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Procedural stories in video games can make you happy. When it hits, you will know that the game seems to be generating a coherent narrative from your own impulsive, seemingly chaotic actions. Both of this year's hit games are strikingly different, but their reactive stories are the same.
Procedural generation has become a familiar concept for players. The endless variations of levels that define games such as Hades in the ever-popular rogue-like genre and the infinite planets that populate the virtual universe of 2016's No Man's Sky are just some of the examples. But procedural narratives are not the same. It should be noted from pre-written branching stories. They are simulation-driven configurations of plot, setting, conflict, and people.
Video games are hard to convince players of than space itself, which makes procedural successes such as The Sims and Rimworld all the more eye-catching. It feels like the approach to story telling is getting even more narrative fruit.
Noupscale is a file on thechorusasset.com.
A fortress.
You won't get a consensus if you ask game makers about the origins of procedural narratives. For some, it started with the randomly generated dungeons of 1980's Rogue, for others, it started with their own adventure books. The designer and programmer of the tactical role-playing game Wildermyth sees procedural stories as a result of the experiences of board games like Dungeon and Dragons. Dwarf Fortress, a management game about dwarfs trying to colonize a text-based world, is the inheritor to this particular group of narrative design.
Dwarf Fortress can be intimidating for newcomers. Beneath its mass of inscrutable icons lies a complex simulation. The world is filled with flora, fauna, foes, and resources, and of course, your dwarfs, all of whom have unique personality. Your job is to make them happy by building a colony that can satisfy their needs and to make sure the group is still alive. If you fail to bring in the harvest after a monster kills half your group, you might ace colonization. The colony is over. Austin says that it sort of creates these stories. The drama happens in your head because you're invested in the personalities all along.
There is a suggestion of a machine beneath the hood.
Austin thinks that Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld are the closest video games have come to the freedom of a tabletop experience. The designer has fond memories of playing and dungeon-mastering dungeons and Dragons sessions as a kid with his siblings, Douglas and Katie Austin, who are writers on the game. Austin sought to capture this narrative possibility in a more accessible style than either of those games.
You might expect the beginning of Wildermyth to be with randomly generated characters. They are humble homesteaders but eventually become battle-hardened protectors of the realm. Along the way, there are rivalries, love, and death. The order of these events and their form are not preordained in the game. Narratives follow a broad structure, but they never quite land the same, because Wildermyth cooks up its story on the fly. It's important that you care for these characters in a way that would surprise even the most undeserving player.
Austin says that the game has a magic that is in its layers of handcrafted and procedural content. There is a grand central narrative with a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end, procedural events that stem from the combat and personality of your characters, and the comic strips that bookend each event. The code is able to incorporate your heroes into the plays because they are written in such a way. The game succeeds both on a momentary basis and as a larger work of fiction, ebbing and flowing like a classic fantasy epic.
The approach to time is what makes Wildermyth magic. Campaigns typically last a century of time, which means that your characters age and the enemy advance across the world map. Procedural RPG Unexplored 2 works the same way. When your character dies, time and the game's foes march forwards, you see the game's systems most clearly. There is a suggestion of a machine beneath the hood according to Joris Dormans, director of Unexplored 2. You are interacting directly with that, and you are collaborating with it to create the story. I think that is powerful.
:noupscale is a file on thechorusasset.com
The myth of the Wildermyth.
The cottage industry of procedural storytellers has become a cottage industry across Europe and North America. Kitfox Games is a developer and publisher of games like The Shrouded Isle. It is set to release a visually updated version of Dwarf Fortress on Steam, as part of an ongoing collaboration between co-founder and designer of Dwarf Fortress Tarn Adams and co- founder and designer of Dwarf Fortress Tanya Short. Procedural Storytelling in Game Design is a bible for aspiring writers and designers in the field. Emily Short, who is no relation to Kitfox's Tanya, joined Failbetter Games as creative director, bringing a wealth of interactive fiction experience to the studio.
Short's CV includes both interactive fiction classics, as well as tools like Versu, which was axed by the studio behind Second Life. Short has one foot in commercial game development and another in academia, like Dormans, who has a PhD in game design from the University of Amsterdam. She is not the only one because studios are reluctant to fund costly research and development when there is no guarantee of successful outcomes. After a few years cutting their teeth in the industry, game makers move into academia for research and then return to commercial game development with a fresh set of narrative tools.
:noupscale is a file on Blaseball ShortCircuits.
The University of California, Santa Cruz is the main hub of this academic study. The work that comes from the lab continually pushes the boundaries of artificial intelligence and narrative. Academics such as Max Kreminski are focusing their efforts on what they call Emergent Narrative, a name for the same kind of simulation-driven plots of Dwarf Fortress and Wildermyth. They describe it as a bottom-up approach to narrative design, and their job is to find and bubble up the interesting stories that fall out of the player's interactions.
