StarTroper, a film trope rating optimizer using machine learning and evolutionary algorithms

Abstract Designing a story is widely considered a crafty yet critical task that requires deep specific human knowledge in order to reach a minimum quality and originality. This includes designing at a high level different elements of the film; these high‐level elements are called tropes when they become patterns. The present paper proposes and evaluates a methodology to automatically synthesize sets of tropes in a way that they maximize the potential rating of a film that conforms to them. We use machine learning to create a surrogate model that maps film ratings from tropes, trained with the data extracted and processed from huge film databases in Internet, and then we use a genetic algorithm that uses that surrogate model as evaluator to optimize the combination of tropes in a film. In order to evaluate the methodology, we analyse the nature of the tropes and their distributions in existing films, the performance of the models and the quality of the sets of tropes synthesized. The results of this proof of concept show that the methodology works and is able to build sets of tropes that maximize the rating and that these sets are genuine. The work has revealed that the methodology and tools developed are directly suitable for assisting in the plots generation as an authoring tool and, ultimately, for supporting the automatic generation of stories, for example, in massively populated videogames.