Dramatica Framework

Each consumer is assigned one of eight narrative archetypes from Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley's Dramatica theory of story structure. Rather than passive consumers, agents enact narrative functions that shape how culture propagates.

Archetypes

★ Protagonist — Trend-setter. Actively seeks novel media, amplifies emerging genres. Higher exploration rate.
◆ Antagonist — Resists trends. High preference inertia, damps convergence. Anchors cultural memory.
▲ Guardian — Curator. Amplifies influence radius, pulls neighbors toward quality (high-coherence products).
▼ Contagonist — Distractor. Introduces noise, tempts agents away from dominant clusters.
■ Reason — Follows popularity. Preference update weighted by market share (majority rule).
♥ Emotion — Passion-driven. High variance preferences, sudden large shifts toward whatever resonates.
○ Sidekick — Conformist. Extremely high social influence; mirrors nearest neighbor closely.
● Skeptic — Contrarian. Anti-correlated movement; moves away from dominant trends.

Throughlines

Media products are tagged with one of four throughlines — the narrative domain they serve:

Situation External state — world-building media (documentaries, reality TV, news)

Activity External process — action-driven media (sports, gaming, action films)

Manipulation Internal process — psychological media (drama, true crime, thrillers)

Fixed Attitude Internal state — identity media (fandom, subculture, devotional)

Order Parameters

Mean Cosine Similarity — Global alignment. Are tastes converging toward monoculture?

Clusters — Number of distinct cultural groups (auto-detected via k-means gap heuristic).

Genre Entropy — Shannon entropy of dominant-genre distribution. H=0 = monoculture, H=log2(12) = uniform.

Narrative Tension — Measures inter-archetype preference divergence. High tension = archetypes pulling culture in opposing directions. Computed as mean cosine distance between archetype-group centroids.

Coherence — How well each throughline's products match their consumer cluster. High = products serve well-defined audiences.

Polarization — Variance of pairwise similarities. High = bimodal distribution (distinct camps).

Controls

Archetype strength — How strongly archetype behavior overrides base social influence. At 0, all agents behave identically.

Narrative tension — Amplifies archetype-specific behavioral extremes (protagonist exploration, antagonist inertia, skeptic contrarianism, etc.).

Throughline coupling — How strongly media products pull consumers toward their throughline's narrative domain.

Live Stats

Mean Cosine Sim
Clusters
Genre Entropy
Narrative Tension
Coherence
Polarization