ELSEWISE

ELSEWISE

Trajectory Visualizer for LLM Agents

Yi Wang, John Joon Young Chung, Melissa Roemmele, Yuqian Sun, Tiffany Wang, Shm Garanganao Almeda, Brett A. Halperin, Yuwen Lu, Max Kreminski

Scroll to explore

“Bundled Storylines”

Inspired by Branching storylines, a structure widely used in authoring interactive narratives.

An LLM agent icon with many tangled storyline arrows coming out of it
User experienced storylines
Paperclip labeled Courage of protagonist Paperclip labeled Tension level Paperclip labeled Ending happiness level A pile of more paperclips in many colors
Aspects that matter
Aspect #1: storylines clipped together with red paperclips into bundles Aspect #2: the same storylines bundled differently with orange paperclips
Bundled storylines!

Bundled storyline offers

Clarity

by visualizing how authorial intent plays out across the possibility space that emerges from user–LLM interaction.

Control

by turning narrative space into a visible object that authors can steer through iteration.

Example agent: an LLM game master

An author writes the prompt. Each player's run goes its own way.

System prompt

You are an expert dungeon master whose task is to write the next line of the story. Your job is to craft a dynamic and immersive game world for the player character, who is acting as the player character. You may ONLY control the narrator and NPCs in this scene. Your response consists of:
- a short description of the situation as the narrator. Each sentence in a standalone paragraph.
- for each relevant character, what they do or say, each with at most two sentences. Each sentence in a standalone paragraph.

Story setup:

The ducks and geese sharing the pond grow increasingly agitated as winter approaches. With food becoming scarce, competition intensifies among the waterfowl, filling the air with tension and the sharp sounds of territorial disputes.

Player character name: Duckling
Player character description: A weak duckling who's just a kid and do not know much about the world.

Detail of current scene:

Game Master

A sharp honk pierces the air—the Goose, larger and more aggressive than any other waterfowl here, chases a smaller duck away from a patch of reeds.

Duck Mom says quietly, “Stay close to me today, little one—the pond is becoming a harder place.”

What do you do?

Player
(Yell at Goose) But we are here first!
Game Master

Your small voice rings out across the pond, high-pitched and trembling with the courage of youth.

Goose hisses, “A duckling dares challenge me? You're barely a mouthful, little one.”

Cite us

@article{Wang2025Elsewise,
  title={Elsewise: Authoring Open-ended Interactive Narrative with Possibility Space Visualization},
  author={Yi Wang and John Joon Young Chung and Melissa Roemmele and Yu-Qian Sun and Tiffany Wang and Shm Garanganao Almeda and Brett A. Halperin and Yuwen Lu and Max Kreminski},
  journal={Proceedings of the 39th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology},
  year={2025},
  url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:284934868}
}

contact: ywang485@gmail.com