# Reconstructing Persistent Worlds from Narratives for Narrative-Grounded Interactive Experiences

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04037 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04037/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Procedural Content Generation via Machine Learning (PCGML)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.00539/) (2017)
- [Large Language Models and Games: A Survey and Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18659/) (2024)
- [Making Large Language Models into World Models with Precondition and Effect Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12278/) (2024)
- [An Ontology of Co-Creative AI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07472/) (2023)
- [Towards a Formal Model of Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12872/) (2021)
- [Collaborative Comic Generation: Integrating Visual Narrative Theories with AI Models for Enhanced Creativity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17263/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Knowledge Graphs for Story Understanding in Visual Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10008/) (2025)
- [STORY2GAME: Generating (Almost) Everything in an Interactive Fiction Game](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03547/) (2025)
- [GameTileNet: A Semantic Dataset for Low-Resolution Game Art in Procedural Content Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02941/) (2025)
- [World-State Transformations for Neuro-symbolic Interactive Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24719/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Designing narrative-grounded interactive experiences remains labor-intensive because interactive content must align with the underlying world implied by the narrative. Existing approaches formulate problems such as narrative planning, scene generation, and gameplay generation, each constructing computational representations tailored to specific downstream tasks rather than explicitly reconstructing and maintaining the persistent world that grounds them. We investigate reconstructing explicit persistent worlds from narrative descriptions as the central computational objective for narrative-grounded interactive realization. Rather than treating the world as an implicit by-product of downstream generation, our approach reconstructs and maintains persistent entities, locations, semantic relationships, and evolving world states while inferring only the contextual information required to support coherent interactive experiences. To investigate this perspective, we develop a reference prototype that reconstructs structured persistent world representations from narrative descriptions and subsequently instantiates playable tile-based environments. Through three representative case studies spanning a procedural scenario, an original fantasy narrative, and an adapted public-domain story, we demonstrate the feasibility of reconstructing persistent worlds and show how a shared world representation supports coherent gameplay while remaining grounded in the source narrative. By explicitly reconstructing persistent worlds prior to interactive realization, this work bridges computational narrative understanding and interactive content generation, providing a semantic foundation for AI-assisted game authoring, mixed-initiative design, educational simulations, and narrative-grounded interactive experiences.