Procedural, Emergent, Tomatoes, Potatoes

I found myself with an empty Tuesday evening, so decided to puzzle a bit more on this question of a framework for emergent storytelling. While reading a chapter, I stumbled on a citation to this Verge piece, which led me to a few other pieces, eventually leading me to want to articulate what I mean by procedural storytelling and emergent storytelling.

To me, they are different but connected things, and I’m going to try to explain the subtlety between them. Recently, it seems the term “procedural storytelling” has somewhat subsumed both categories, so this is probably a little pedantic, but it does become a real point^TM if you can stick with me.

Some definitions

Procedural storytelling: directly generating narratives via some algorithm or script. The direct output of this mostly computational challenge is a coherent and cohesive narrative. A lot of work over time has gone into trying to structure narrative in pieces to then generate a multitude of outcomes that are all still coherent narratives, to use AI to try to generate fiction (AI Dungeon), or some combination of these things. Procedural storytelling autonomously generates stories. It doesn’t require an external agent to impose narrative structure, because the output of the system is narrative itself.

Emergent storytelling: requires an external agent to impose narrative structure. It is the narrative that emerges from a system designed for some other purpose. The Sims, for example, does not generate stories. It simulates people living a life, most of which is extremely boring and involves avoiding bathroom accidents, or continuously greeting strangers only for them to walk away and leave the lot. Crusader Kings is a simulation of history, complete with armies and countries and rulers. Yes, interesting stories can and do emerge, but the game itself is a complex math machine designed to simulate the march of history. Interesting stories emerge indirectly, and it takes an outside agent (a player) to recognize and define them. Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld are other games in this category. The vast majority of things that happen in any of these games or games like them are uninteresting, repetitive, and/or irrelevant to whatever the player cares about, and yet they are very fun.

Note: this category includes both autonomous and directed emergent storytelling as described in my previous post.

Scripted narrative: encompasses both branching and linear narratives. These are authored narratives that are experienced by players such as you’d find in the Witcher 3 or Baldur’s Gate 3 or other games that don’t necessarily include the number three. I won’t spend time here in this post, even though I have a deep, deep love for branching narratives.

Now, with those bounds set, we can argue about where games fall on that spectrum and whether or not that spectrum is accurate. But I’d like to talk about “story-sifting” within this frame.

What would Crusader Kings be without a little emergent incest?

Story-sifting

Story-sifting is a term for surfacing the things that are interesting from a sea of random events. As defined above, this is typically a player responsibility. Many uninteresting things happen; players find the diamonds in the rough and impose narrative structure on them. Story-sifting by a machine automates this task. Now, instead of players identifying interesting moments in their simulation, an algorithm could do so. And if an algorithm can understand what parts of a story are interesting, it would likely be better at generating new stories directly.

This is where the line between procedural and emergent starts to blend. Now, you could have an autonomous system both create a sea of uninteresting random events and also surface the minority of interesting moments, thereby generating a coherent and cohesive narrative. I could let my Sims world run for hours, and an algorithm could tell me a lovely tale of the interesting things that happened.

But why would I?

Part of what makes emergent narrative so interesting and valuable is that it is unexpected. I am surprised when my Sim gets angry and slaps her husband because he flirted with the bartender. I am surprised when I discover in Crusader Kings that my wife had twins 3 years ago with my rival, so my heir isn’t actually my son, and here I am infirm and obese, soon to be bereft of a throne. Most of my play is about the intricacies of raising a family or ruling a realm, occasionally interspersed with these moments of narrative joy.

I’m curious how we will see procedural storytelling develop, as the research tends to focus on the computational challenge while design balances efficiency and experience. Maybe there is a formula we could discover that could quantify exactly how many interesting moments should be elevated compared to the uninteresting sea beneath (skeptical face). Maybe we could develop an algorithm that responds to player activity with a dose of expertly-sifted narrative pleasure just when their behavior seems to show waning interest. I understand the siren’s song that is procedural narrative. There’s something magical about figuring out stories to the extent you could teach a machine to tell them. But I think, like most things, the best future is one not where the machine tells stories for us, but where it helps us do so better ourselves.

