Yichi (Lyric) Liu
Tales of Two boyfriends platform provides a platform for creating interactive narratives with dramatically meaningful variations for the interactor to explore. The story pattern of W2P (a woman an 2 partners) is derived from an essay by Janet H. Murray “A Tale of Two Boyfriends: A Literary Abstraction Strategy for Creating Meaningful Character Variation “[1] which privileges female agency within the classic western narrative format of a romantic triangle between one woman and two men. The pattern divides male characters into Boyfriends of ObliGation (BOGs) and Boyfriends of Desire (BODs). Using this platform, authors can define a BOG and a BOD character based on multiple variants. The system then generates a set of possible plot events, similar to the events in Vladimir Propp’s classic abstraction of fairy tales[2], in the form of story-cards.
Reference:
[1] Murray, Janet H. “A Tale of Two Boyfriends: A Literary Abstraction Strategy for Creating Meaningful Character Variation” In Interactive Digital Narrative: History, Theory and Practice edited by Gabriele Ferri Hartmut Koenitz, Tonguc Ibrahim Sezen, Digdem Sezen: Routledge, 2014.
[2] Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1928. Reprint, 1968.
