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Curating Simulated Storyworlds
Abstract
There is a peculiar method in the area of procedural narrative called emergent narrative: instead of automatically inventing stories or deploying authored narrative content, a system simulates a storyworld out of which narrative may emerge from the happenstance of character activity in that world. It is the approach taken by some of the most successful works in the history of computational media (The Sims, Dwarf Fortress), but curiously also some of its most famous failures (Sheldon Klein's automatic novel writer, Tale-Spin). How has this been the case? To understand the successes, we might ask this essential question: what is the pleasure of emergent narrative? I contend that the form works more like nonfiction than fiction---emergent stories actually happen---and this produces a peculiar aesthetics that undergirds the appeal of its successful works. What then is the pain of emergent narrative? There is a ubiquitous tendency to misconstrue the raw transpiring of a simulation (or a trace of that unfolding) as being a narrative artifact, but such material will almost always lack story structure.
So, how can the pain of emergent narrative be alleviated while simultaneously maintaining the pleasure? This dissertation introduces a refined approach to the form, called curationist emergent narrative (or just curationism), that aims to provide an answer to this question. Instead of treating the raw material of simulation as a story, in curationism that material is curated to construct an actual narrative artifact that is then mounted in a full-fledged media experience (to enable human encounter with the artifact). This recasts story generation as an act of recounting, rather than invention. I believe that curationism can also explain how both wild successes and phenomenal failures have entered the oeuvre of emergent narrative: in successful works, humans have taken on the burden of curating an ongoing simulation to construct a storied understanding of what has happened, while in the failures humans have not been willing to do the necessary curation. Without curation, actual stories cannot obtain in emergent narrative.
But what if a storyworld could curate itself? That is, can we build systems that automatically recount what has happened in simulated worlds? In the second half of this dissertation, I provide an autoethnography and a collection of case studies that recount my own personal (and collaborative) exploration of automatic curation over the course of the last six years. Here, I report the technical, intellectual, and media-centric contributions made by three simulation engines (World, Talk of the Town, Hennepin) and three second-order media experiences that are respectively driven by those engines (Diol/Diel/Dial, Bad News, Sheldon County). In total, this dissertation provides a loose history of emergent narrative, an apologetics of the form, a polemic against it, a holistic refinement (maintaining the pleasure while killing the pain), and reports on a series of artifacts that represent a gradual instantiation of that refinement. To my knowledge, this is the most extensive treatment of emergent narrative to yet appear.
... The "explicit myth" of games can be seen as the written, authored mythologies of the world, and the "implicit" myth, as the personal, ritual action of myth, which in games is understood both as the active play experience and the personalized narrative. This split might strike a familiar chord in interactive storytelling communities to that of the authored versus player story [37,38,40,44,59,70] or emergent narrative [5,18,33,40,45,51,52,70,79,87]. The relationship between perennial games, myth, and emergent narrative, while fascinating, is unfortunately out of scope for this paper. ...
... The "explicit myth" of games can be seen as the written, authored mythologies of the world, and the "implicit" myth, as the personal, ritual action of myth, which in games is understood both as the active play experience and the personalized narrative. This split might strike a familiar chord in interactive storytelling communities to that of the authored versus player story [37,38,40,44,59,70] or emergent narrative [5,18,33,40,45,51,52,70,79,87]. The relationship between perennial games, myth, and emergent narrative, while fascinating, is unfortunately out of scope for this paper. ...
... Here, Sicart's broad notion of play[77] is useful, as it encompasses the wide-ranging possibilities of play.5 One useful comparison to emergent narrative here is James Ryan's notion of emergent narrative as nonfiction or lived experience[70], as the case is similar: These are both stories created (curated) from a wealth of material events. ...