The approach of "story sifting" could give even greater shape, structure, and meaning to these procedural narratives. Think of it as the computer scanning in-game events to find interesting micro-stories, like a lovers tryst or an escalating tale of revenge. These are woven back into the game after being surfaced to the player. Matching events that have already happened with those that are in the process of emerging is the greatest challenge. If he can do this, these stories can be interwoven in a way that they become a cohesive whole, a kind of plot-combo that stretches both in front of and behind the player.
Some titles have used something close to a story in the past. The Sims 2 features story trees, which remind the player to complete the events. The characters in the social simulation prom week look at the history of their high-school world to influence their next actions.
The most in-depth implementation of story sifting is in the baseball simulation, Blaseball. The Baltimore Crabs, for example, have a roster that includes even weirder procedurally-generated characters, which can range from Shakespearian to anti-capitalist. Cat Manning is a narrative and design consultant on the game. It was just oral storytellers who would have to see an event happen in real-time and relay it to the community. The Society for Internet Blaseball Research stepped in because players were having trouble keeping track of the data in the game. Manning says the fan community developed a tool to let players watch replays of past games using data available on the site.
A lot of the story sifting still happens organically in the chat, even though the site now features its own feed. When the scope is expanded to include tens of thousands of players, it's a rare example of a procedural story in a single-player game. The amount of fan art and even music is a testament to the way players are able to imagine color and detail into its world, just as readers do with literature.
Noupscale is a file onchorusasset.com.
Middle-earth is named Shadow of Mordor.
You might be wondering why major studios haven't jumped on procedural stories yet. The simple answer is that the variables become more complex and expensive. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor tracks your battles with the game's Uruk mini-bosses through its Nemesis System. The mini-narratives created by the game are more enjoyable than the main story. The State of Decay series features a cast of zombie survivalists, the first being more successful than the second.
2020's Watch Dogs: Legion is the most ambitious blockbuster attempt. The "Play As Anyone" system allows you to recruit non-playable characters to a squad of hacker-activists who are trying to liberate a grim, dystopian London. Every single non-playable character in the game has a unique background, which is generated by the game's "Census" system. The beauty of the game is that you can assemble this squad according to your own preferences.
There are so many spinning plates.
Liz England, the team lead game designer, says that the implementation of the "Play As Anyone" system was anything but easy to understand. She says it is like picking up a rock and finding a civilization below. The entire production had to be relearned because of its procedurality. England says that there is already so many spinning plates shipping a game like Watch Dogs: Legion, and then you say to everyone, "This tech you've been using, we're gonna throw it out." We need to invent it from scratch. It is very different to make a game with a difficult concept and then scale it to hundreds of people across multiple studios around the world.
England, who joined a new studio headed up by State of Decay's Jeff Strain, says there are other aspects of independent procedural stories that big-budget games can't hope to match. Crusader Kings 3 is a medieval power game that will give you text boxes with information specific to your game. It becomes more difficult when someone has to say something loud. England says that the audio is very expensive. It has to be recorded with actors in other languages. In narratives, procedurality involves relinquishing control over the player's experience. It is difficult to make sure it can meet the expectations of video game players.
:noupscale is a file on thechorusasset.com
Unexplored 2: The Wayfarer's Legacy.
The tools used to create games and the games themselves will continue to be innovated. Emily Short is excited about democratizing the space. She says that having knowledge and tools accessible and having new people come in who want to experiment is part of the reason she writes so much. Even if specific innovations that I am working on go nowhere, at least I am teaching other people. There is a huge space of unknown possibilities.
There is a huge space of unknown possibilities.
Others agree with Short. studios tend to have their own software solutions because of the high level of technical expertise required to make these stories work. It is a case of everyone building their own weird engine, according to Kitfox Games. She knows of a developer who is about to start looking for private funding to develop their own tool. There is an emerging vocabulary set, but it is basically industry jargon. It is very hard to discuss Procedural Storytelling without words. The co-founder of Kitfox predicts that machine-learning will buff up the audio and visual aspects of procedural stories, from voice-acting to art, so you will have higher production values on all independent games.
It is clear that procedural stories won't replace straightforwardly human-authored plots anytime soon. Short offers a thoughtful rebuttal for those who are worried. She says that it feels like it's mistaking the pleasures of one thing for the pleasures of a different thing. Instead, players will continue to enjoy the linear narratives of titles such as those in the Uncharted franchise while being able to play games that convey the thrilling sensation of co-authoring a story with a machine.
The field as a whole still feels as if it is only on act one, as the potential is as vast and varied as stories themselves.
