Personally, as a writer and game designer, I find most emergent narrative is actually simulation, and the ones that work depend on the players imagination injecting meaning into the game events. Another version is basically just social media, with game rules and a sandbox aspect. That’s cool, and it can pay off massively, but narrative just feels like a strange word for it. World of natural consequences without imposed meaning seems a better fit, although it’s a mouth full. In tabletop games, we just call them sandboxes
People wish sometimes that video game ai could keep up with a good game master - but then again, you would lose the fun of hanging out with friends in person
Tynan Sylvester (creator of Rimworld, and author of "Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences") has some great thoughts on this in the early part of his GDC talk on building a 'story generator' rather than a game. He talks about 'apophenia' - the propensity of players to ascribe narrative meaning to events - and the way in Rimworld they strive to create simulation systems that facilitate that kind of player-provided narrative reasoning.
Tynan is a great example, as well, of how your own biases will influence the emergent properties of the game. This aspect may have been changed, but when it was first implemented, male colonists were either exclusively heterosexual or exclusively homosexual (straight or gay) while female colonists were inherently bisexual. In addition, there was a ten year biological age band where no colonist would pursue a romantic relationship with somebody who was ten years their senior/junior.
It's a great game otherwise, and I'm absolutely plugging it for a recommendation, but like with the systems that cause attacks and assaults only based on colony wealth at that time (and at times encompassing visiting trader wealth too), the emergent systems are a product of the author's ideas and biases, like any other creative work.
I'm not sure I agree with this, I had a great time playing Rimworld. It might not be to your taste, but it doesn't feel like there's any objective sacrifice to gameplay just for the sake of making the stories better - are there particular design choices you're thinking of?.
Although I do get a nagging feeling that I would get more out of playing Dwarf Fortress instead every time I play Rimworld, and usually end up binging that for much longer.
A decision to cause storytelling drama. The whole storyteller concept just throws random events at you without any deeper connection to any other systems, just to force strife for the sake of a "story".
I think there's sort of three broad categories here:
Narrative "emerging" because the level of risk, broad array of "ways to fail" and/or simulation complexity enables players to tell the story of their playthrough in an interesting way. (See: 'boatmurdered', Kenshi).
Narrative "emerging" out of inter player conflict and politics in large multiplayer games. See guild politics in PvP-with-consequences focused MMORPGS such as Lineage II (at least back in the day, it's a bit of a different game now), and EVE Online. (This sort of narrative blends with the first as well, see: http://www.wirm.net/nightfreeze/part1.html)
Narrative "emerging" as a result of very intricate procedural generation that actually does create logically consistent histories and conflicts in a single player world. (See: Dwarf Fortress and Ultima Ratio Regum). I guess things like GPT generated dialog belong here too, but that hasn't really achieved the "logically consistent" part yet.
This article seems to exclusively talk about the first one.
I have a hard time seeing most of these as "emergent narrative". They're just random level generation. By that metric Asteroids is "emergent narrative". 5 astroids approached, 2 from the left, one from the top, 2 from the right. I decided to target the one on the top. It broke in 2 but my quick reflexes swiftly took care of the one heading toward me. I gave chase to the other clearing the universe of one of its original 5 asteroids."
To have "emergent narrative" IMO requires a much larger set of verbs than "door, lock, hallway, monsters types A-Z, etc..."
Emergent narratives of the kind one might encounter in, say, Dwarf Fortress arise due to a combination of a (1) procedurally generated world in its early state with the necessary component of (2) ages upon ages of procedurally generated history applied on top of it.
The element of time past makes for a stark difference from other uses of randomness or procedural generation. By the time the world arrives in its “current” state where player-controlled characters enter, the long, complex, infeasible to study in detail history (which, by the way, involves said characters and their ancestors) imbues everything with potential meaning and significance.
I totally agree. These are emergent settings. Setting is one small part of a narrative. I feel like this actually was a goal game developers were trying to hit in the 90s and there really hasn’t been much progress…
I tend to agree. The choice to label this as narrative is a mind trick. A when a procedurally generated level spits out something completely bizarre and game breaking, you have a laugh at the developer and maybe file a bug report. When generated narrative is completely bizarre and game breaking, you engage with the unique experience and see where it leads. When a game has a poor story, you wish they bothered to employ a writer and not just graphics programmers. When a game has so little story it forces you to make it up yourself, you have to replace it with your imagination.
Personally, I think most emergent narratives are poor narratives. They lack the pacing and dynamics of one crafted by a story teller. I think Rimworld tackled this, with the different 'storyteller' options selecting certain types of events, levels of difficulty etc., trying to improve the sense of drama. But it is still stuck with poor choices making poor narratives. "So I made my pickaxe and tunnelled through the wall the noises were coming from and was eaten. The end.'
Surprising that the author completely "missed" sports games. Sports games (like soccer or other team sports) are by nature "emergent" as every single game is different. Trying to narrow down the definition to everything that's like Dwarf Fortress and Rim World is incredibly reductive.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's just lack of familiarity. Sports games come across as actively hostile to people who don't already know how to play sports games.
I've tried over the years to get into the various big franchises when I see something very cheap, but there's never a high-level tutorial for "I don't understand the gameplay and I barely understand the sport."
I'm guessing that if you go find some people playing football in a vacant lot near where you live, they'd be willing to give you a tutorial for "I don't understand the gameplay and I barely understand the sport," if you play with them, anyway.
I have to say that even after reading your post, I don´t understand how sport games could offer any narrative. But I´ve disliked every team sport I´ve encountered and never gotten the appeal at all. Maybe the author is the same.
