Playing the Plot: Optimizing Narrative Structure with Strategic World Models

How should a story be told? While a story's chronological events (\emph{fabula}) are fixed, their reveal order (\emph{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 \emph{suspense} as the audience's posterior variance over payoffs and \emph{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 \emph{in medias res} openings---emerging purely from the mathematics of strategic play.