This article presents a novel and highly interactive process to generate natural language narratives based on our ongoing work on semiotic relations, providing four criteria for composing new narratives from existing stories. The wide applicability of this semiotic reconstruction process is suggested by a reputed literary scholar's deconstructive claim that new narratives can often be shown to be a tissue of previous narratives. Along, respectively, three semiotic axes – syntagmatic, paradigmatic, and meronymic – existing stories can yield new stories by the combination, imitation, or expansion of an iconic scene; lastly, a new story may emerge through reversal via an antithetic consideration, i.e., through the adoption of opposite values. Targeting casual users, we present a fully operational prototype with a simple and user-friendly interface that incorporates an AI agent, namely ChatGPT. The prototype, in a coauthor capacity, generates context-compatible sequences of events in storyboard format using backward-chaining abductive reasoning (employing Stable Diffusion to draw scene illustrations), conforming as much as possible to the user's authorial instructions. The extensive repertoire of book and movie summaries available to the AI agent obviates the need to manually supply laborious and error-prone context specifications. A user study was conducted to evaluate user experience and satisfaction with the generated narratives. The preliminary findings suggest that our approach has the potential to enhance story quality while offering a positive user experience.
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This study will examine how branded games in the LEGO Ninjago franchise communicate the brand narrative through their mechanical, semiotic and referential design. Digital games as communicative tools facilitate a new paradigm of marketing focusing on experience creation through integrated marketing communication plans. The LEGO brand creates highly successful games that communicate the brand effectively. To explore the possibilities and counteract the simplistic use of branded games, this study introduces an innovative framework to formally analyze branded games and their communication of a brand narrative through mechanical, semiotic and referential layers. This framework introduces formal game design to advertising studies, while dragging game studies into branded ecosystems. Using the framework, we analyze LEGO Ninjago the Movie – The Videogame, to identify how this paid digital game expands the Ninjago universe and fulfills specific marketing purposes oriented to LEGO toy sets. Our analysis shows that on a mechanical and semiotic layer, the game presents a standalone experience catering to the universe of the Ninjago movie and the values of the Ninjago brand narrative. However, by framing the whole game as LEGO – in its materiality and interactable objects – the LEGO brand narrative of creative construction informs the act of play. The referential design in these games makes use of playful disruption of rules to instill additive comprehension in the player related to purchasable sets and content.
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