#emerging storytelling

[sparkleofstardust]

ahahaha. ouch

#those jason flashbacks are something else ngl incredibly painful but the storytelling in this section is fascinating #and omg the scene before this where flashback jason dissapears into the dark and tim emerges from the exact same spot instead ?? fantastic #but also hey arkham universe please treat your robins better i am begging #dc #batman #batman arkham knight #batman arkham knight spoilers #robin #tim drake #jason todd #my ramblings

[mr-kench]

Online Cooperative Games form such weirdly natural friendships. I’m not even talking like people you’d hang out with or anything but you just interact and get talking as if you’ve known each other your whole life and then leave not even remembering them the next day.

The most memorable moment I had like this was in Elder Scrolls Online. I was in the PVP area and I came across a raiding party and joined up we got into a casual conversation with everyone, started talking about work and finances all while tearing down a fortresses walls and slaughtering everyone inside. It was such a tonal dissonance between what was happening and what we were doing.

Another game is a cult classic game that’s been going since the ps3 era of games called PlanetSide 2. If you need to know what it is imagine Helldivers except it’s on a single planet across 3 continents and it’s three player factions fighting each other. You actually travel across the continent taking bases and outposts with the goal to dominate each continent. Really fun, really simple and I’m shocked that sort of gameplay never caught on.

However during while fighting to take the mountain base called The Crown all three factions met one was fighting from the base while my faction and an opposing faction were storming the Beaches of Normandy to climb that mountain. Everyone was getting into it myself included and bonds were formed as rag tag group formed to help each other climb just a few inches further. I heard someone yell “we won’t let those fuckers take this land!” I was an Infiltrator (basically a spy armed with a Sniper Rifle, pistol, radar gun and cloaking tech) I remember saving a group that was surrounded by sniping a few soldiers and distracting them enough for the others to mow them down. I was a squishy class meant to move solo and… Infiltrate but in that moment I became a part of the crew. We legit started taking bullets for each other as I led them to an emergency exit tunnel I scouted out. It was poorly guarded and I like to think we helped turn the tide by sneaking in a squad into the center of the enemy base. Michael Bay wishes he could direct the story that unfolded during that battle.

#story writing #planetside 2 #helldivers #helldivers 2 #online friends #emergent storytelling #the elder scrolls #elder scrolls online

[syn0vial]

i'm sick at home and bored out of my mind so i'm putting the bg3 crew in rimworld.

we're all gonna die.

#syn plays rimworld #the game decided to give gale 16 joints in his starting inventory and i've decided to roll with it #who am i to argue with emergent storytelling #also i have a bunch of medieval mods running so hopefully this playthru will have the appropriate medieval fantasy vibes #baldur's gate 3 #rimworld

[gxdmade]

I dunno if anyone else thinks about the Transponder Snails, but I do. I love those little guys a lot.

I like to think that the reason they look like the other person on the line is because they’re reflecting what the other snail sees, kinda like a form of caller ID in my opinion.

On top of this, I think if they hang around a specific person for a long time it’s like Sonic Adventure Chao gardens where they start taking on attributes of that person. And then you can also get custom accessories that match your clothes/signature items.

Obviously some you can just get them customized for identification/company purposes, but I just like the idea of them taking on someone’s attributes when they more or less imprint on them or something.

#the true storyteller {ooc} #I love these little guys sm. Usopp has one as a lil pet guy that’s also an emergency line

[carbkaiju]

Hello, for the wip game I would like to know what ddcats is :3

heya, thanks for the ask!

it's such a small and unfinished doodle, but it has a huge story to go along with it. (also take this sketchier version from my notebook)

in my Hamlet, I pair up every crusader and highwayman that I hire. I give them all 'R' and 'D' names, respectively, and I try not to separate them. these two are Ripple and Dent, and they eloped, are undeniably married, and are unkillable. I sent them off to meditate together after a mission and they disappeared. for two weeks.

their story truly inspired me and I HAD to draw something, even though I didnt have much time to do it. but I want to give them a proper piece of artwork. I love them so much and I havent separated them since. they were part of the first team I sent to the Darkest Dungeon and they brought everyone home safely, they are unstoppable. they're now happily in retirement and I no longer send them on missions. :)

#ask #wip #darkest dungeon #crusader #highwayman #furry #emergent storytelling my beloved

[fate-defiant]

Ever wonder about the Drosselmeyer family after his death. Must've been very awkward to just have the looming spectre of Axe to The Wrist hanging over your head for generations.

