# Towards Enhanced Immersion and Agency for LLM-based Interactive Drama

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17878 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17878/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [Is ChatGPT a Good NLG Evaluator? A Preliminary Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04048/) (2023)
- [Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10158/) (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)
- [Art or Artifice? Large Language Models and the False Promise of Creativity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14556/) (2023)
- [On the Self-Verification Limitations of Large Language Models on Reasoning and Planning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08115/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models are Superpositions of All Characters: Attaining Arbitrary Role-play via Self-Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12474/) (2024)
- [Are Large Language Models Capable of Generating Human-Level Narratives?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13248/) (2024)
- [Help me write a poem: Instruction Tuning as a Vehicle for Collaborative Poetry Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13669/) (2022)
- [The Oscars of AI Theater: A Survey on Role-Playing with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11484/) (2024)
- [From Role-Play to Drama-Interaction: An LLM Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14231/) (2024)
- [IBSEN: Director-Actor Agent Collaboration for Controllable and Interactive Drama Script Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01093/) (2024)
- [Making Large Language Models Better Data Creators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20111/) (2023)
- [PoeLM: A Meter- and Rhyme-Controllable Language Model for Unsupervised Poetry Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12206/) (2022)
- [A Survey of AI Music Generation Tools and Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12982/) (2023)
- [Computational Narrative Intelligence: A Human-Centered Goal for Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.06484/) (2016)
- [The Drama Machine: Simulating Character Development with LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01725/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Artificial Intelligence for Music Generation: Agents, Domains and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13944/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [CogDual: Enhancing Dual Cognition of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Rule-Based Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17147/) (2025)
- [AI for Games in the Foundation Model Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16679/) (2026)
- [ArcANE: Do Role-Playing Language Agents Stay in Character at the Right Time?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05553/) (2026)
- [Can LLM Agents Stick to the Script? A Benchmark for Long-Horizon Consistency in Interactive Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08160/) (2026)
- [HAMLET: A Hierarchical and Adaptive Multi-Agent Framework for Live Embodied Theatrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15518/) (2025)
- [OPEN-THEATRE: An Open-Source Toolkit for LLM-based Interactive Drama](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16713/) (2025)
- [AlphaContext: An Evolutionary Tree-based Psychometric Context Generator for Creativity Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18398/) (2026)
- [MedGame: Storytelling Gamification Empowered by Large Language Models for Medical Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21570/) (2026)
- [ANIMASK: What the Model Contributes to Role Play in Simulated Story Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16667/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

LLM-based Interactive Drama is a novel AI-based dialogue scenario, where the user (i.e. the player) plays the role of a character in the story, has conversations with characters played by LLM agents, and experiences an unfolding story. This paper begins with understanding interactive drama from two aspects: Immersion, the player's feeling of being present in the story, and Agency, the player's ability to influence the story world. Both are crucial to creating an enjoyable interactive experience, while they have been underexplored in previous work. To enhance these two aspects, we first propose Playwriting-guided Generation, a novel method that helps LLMs craft dramatic stories with substantially improved structures and narrative quality. Additionally, we introduce Plot-based Reflection for LLM agents to refine their reactions to align with the player's intentions. Our evaluation relies on human judgment to assess the gains of our methods in terms of immersion and agency.