# Charting the Shapes of Stories with Game Theory

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.05747 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05747/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07772/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [LLM Bidders Preserve the Mechanism-Level Orderings of Human Bidders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09083/) (2025)
- [LLM-Powered Preference Elicitation in Combinatorial Assignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10308/) (2025)
- [From Natural Language to Extensive-Form Game Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17282/) (2025)
- [Incentive-Aligned Multi-Source LLM Summaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25184/) (2025)
- [One Model, Two Markets: Bid-Aware Generative Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22231/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Stories are records of our experiences and their analysis reveals insights into the nature of being human. Successful analyses are often interdisciplinary, leveraging mathematical tools to extract structure from stories and insights from structure. Historically, these tools have been restricted to one dimensional charts and dynamic social networks; however, modern AI offers the possibility of identifying more fully the plot structure, character incentives, and, importantly, counterfactual plot lines that the story could have taken but did not take. In this work, we use AI to model the structure of stories as game-theoretic objects, amenable to quantitative analysis. This allows us to not only interrogate each character's decision making, but also possibly peer into the original author's conception of the characters' world. We demonstrate our proposed technique on Shakespeare's famous Romeo and Juliet. We conclude with a discussion of how our analysis could be replicated in broader contexts, including real-life scenarios.