Graphics, Imaging, and Games Lab

Crafting satisfying narratives while preserving player freedom is a longstanding challenge for computer games. The quest structure used by many games allows players to experience content nonlinearly, but risks creating disjointed stories when side quests only minimally integrate with the main story. Instead, we propose a flexible, scene-based emergent story system that reacts to the player’s actions while maintaining a reasonable amount of authorial control over the story. Based on the philosophy of story scenes as kernels or satellites, we define a minimal story graph that initially contains mostly disconnected nodes. Over time, the graph is built dynamically from the most reasonable choices offered to the player. In this paper, we describe the framework of our system and present an early prototype game as a case study. We end with a vision of how our framework could be used to create more coherent, emergent stories in games.