I'm finding that I really like games with emergent narratives (most, if not all Roguelikes; Paradox strategy games; Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War; ARMA; Rebuild; Dwarf Fortress; XCOM, and many more!) and Immersive Sims/games with heavy ImSim influence or elements (Dishonored and Deathloop; Hitman; Deus Ex; Prey; Cyberpunk 2077; Metal Gear Solid V; Far Cry; Breath of the Wild; My Summer Car; Pathologic; Space Station 13; Shadows of Doubt, and more!)
And it makes me wish there were more games that combined the two. Like a Nemesis system-like with weaknesses tied to the environment that a savvy player could use for their advantage, or some shit.*
*yes, I know some of those examples will overlap and be both already. I said I wish there were more games, after all, lol
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 Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment The Second Artificial Intelligence for Interacti
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.
dfkhfghgfd I LOVE that since Essek developed from Sinister Smirking Sorcerer/Courtier to Awkward Shy Dork, the earlier interactions with Caleb where he’s constantly all *raises eyebrows, makes mysterious intimations, smiles* now just look extremely homosexual
So I think I’m going to abandon my current run so I can actually record the next one, but so far King Martín of Asturias has had a very eventful life.
Now King Martín was a very attractive man, not to mention a genius and a king, so the ladies were throwing themselves at him. Since his betrothed was only 12 he thought to himself, sure, I can take one of them as my lover until I finally get married. Come to find out, the woman he slept with was the wife of the the very gifted physician he had just invited to court from a foreign country. As he didn’t want to lose the man’s respect, he attempted to break off the affair, but it was too late! His lover was pregnant and the court physician found out King Martín was the father. Oops. So the court physician HATES his guts. Surprisingly this didn’t effect his level of care, since he actually did a remarkable job at treating the kings various ills. But. When the King finally did marry his Byzantine princess, the physician was ready.
See, due to his high learning, the king had also appointed the physician as Court Chaplin. (The King’s council was very meritocratic that way). So during his job to hunt apostates he accused the recently converted Queen! Forcing the King to decide in front of the entire court whether or not to burn his wife at the stake. By sparing her, he set a dangerous precedent of mercy towards infidels and lost standing with the clergy, but he maintained his alliance with the Byzantines.
The King did break off his affair with the physician’s wife once he was married, and intended fully to never stray. But then. He saw HER.
I made King Martín in the ruler designer so naturally he was amazing, but here was a woman who could actually be his match! Attractive and smart, she was perfect. He had to have her.
So King Martín took her as his lover. Their first child, Fernando, was an attractive genius, and he was legitimized, baptized by the Pope, and named the heir above any of his other natural-born or bastard children.
Eventually the old Basillus of the Byzantine Empire died, and with him, the Byzantine alliance. King Martín saw his chance. He would have his wife disposed of and marry his lover!
Except the woman wouldn’t die. She survived seven assassination attempts, and her pregancies kept forcing King Martín to delay his plans.
Eventually, luckily, he was finally able to poison his wife and no one was the wiser. He married his lover Onecca straight away and they have lived happily together since.
It’s interesting how the stories of Dwarf Fortress produced by the players, like these pretty cool ones up here, do put the truth to The Toady One’s design goal of Dwarf Fortress as a full fantasy world generator. Because, from good worlds there comes good stories...
So...I wanna talk about how ridiculously proud of Aramis Stilton I felt during/after A Crack in the Slab and why I think Dishonored 2 has more/better narrative elements than people think. This discussion involves the scenario that occurs if you knock Stilton out. So...SPOILERS.
So, when we see the Stilton manor in the past it’s just super, super fancy. Velvet and gold and ostentatious displays of wealth and “culture” everywhere. And we overhear servants and guardsmen talking about how absolutely phony this is for Stilton. He buys books he never reads by the foot so he looks educated. He has multiple instruments he can’t play scattered about the house. His silvergraph studio seems to focus on aristocratic fashion (or something). He leaves worried notes to his kitchen staff asking for fancy foods that, it is clear, he doesn’t much care for. And we hear Stilton himself continuously express concern over how he is perceived by the upper class and nobility, both in the past and the initial present.
The things that Stilton ACTUALLY cares about are hidden away and limited to small spaces: a tiny prep area for butterflies, some workshops squirreled away in corners, a piano in the process of being taken apart/put back together hidden behind the stairs.We get the feeling that Stilton is interested in the natural world and engineering. We KNOW he cares about the working class in general and his miners specifically. But these interests aren’t really expressed in the past manor.
BUT
If you knock Stilton out, he doesn’t view the ritual and, thus, doesn’t go mad. When you return to present day, you see a drastically re-imagined manor. The decor is more minimalist, clean, and bright (and much more to my personal taste). But more tellingly, and more importantly, we see that Stilton is no longer hiding who he is and what his interests are. The decorations in the home overwhelmingly feature images from the natural world: mounted specimens, paintings of various critters, potted plants EVERYWHERE. I was especially charmed by the butterfly terrarium in Stilton’s room. There are also multiple paintings of street scenes, often focusing on the mining community, and some schematics. The kitchen designed for elaborate four course meals is gutted and is being repurposed into something else. The piano room has clearly become a lecture hall for topics surrounding (once again) the natural world and engineering. The silvergraph room now looks to be dedicated to “nature” photography. The notes we find in his office and room show that he simply does not care what the upper class thinks of him any more. He is happy to be himself. He is unafraid to make his home into his sanctuary, unafraid to display and share his interests with others.
And it makes me SO DAMN PROUD of him. Because that’s ridiculously hard to do, even if you’re in a privileged position as Stilton is. And he turns it around in three years, shortly after his lover passed away (you will have to pry canonical Theodanis/Stilton from my cold dead hands) and a hostile regime comes to power.
Just...I explored the change and basically went “YES. YES. YOU HAVE DONE WELL. I AM PROUD OF YOU.”
So TL;DR (too late): Arkane did a ridiculously, ridiculously good job of telling a really compelling story of alienation, classism, self-doubt, and self-acceptance with the environments. It was meaningful to me, made me feel so strongly about this relatively minor character. It was an amazingly well done emergent plot line. And I kind of feel like the people who are saying that the narratives in Dishonored 2 aren’t as good as the one in the first game just...aren’t looking around? No one told me that story. None of the characters mentioned it. But it’s so clearly THERE.
Just...damn. Whoever was in charge of environment design deserves the biggest goddamn gold star.
Image request: A stylized, slightly abstract image representing branching paths or interconnected nodes, symbolizing procedural generation. Subtle visual cues hinting at a dystopian/cyberpunk setting would be ideal (e.g., neon glow, fragmented cityscape). Color palette: predominantly blues and purples with accents of orange.
Imagine a game where every playthrough unfolds uniquely, shaped not by…
