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Social-Network-Based Guided Emergent Narrative
(2013) Abernathy, Rose; Eaton, Eric
Narrative is a key component of many video games; however, the interactivity of video games poses unique challenges to storytelling. An ideal video game narrative would react flexibly to the player’s actions while still maintaining narrative integrity and following the author’s intent. The goal of narrative generation is to balance flexibility and authorial intent without requiring every possibility to be planned for ahead of time. This paper describes previous work in narrative generation and proposes a new approach called Social-Network-Based Guided Emergent Narrative (SN-GEN). SN-GEN represents overall story plots as features of a social network graph. Individual agents in the story act autonomously, but are guided by the plot points. The game Sprite Quest is presented as an implementation of SN-GEN. Finally, SN-GEN is analyzed along two dimensions: expressive capability and flexibility to player interference.