For example, what if we had a tool that could help us and/or the game agents make choices that may eventually lead to more interesting / more varied emergences. Maybe in Crusader Kings 3, it’s a tool that lets me record the memories/events I think are interesting and then pieces them together for me. Maybe it’s a system built on story-sifting that may produce highlights of what happened in the world, introducing us to characters in another realm with some juicy drama that we could incorporate into our own play (hello, abduction scheme). I would love to see more work focused on co-authorship and narrative co-creation, in both emergent and scripted narratives, where insights from computational work on procedural storytelling can be brought to bear.

Emerging Stories in the Sims

(repost from Medium, as I figure out my blogging situation!)

I’ve been spending a lot of free time playing the Sims 4 again. I’ve downloaded a fair number of gameplay mods (adding mental health, menstruation, more relationship dynamics, etc.), and I’m trying some historical challenges (e.g., play from the 1890s to modern time). The creativity of creators for this game is just astonishing.

In all this play, I’ve noticed that there are two main kinds of storytelling that players engage with in the Sims 4:

• Directed
• Autonomous

Directed storytelling is as it sounds — the player directs the events that happen. They control the traits and moods of the Sim characters and they orchestrate events that they’ve planned out in advance. In this style, the game is a stage, and the storytelling is constrained by that stage in some aspects (e.g., the possible animations and actions), but beyond that it’s reliant purely on the player’s imagination and skill with the tools of the stage. Every Sim is controlled by the player as they act out a script. There is some allowed randomness here as the game simulates the created relationships, but primarily, the story is player-directed.

Autonomous storytelling is what I’ve learned that I prefer. This method is reactionary to the autonomous actions of the Sim characters. The game itself allows autonomy to be turned on or off, but there are also many mods that can impact autonomy, whether overall or for specific kinds of actions. The Sims themselves “decide” what they want to do, who they want to talk to and flirt with, whether they want to paint or sleep or play with their children. Here, the player primarily reacts to these autonomous actions and may occasionally intervene to help the Sim accomplish what they seem to want, but the director is really the Sim itself. There is no game entity fully controlled by the player or representative of the player. Stories emerge from the game character.

She’s not so pleased with her husband right now

Back in 2012 when I was still dissertating, I spent a lot of time thinking about “emergent narrative.” The idea at the time was that games allow players to create stories about their experiences that are separate from the game narrative and are constrained by the possibilities of play within the game. Someone may be playing World of Warcraft and join a player event where gnomes run across the continent and tell a great story about their level 1 gnome and the dangers she faced in this journey. This player-created event uses the systems of the game (levels, races, locations, enemies) to tell stories of brave, tiny gnomes. (Blizzard eventually added this event officially in-game after consulting with the player-creator). It is not game narrative per se, because the story of gnomes running across the world isn’t part of the game’s story as designed, but it is still a narrative of the gameplay. This is emergent narrative, and on which diegetic level it exists remains a question to me.

I think the Running of the Gnomes, as it was called, is a mix of Directed and Autonomous emergent storytelling. In World of Warcraft, autonomy systems are very primitive. Typically, NPCs simply walk a predetermined path and enemies spawn in set locations and follow predictable behavior. The gnomes are purely player-directed, but the drama of the story arises from a combination of game actors — tigers pouncing out of the jungle to devour your level 1 gnome — and player actors — at the last second, your friend, a mighty dwarven warrior, slices the tiger in half with its axe.

Lots of gnomes, lots of pink pigtails

This adjusts our schema to now be:

• Directed. Dollhouse-style play.
• Autonomous. Reactionary play.
• Hybrid. Player actors responding to game actors.

Where hybrid primarily differs is in its inclusion of player actors. I believe this category is the one traditionally meant by “emergent narrative,” but it felt limiting to me. The Sims doesn’t have any game narrative, so all stories must emerge, but those stories are not typically about the player’s experiences. They are about the characters’ experiences. The stories are idiosyncratic to the players, since they observe or enact unique character stories, but they are not about the players. In fact, ideally the players are invisible in the stories that result.

That said, the Sims 4 does allow hybrid emergent storytelling as well. Should a player create a Sim of herself and only control that character, responding to those around her, that would fall into the hybrid category. However, all Sims in a household are played characters, so this would be difficult to accomplish in most circumstances.

