#emergent storytelling

[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.

[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

[arachnaetheyarnspider]

Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem Thoughts

So, @francostrider and I got our hands on a fan translation of Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem. So far, it's been a fun (if sometimes frustrating) romp, but I just wanted to touch on one moment of emergent characterization, which ensured that Matthis will NEVER be a primary part of our army.

So Matthis is a cowardly dumbass of a knight, and his sister, a healer, has already joined our side. Sir Dumbass rides up, laments that he'll never see his sister again, and then UP AND STABS HER! Thankfully, he doesn't crit, but there was a very good chance that he could have killed her off then and there.

Then, when she tries to talk him down from his stupidity, he decides to take that moment, not to apologize, but to lecture her for not dating.

Yeah, Sir Dumbass, welcome to the good guys. Give us your sword, before you hurt yourself or someone else.

[sparkleofstardust]

ahahaha. ouch

[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.

[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.

[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. :)

[ferociouslycreativemystery]

I think I've got it now! This is what you're supposed to do while you crochet/knit

[orbcube]

just summoned someone who helped me beat midir for the first time ever and then they got summoned in as my spear of the church boss so i had to kill them. fell to my knees

[spectrearia]

Hiya! I've seen you reference Eggs Benedict, but I don't think I've ever heard anything more about him except that he's a cat! (I may have missed posts, potentially.) Can you tell me more about him? :o

oh of course!! I've mostly posted about him on my art blog, but I can't help but tag posts that remind me of him here on this blog as well xD here's a link to his tag for all the chaotic sketches that I've done over the past few years: [link]

basically, Eggs started out as a silly sketch of a weird cat that I drew once and then he evolved into an actual Character once I found a cat like him in Minecraft and named it Eggs Benedict. my friend Cookie and I turned it into this running joke that he's a fae entity of sorts trapped in a "cat's" body (in quotations because he's got this... unnatural appearance to him that's not Quite a real cat but is still Just Enough like one to count). he likes to torment Khalan for fun but Aya is fooled by a glamour that conceals his true identity from her, so she thinks he's a normal cat and doesn't understand why Khalan vehemently insists that he's Not and claims that the cat is out to get him. (they fight about this A Lot. Khalan has had Enough of this demon cat and wants it out of the house but Aya claims that Eggs is just -baby- and is mad at Khalan for saying otherwise lol)

the name Eggs Benedict is one Aya gave him (since she names all of her pets after food), but no one knows his true fae name because if anyone did, I feel like they'd just instantly die idk xD he was put in a cat-like body as punishment for horrible crimes against the fae council and is forced to stay with Aya as part of that punishment because we just thought that would be a hilarious idea lol (she absolutely babies him - which is incredibly demeaning and patronizing for someone of his status). what did he do to deserve that...? we have no idea. it will always remain a mystery.

anyway, sorry that's a lot haha. i've just put a decent amount of thought into this silly character over the years because I Wanted To and it's Fun 👍

[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.

[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: mjn@anadrome.org

Many thanks to @andrevasims for searching in this post:

[citylighten]

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[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

[vvelegrin]

taps mic. Emergent storytelling

(bad at video games)

[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)