Perennial games—ongoing, live games—are a form of games that often seem at odds with storytelling through their temporality, repetition and strange diegesis. This paper proposes a reframing of storytelling in perennial games as myth to alleviate these problems. Two layers of myth are presented, the first as the constructed fictional layer, and the second as the lived experience of the communities and people engaging with the game. This avoids the traditional player/author split, often seen as problematic in perennial games, by not focusing on authorship or control of these layers. Rather, it focuses on what each layer is affecting about the experience, how both authors and audience can engage with each layer, and how these layers affect each other. Three additional problems with perennial storytelling are identified that this reframing as myth helps alleviate. Framing the play of perennial games as myth shows how players are a part of a greater mythological experience in a disenchanted world. It explains the repetitive nature of perennial games as re-enactment and ritual, instead of as a logic-breaking repetition of story events. Furthermore, mythology has an inherently complicated relationship with truth and fiction, and this fits naturally with a similar relationship of perennial games and diegesis. Through this recontextualisation, we can improve understanding of how players are experiencing and engaging with perennial stories with a holistical understanding of their play and development.
KeywordsPerennial gamesMythologyMythRepetitionDiegesisPlay
... Though emergent narrative is possible in many forms, it has particular relevance with regard to procedural systems due to potential unforeseen outputs and recombination of algorithmically generated content. James Ryan's dissertation [36] on Curating Simulated Storyworlds argues that a curationist approach is key to producing successful interactive emergent narratives. This framework has been built on by Kreminski, Wardrip-Fruin, and Mateas [37]. ...
Procedural content generation has been applied to many domains, especially level design, but the narrative affordances of generated game environments are comparatively understudied. In this paper we present our first attempt to study these effects through the lens of what we call a generative archaeology game that prompts the player to archaeologically interpret the generated content of the game world. We report on a survey that gathered qualitative and quantitative data on the experiences of 187 participants playing the game Nothing Beside Remains. We provide some preliminary analysis of our intentional attempt to prompt player interpretation, and the unintentional effects of a glitch on the player experience of the game.
... Story sifting [31,29] attempts to address the problems of overwhelm and structurelessness in works of IEN by augmenting the underlying simulation (which is responsible for generating narrative events) with an additional technical system: the story sifter, which aims to detect narrative events or event sequences that make for compelling narrative material. Sifting thus allows the adoption of an "overgenerate and test" approach to storyworld simulation, in which simulations are allowed to generate a wide variety of surprising juxtapositions; sifters are tuned to detect and surface the most interesting narrative situations that emerge from the simulation; and the overwhelmingly vast amounts of uninteresting or nonsensical material also generated by the simulation along the way can be downplayed or dismissed, allowing for a coherent story to solidify. ...
We discuss the issues of authoring for story sifters: systems that search for compelling emergent narrative content within the vast chronicles of events generated by interactive emergent narrative simulations. We describe several different approaches to the authoring of sifting patterns that specify how to locate particular kinds of narratively potent situations; address the relationship between sifters and the simulations they operate over from an authoring perspective; and sketch several possible approaches to the authoring of sifting heuristics, or high-level encodings of what makes for a compelling story that could be used to guide a sifter’s behavior.
Our focus is on the problem of story sifting (or story recognition), which is the automated sifting of interesting stories that emerge from the interactions between virtual characters in virtual storyworld environments. To date, approaches to story sifting have been either: manual, with the burden of authoring sifting patterns; or automated, but of limited efficiency and scalability. In this paper, we address these shortcomings via a novel approach that recasts the problem as one of object detection. We demonstrate how an object detection model can be trained to detect story arcs of prominent story types emerging from an interactive virtual storyworld which can occur anywhere in the storyworld’s timeline. We evaluate our approach using synthetic virtual story environments that show our approach is able to: detect story arcs anywhere in the storyworld’s timeline with a high degree of accuracy and more efficiently than the state-of-the-art Arc Sift, making it scalable in real-time.
