generation Creating: Fan Fiction You Love in Your Favorite Author's Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15616/) (2025)
- [HAMLET: A Hierarchical and Adaptive Multi-Agent Framework for Live Embodied Theatrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15518/) (2025)
- [Test-Time-Matching: Decouple Personality, Memory, and Linguistic Style in LLM-based Role-Playing Language Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16799/) (2025)
- [OPEN-THEATRE: An Open-Source Toolkit for LLM-based Interactive Drama](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16713/) (2025)
- [Beyond Direct Generation: A Decomposed Approach to Well-Crafted Screenwriting with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23163/) (2025)
- [Multi-Agent Comedy Club: Investigating Community Discussion Effects on LLM Humor Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14770/) (2026)
- [NARRA-Gym for Evaluating Interactive Narrative Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08503/) (2026)
- [When Stories Evolve: Benchmarking LLM Storytelling Across Agent Architectures in Open-Ended World Simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15654/) (2026)
- [Evaluating the Bias in LLMs for Surveying Opinion and Decision Making in Healthcare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08260/) (2025)
- [Telling Speculative Stories to Help Humans Imagine the Harms of Healthcare AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14718/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models have demonstrated their capabilities in storyline creation and human-like character role-playing. Current language model agents mainly focus on reasonable behaviors from the level of individuals, and their behaviors might be hard to constraint on the level of the whole storyline. In this paper we introduce IBSEN, a director-actor coordinate agent framework that generates drama scripts and makes the plot played by agents more controllable. The director agent writes plot outlines that the user desires to see, instructs the actor agents to role-play their characters, and reschedules the plot when human players participate in the scenario to ensure the plot is progressing towards the objective. To evaluate the framework, we create a novel drama plot that involves several actor agents and check the interactions between them under the instruction of the director agent. Evaluation results show that our framework could generate complete, diverse drama scripts from only a rough outline of plot objectives, meanwhile maintaining the characteristics of characters in the drama. Our codes and prompts are available at https://github.com/OpenDFM/ibsen.