Toward supporting stories with procedurally generated game worlds

The Fourteenth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG ’19), August 26–30, 2019, San Luis Obispo, CA, USA, 2019

Procedural storytelling offers immense promise for games to offer more reactive narrative experiences that feel more deeply tailored to players' decisions. To date, interactive narrative systems have tended toward either a large emergent possibility space with less focus on narrative structure, or toward greater structure with smaller possibility spaces. In this paper, we introduce Lume, a system for procedural narrative generation that combines the best of these two approaches through a novel combinatorial scene architecture in which storylet scenes are comprised of parameterized node-trees. We detail how the system works and discuss how it moves toward creating reactive interactive narratives that are both dynamic and coherent. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Interactive systems and tools; Interaction design theory, concepts and paradigms; Systems and tools for interaction design; Hypertext / hypermedia.

Human-Computer Interaction. Perspectives on Design

Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Creativity in Natural Language Generation (CC-NLG 2018), 2018

International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 2020

Proceedings of the 9th …, 2012

2011

Abstract This paper discusses the concept of procedural content generation-based (PCG-based) game design as a way to create new kinds of playable experiences. We examine the different ways that PCG is currently used in games, and how that use impacts the meaning of the game and the player's experience.

Attractive and realistic content has always played a crucial role in the penetration and popularity of digital games, virtual environments, and other multimedia applications. Procedural content generation enables the automatization of production of any type of game content including not only landscapes and narratives but also game mechanics and generation of whole games. The article offers a comparative analysis of the approaches to automatic generation of content for video games proposed in last five years. It suggests a new typology of the use of procedurally generated game content comprising of categories structured in three groups: content nature, generation process, and game dependence. Together with two other taxonomies – one of content type and the other of methods for content generation – this typology is used for comparing and discussing some specific approaches to procedural content generation in three promising research directions based on applying personalization and adaptation, descriptive languages, and semantic specifications.

In this article, we address the particular issue of authoring interactive narrative with respect to video-games and interactive storytelling. We first introduce the narrative paradox between interactivity and narrative content in virtual environments and consider its impact on game design and development. We then introduce the concept of the Emergent Narrative (EN) and the particular philosophy it has been developed upon. Finally, we describe an authoring process for this approach that reflects on the characteristics of interacting within such a narrative framework.