#like damn. what a diddly downer #i am also curious about the extent of their power #like. fakir did do concersations with a tree but he could do that BECAUSE he could do the writing thing. not the other way around #also this has to be a thing like. beyond just writing #it's storytelling man it's shaping reality! there's so much to it #idk i just wish we coulda seen some other ways in which the power could emerge #clearly writing is a useful tool but like. there's gotta be more to it #i wanna delve into it

[l-1-z-a]

Emergent narrative in The Sims 2

Matt Brown at AIIDE 2006

Notes from Matt Brown's (EA/Maxis) invited talk at AIIDE 2006, entitled "The Power of Projection and Mass Hallucination (Practical AI in The Sims 2 and Beyond)".

The general gist of it is that The Sims 2 is a sandbox world that provides some small bits of narrative-promotion to try to encourage emergent narrative sequences to actually emerge, by matching them against pre-authored snippets that seem desirable. In general, Matt Brown has a very AI-minimalist style of AI design.

Some points and claims:

Perception is key: how to seem intelligent, not how to be intelligent ("Big A, little i")

Complicated behind-the-scenes computation is usually interpreted as random behavior by the player, so don't bother

Players have short memories and quickly move on, so your AI should too

Correlary to the above: Local intelligence is good enough, at least for something like The Sims. Just focus on making sure everything makes sense in relation to what comes immediately before and immediately after, and players will fill in appropriate long-term stories themselves.

Consistency leads to player storytelling and ascription of personality

Some randomness helps avoid brittleness; keeps you from getting stuck in repeated or easily exploitable weird behaviors

The Sims/NPCs react to player-driven momentum, rather than initiating much of anything

Much of the local behavior is organized around story trees

Story trees are explicitly authored bits of story, very short

In their experience, the important thing here was the authoring tools, not the AI: given good tools, a few human authors can quickly create and maintain lots and lots of story trees. Important features were sorting of story trees by roles, easy searching/comparison/etc., batch creation/edits, and variable bindings.

He was pretty adamant that it's much easier to write authoring tools to make writing extensional definitions of "good story" feasible than it is to build a generative system with an internal notion of good story, since you'd have to do a lot of manual fiddling on the latter anyway.

Events are matched against all tree prefixes simultaneously, and of high-matching trees, the events that that tree says would come next in its story snipped is scored against a model of player interest ("player likes [x] events") and personality of the NPC, etc.

Players find it easier to give specific outcomes rather than traits — answering "likes hiking (y/n)?" is easy, while "x/10 for extrovert?" isn't.

Focus the player on the details you will actually use; in character design and personalities, don't try to faithfully model things that don't matter very much to your game

Anecdote: They had a complicated model for which urinals Sims would use: if there's 3, and someone's at the leftmost one, the Sim is supposed to use the rightmost one, not the middle one, unless they have some sort of weird personality. It wasn't reliably getting the responses they wanted, so they ripped it out and replaced it with a random-number generator, which people were just as happy to make up stories about and ascribe personality to.

A bit of an admission in the conclusion: As a sort of aimless "sandbox game", The Sims only really needs to make sure something interesting happens, but it hardly matters what. The player is responsible for making up stories (this is their sandbox after all), so the story-AI part of The Sims is only intended to provide some prompts and play off what the player does. That might not be the case in other types of games.

Follow-up: Maxis ended up deviating significantly from this view of Sims narrative with The Sims 3, bringing in Richard Evans to do a less AI-lite version of the AI, which included longer-term planning rather than purely emergent narrative. Evans has given a number of talks on that, which I unfortunately don't have good notes on, but here (archived) is a brief writeup someone else did of his AIIDE 2007 talk.

Mark J. Nelson, 2006-06-21.

<Note index>

Comments welcome: [email protected]

Many thanks to @andrevasims for searching in this post:

#sims 2 beta #sims 2 #ts2 #Emergent narrative #The Sims 2 #AI design #AI #artificial intelligence #article #sandbox world #storytelling #authoring tools #story trees #event matching #player interest #NPC personalities #game design #game development #gamedev #game dev #Matt Brown #ea maxis #Mark J. Nelson #simblr #ts2 simblr #the sims 2 #sims2

[citylighten]

BEGINNING // PREVIOUS // NEXT

#dear diary #simblr #ts4 story #ts4 storytelling #black simmer #sims story #A RARE DIARY ENTRY EMERGES