Possibly in this year 2023, there are more interesting theoretical frameworks of emergent narrative to work with, but Medium is for sharing half-baked thoughts, right? (edit: it’s not for sharing half-baked thoughts, I think actually.)

Some thoughts on story in MMOs

This came up in the comments of a thread that Brent Breaux started earlier. We started discussing the manner in which story is going to be told in SWTOR.

Storytelling is usually a way to communicate what happened in one place to someone who was in a different place. The storyteller is the mediator of this narrative. In a game, this changes a little bit. Instead, the listener pretends to be a participator in the story and they craft that story themselves through the choices they make in the game.

This works particularly well in RPGs. A single player is able to see a character (sometimes many) and a world shift before his eyes as he makes changes that are meaningful. Some of the most powerful stories told in games earn much of that power through the agency they give to their players.

Story in an MMO has up to this point been quite different. As an MMO player, one enters a world that is much like our own. There are many stories happening, many characters and players, and many places to explore. Each place may have its own story and sometimes we happen upon stories we didn’t expect. In most cases, these are told through quest text, a somewhat tedious element of the game which many players skip.

The Silver Lining

All of the media we encounter affects us in some way, but for me, one game in particular drastically influenced the direction of my life – King’s Quest VI.

I was 10 years old at the time, and this game shipped with the desktop my parents had just purchased. I was quite computer illiterate at the time, so first thought that the 5 1/4″ disk drive (yes, it had one of those) was the CD drive.

If you’ve never played the series, you missed out. It’s a delightful adventure series that uses myth and fantasy  to propel one through a world of drama and excitement. The 6th installment was particularly amazing because it features the Charon and the Underworld, the Golden Fleece, the Minotaur, Druids, Beauty and the Beast, Alice in Wonderland, etc. – all of my favorite things. Or perhaps they are all my favorite things because I encountered them there.

Characters in History (and also Starcraft)

There was a fascinating article put up on Gamasutra today which deals with the process of storytelling in a real-time strategy game (RTS). Brian Kindregan, the lead write of Starcraft II, gave some fascinating insight into the narrative process at Blizzard. Two great points were made.

1. Storytelling is about the characters, even, or maybe, especially in an RTS.

2. The medium of games is evolving rapidly and with it, our understanding of how to tell stories.

First, the characters. I’ve especially been thinking lately about the way characters are created. There is theory that tries to understand how we create imaginary people out of text (especially Possible-Worlds theory), but what I really want to know is the ins and outs of creating those characters. What are the pieces of them that we need in order to be engaged? As Brian says, engaging the reader is always the goal no matter what medium you’re working in.

…engaging the reader is always the goal.

I think I tend to think of the classroom in the same way. I’m telling a story, either one written by Homer or Vergil, or one lived by people in the past. My goal is to engage my readers, my players, my participants – my students.

Is there something that lets us create these alternate worlds in our mind and populate them with people and physics? I know that when I play a Warcraft game, even World of Warcraft, I feel like I’m in Azeroth. It has a geography, a culture, a history, etc. It’s a real place in my mind. Jaina and Thrall and Arthas are characters I recognize and feel for. In my case, I have a soft spot for Arthas and killing him was one of the most problematic things I’ve done in a game. But back to the topic at hand – why do I care?

Kindregan says that we need characters to differentiate between the parts of the world that don’t matter, the disposables, and the parts that do. Sometimes I think history is the same way. There’s a judgment made about what matters. Caesar. Nero. Constantine. These matter. Joe Roman… ? In our modern culture of equality, such statements probably elicit a bit of horror. “Gasp, how can you say one person matters more than another?” Somehow, these characters in the story of history make it meaningful and relevant. And they are characters. One of the big paper topics of a class I TA’d for last year was – “How do we find out who Caesar really was?”. What we have left from history are character sketches of a person larger than life. What does it even mean to know what someone really was? Everyone is a character, maybe nothing more.

I was talking to my students the last day of class this term about the Nike revolt. The emperor made a decision to slaughter 35,000 people in order to end chaos and affirm his role in power. My students didn’t engage with that story until Justinian became a character. Why did he decide this? What were his motivations? What were the consequences? It was when they were able to enter into a world of Justinian that they started to actually think about that event and what it means. It took a character to teach them history.

Look for another post about Arthas and his role as a character in the story of Warcraft. Now I can’t stop thinking about him.