Agent Inheritance Protocol: Speculating on Feralized Agents After Principals Die | OpenReview
How should a story be told? While a story's chronological events (fabula) are fixed, their reveal order (syuzhet) profoundly shapes the audience experience. We introduce a game-theoretic framework to optimize this narrative structure. Modeling stories as extensive-form games, we cast characters as strategic agents whose decisions define the fabula, while a Coarse Correlated Equilibrium captures plausible alternative outcomes. Using this equilibrium, we formalize suspense as the audience's posterior variance over payoffs and surprise as the Bayesian shift in expectations. We optimize the syuzhet by finding the event permutation that maximizes these metrics, subject to causal constraints and cognitive load penalties. Our end-to-end pipeline generates a story, constructs its game tree, computes the optimal syuzhet, and renders a comic book. Across 50+ generated stories, the framework autonomously discovers classic narratological structures---including flashbacks and in medias res openings