A distinctive aspect of interactive stories is how they enable players to impact the story based on their choices, with repeated playthroughs potentially yielding different stories. While some work has been done to investigate repeat experiences of interactive stories, the focus has mainly been on simpler linear and branching narrative systems. Recent advances in large language model (LLM) systems such as ChatGPT have sparked renewed interest in how users engage with artificial intelligence systems, and how LLM systems could be used in works of entertainment such as games and interactive stories. In this paper, we detail the findings of a qualitative observational study of 10 participants playing and replaying the interactive text adventure game AI Dungeon which is based upon the natural-language-generating LLMs GPT-3 and GPT-J. The study provides insights into how the player’s mental model of the system shifts from assuming the system is a linear or branching narrative to one with seemingly limitless narrative possibilities. This study also uncovers three related sources of motivations for repeat engagement with an LLM-based interactive story, which are impacted by the player’s shifting mental model of the system: narrative closure, narrative incoherence, and expectations for variation between playthroughs. Finally, this study highlights how uncertainty in terms of both how the system works and what objectives the player has could impact the player’s choice of actions when engaging with an LLM-based interactive story such as AI Dungeon.
Level Generation and Narrative Generation have often been separated from each other, even though they are both forms of Procedural Content Generation (PCG). The union of these between level generation and narrative generation, however, is under-explored given their history, and by exploring the union between these two topics will lead to new forms of PCG-enabled gameplay and stories. To address this under-exploration, we list both narrative and level generators and a description of a possible combination of these systems through shared knowledge representation structures. We also lay out various evaluation dimensions for these combined systems, which include level generation evaluation, expressive range, procedural narrative evaluation, and believable character evaluation. Finally, we describe the possible new frontiers that this approach enables, such as generating areas based on character personality traits.
Emergent Narrative (EN) affords extensive agency to participants but conflicts with the desire to guarantee compelling narrative. Recent work presents story sifting, an approach that curates simulation output, believing that intervention compromises the aesthetics of EN. However, this type of retrospective story sifting cannot improve narrative in participatory storyworlds, where the story emerges through play. We propose a new form of prospective story sifting intervention, that uses an incremental story sifter to identify possible stories during play, and passes these to a drama manager that intervenes in the simulation to make those stories more likely to complete. Our approach is incorporated into Awash, a pirate-themed EN game, and through qualitative analysis we find that the intervention increases narrative completeness and does not appear to compromise key EN aesthetics. Our work thus demonstrates a new technique that mixes generative and emergent approaches, and shows that intervention can be compatible with the aesthetics of emergent narrative.
Thue, DavidArtificialIntelligenceArtificial Intelligence (AI) systems have been used to generate narrative structuresNarrative structure and simulate virtual story charactersCharacter at a variety of different scales, across both academia and industryIndustry (industrial). Such systems are often built from specialized components known as intelligent narrative technologies. The goal of this chapter is to highlight some of the challenges that can arise when such technologies are used as part of authoring or executing an interactive story. Authoring in a way that works with these technologies often requires a host of technical skills, such as writing computer codeCode, building mathematical models, or predicting the effect of a simple changeChange on a large, complex systemComplex system. In addition to explaining why these skills are needed and the problems that they help to solve, this chapter will highlight recent and ongoing efforts to make authoring for intelligent narrative technologies more accessibleAccessible (accessibility) to those with fewer technical skills.
The process of authoring an interactive digital narrative has been one of the main issues in our field of studies. Throughout the history of the field, considerable attention has been given to the development and usage of authoring tools, very often disregarding the authoring process as a creative activity. In this chapter, we transcend the discussion around authoring tools, to delve into several models that describe the authoring process of different kinds of interactive digital narrative artifacts from ideation to publishing, identifying common practices across them. Subsequently, we propose an iterative and inclusive authoring process that is open to any form of interactive digital narrative artifact. The process consists of four stages: ideation, pre-production, production, and post-production. Finally, we discuss our thoughts on the understanding and acknowledgment of the interactive digital narratives’ creator and their role.KeywordsAuthoring ProcessAuthorCreationInteractive Digital NarrativesAuthoring tools
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