IVIE: A Neuro-symbolic Approach to Incremental and Validated Generation of Interactive Fiction Worlds

2026-06-11

AI Summary

Interactive fiction generation faces challenges stemming from large language models’ lack of world consistency and the limited creative flexibility of symbolic systems. This work proposes IVIE, a neuro-symbolic system that achieves an effective balance between creative freedom and logical coherence for the first time in this domain. IVIE employs a four-stage incremental generation pipeline, delegating creative content generation to a large language model while leveraging symbolic reasoning to verify and constrain the evolving world state. The architecture enables the construction from scratch of fully playable narrative worlds comprising locations, items, characters, and puzzles. Human evaluations demonstrate that the generated content maintains high thematic coherence while significantly enhancing player immersion, thereby validating the synergistic advantage of the approach in reconciling narrative consistency with generative flexibility.

Abstract

Computational creativity in Interactive Fiction faces a fundamental tension: Large Language Models (LLM) may produce creative narratives but struggle with world coherence, while symbolic systems ensure consistency but lack creative flexibility. We present IVIE (Incremental & Validated Interactive Experiences), a neuro-symbolic approach to generating complete and playable interactive fiction worlds from scratch. Building upon PAYADOR's neuro-symbolic framework, IVIE implements a four-stage incremental generation pipeline that delegates creative decisions--setting and character creation, puzzle design--to LLMs while grounding the world state through symbolic validation. The system generates worlds with interconnected locations, functional items, non-player characters, and coherent puzzles, all structured around a central goal-oriented architecture. Human evaluation shows the approach generates immersive, thematically coherent worlds with high player engagement. Results seem to indicate that the neuro-symbolic approach successfully balances flexibility with narrative coherence: symbolic validation grounds LLM generation without eliminating generative freedom. However, challenges remain: LLM inconsistencies occasionally bypass puzzle constraints, and objective validation gaps allow some structurally impossible goals. We identify key design considerations for future neurosymbolic interactive storytelling systems, particularly regarding LLM capabilities and their limitations.

Problem

• Interactive Fiction
• Computational Creativity
• Neuro-symbolic Systems
• World Coherence
• Large Language Models

Innovation

• neuro-symbolic
• interactive fiction
• incremental generation
• symbolic validation
• large language models