[sistersorrow]

Populous, the progenitor of the god game genre, came out in 1989

35 years later, in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty-four, the genre hasn't evolved much beyond either being a wizard mayor or a cosmic baby sitter

#it's hard to really articulate what I mean #but god games don't make me FEEL like a god #instead I feel like I'm a sorcerer city planner who also has to run a daycare for little creatures too dumb to survive on their own #in the current year with games like Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld focusing so much on emergent gameplay and storytelling #it feels like the modern state of gaming would be fertile ground for a game designed to be a sort of myth generator with the player as God #also really odd that for a genre called “god games” religion barely exists beyond a few ways to harvest prayer mana #really feels like there's a lot of potential there but I have no clue what that would look like #games #god games #basically I want a game that allows me to larp the entire Old Testament #and end up with the sort of stories that would get posted to an r/shit[GAME NAME]says subreddit

[vvelegrin]

taps mic. Emergent storytelling

(bad at video games)

#pathologic #tried to save a baby but instead got hugged by like five infected people #oh well. there goes my five-day streak without getting infected #aheem heem. emergent storytell--[i am shot by a sniper]

[florallychaotic]

Adding to the list of eventual video essay ideas (we will get to ever after before the new year i swear): Why Once Upon a December is the best song in an animated musical (and how Disney has NEVER managed to surpass it)

#thats not like purely me having nostalgia for the song #though i definitely do #but the absolute powerhouse of music and storytelling that it is #combined with the haunting historical context #.......literally both the parts where the aristocracy emerge from the paintings #and anya singing 'far away long ago' as she dances with nobles in her fantasy #still give me goosebumps and anastasia is easilly the film ive watches most in my life #sorry but the the way liz calloway sings 'things it yearns to remember' #as her father the terrible last czar of russia greets her? never seen an animated musical top that

[bloodborne-on-pc]

Lost both Reynauld and Dismas in a party wipe. Thanks a lot Miller.

#darkest dungeon #guess i'll have to get that achievement on my next playthrough #tbh it didn't help that dis became abusive and would not stop stabbing rey #literally all of the friendly fire was aimed at him it was so fucked up #love the emergent storytelling of this game's rng

[chromegnomes]

I'm problematic and a poser bc I'm extremely interested in Tarot as a system of symbolism and interpretation, but have never gotten a reading and don't particularly want to

#I'm just obsessed with cards #and emergent storytelling #and religious imagery #and Dramatic Nouns

[amber-gimlet]

My durge was doing the "let me show you magic" convo with Gale, and it got to I think the third dice roll where you have to imagine something.

she tried to imagine her life if she was free of all these afflictions and curses.

crit failure.

#three distinct siege modes #bd3 #aaaaah I emergent storytelling through gameplay mechanics #I had inspiration but decided not to reroll it #you can't get a result more perfect than that

[foggyoutline]

The September issue of the Foggy Outline newsletter is out! Our serial continues with part 3, which sheds a little more light on what Callum's doing at this party, and why no one there has been paying him any attention (even as he rifles their purses and snoops through their wardrobes).

running order

prologue: generating a character with Spindlewheel

tonight's performance: in which Mari is late to the party

asides: what's new with Merely Roleplayers, what else I'm making and enjoying, #pinspiration

fin: oracles and divination

#newsletter #foggy outline newsletter #spindlewheel #spindlewheel rpg #oracle deck #emergent storytelling #serial fiction #merely roleplayers #of the sword #actual play uk #interactive soup

[typicalcommondandelion]

overjoyed because my d&d character's intended characterisation did finally manage to get into the story at the severity I wanted it to be at instead of me just going "Yeah so my blorbo is like this, this, and that..." to explain his behaviour in-post at every post-session

#dreamy chatters #this is about my little centuar man gaining inspiration from sharing a vulnerable moment with an npc he holds dear #and then holding onto that inspiration for IRL entire MONTHS. after like 2-3 months pass in-game #to finally use that inspiration at a pivotal point in their relationship where he has to convince said NPC that he values them for them #rather than valuing them because of what they repretent to him #and proceeding to FAIL #RAUCOUS CHEERING MY BOY IS SO OVERCOME BY REVENGE IT FUCKS UP THE RELATIONSHIP HE HAS WITH THE ONE NPC WHO FULLY KNOWS AND UNDERSTANDS- #-SAID REVENGE #im so happy thr emergent storytelling worked 🎉🎉🎉