Author hasn't listed Noita which is a recent game. Levels are fully destructible and procedurally generated. Every play through feels different mostly because you discover some item you never had before.
Pixel Dungeon is an Open Source roguelike dungeon crawler with procedurally generated maps. It also has high replay value because every play through feels different.
With Noita another narrative aspect of the game is the extremely hidden lore and extra game mechanics. They are never explained and the developers encouraged players to work together to figure it out. I believe they even encouraged datamining and manipulating game files as part of the "powers" of your knowledge seeking alchemist.
(mild spoilers)
Once you figure out that the world is actually much bigger than the normal levels you go through the game also has a big exploration element: you not only need to find spells to defeat enemies, but also to traverse the terrain and access secrets. There are cryptic messages hidden in places behind terrain, hidden combinations of liquids that have powerfull effects, secret artifacts that have to be interacted with in a certain way.
Nowadays if you see someone playing this game online you'll see them do all these things, know where to go and what to do. But when the game just came out almost none of this was known; people had to figure things out on their own and worked together in the Noita lore discord. I really liked being a part of it.
Ultima Ratio Regum, which makes this list, is a game that is easy to overlook because it looks like "just a Dwarf Fortress clone."
But Fortress-like is merely the foundation upon which the game is built. I would say the main innovative feature is it's a mystery generator, with a focus on the intersection of lost history (ruins, artefacts) with contemporary politics inside and between empires.
Where DF is very simulation focused, URR has made real steps forward for procedural and emergent _narrative_
urban dead, a humans vs. zombies mmo browser game has not a single of the stated features and was one of the most emergent story generation games i've ever seen, pushed by the players in external wikis. i think it's almost 15 years since in played it, so no idea what became of it.
Dang, there’s a blast from the past. I wrote up the original wiki for the Featherstone Library, creating the fiction that it was named after Donald Featherstone, and was a founder of the FFL.
Wow, blast from the past indeed. The community in this game was great. A bit later a similar game spawned - Nexus Wars, which was also great, but sadly closed down.
Fun read, but for me misses a pretty crucial 'feature to look for': Having multiple human players. Surely that is a great route to emergent gameplay? Reading the title of this post I just assumed DayZ and Arma 3 would be in there somewhere. Cool list anyway :)
> Emergent story is the story that is generated during play by the interaction of game mechanics and players
Totally agree, is DayZ in a nutshell. Creates some down right weird, funny and intense interactions between randomly paired humans. Excited to see what all the new updates bring.
One that is definitely missing from the list is The Long Dark. It's a perfect example of a game which has just enough systems for stories to write themselves. I've been playing on and off for a few years and the survival mode has consistently delivered.
Tried hard to get into it, but the whole thing just kept feeling like it was put together with bubble gum and string, even as I got deeper in. Any tips on how best to approach it?
This here is also a great game with emergent narrative: "One Hour One Life".
Each time you only have one hour of lifetime and act in a evolving multiplayer world.
Just copy pasting the first comment on steam to show what kind of stories unfold:
I was born mere seconds before my twin sister in a once prosperous town. Through the years and hardships, the townsfolk seemed to be dwindling in numbers and there were not many left. My mother, Honey Nova was the leader of our people and a strong and kind woman. She took very good care of my sister and I. She named me Yun and my twin sister Yan. Life was easy as a child, I enjoyed playing outside with my twin in the berry fields and following my mother as she worked as a gravekeeper. She was a hard working woman and was very close with her two brothers. When it came time for her to pass on, she begged to be buried next to them.
My sister and I gathered around her as she stood on her gravesite (she always put her work first, a dedicated grave keeper). We cried as we said our last goodbyes - her dying words were "I'm proud of you daughters". We took off our hats in respect and steeled our resolve to become the village's next gravekeepers. Our first order of action was to bury our mother and uncles and then to find them gravestones.
Our work was busy and fast-paced. We scoured the wilderness for headstones, built paths and plots, and even found a few wayward relatives in the wilderness that could finally be put to rest. A few years after my mother died I had my very first son. Stillborn. Too young for a grave, too old for the pain it left in my heart. I never even gave him a name. I was eventually able to conceive another son, I named him Yama. He was a quiet child, never speaking much - but seemed to intrinsically understand the world. He immediately set out and fed himself and started working. I was so proud! He was a role model for his (many) cousins. My sister was a fertile woman.
Then along came my second son... I gave him the name Yurem.
Yurem was a little more, spirited. Around the age of four is when I noticed he wasn't quite right. I retired from my job to stay home with him and hopefully instill some of my mother's values - love, respect, strength. Around the age of 14 he started acting out in the kitchen and I grew increasingly concerned. He would throw off his clothes and hide in the corner mumbling things about God and witches. I pleaded with him to put his pants back on, nothing seemed to get through to him and nothing could prepare me for the horrors about to unfold.
In the following year, Yurem snapped. He had found the body of my first born son and approached me. He screamed at me, veins popping from his neck and forehead. He said I was a witch, that I had an abortion and that I needed to be cleansed. My oldest son Yama overheard and came to my defense. It was then that we saw the knife behind Yurem's back. Yama dove in front of me, telling his brother that I wasn't a bad person. That stillborn children happen all the time. We don't have hospitals. But there was no talking Yurem down, he had finally jumped head first into the deep end. As Yurem lunged for me, Yama grabbed him and wrested him to the ground. After a long tense struggle, he finally managed to wrench the knife from Yurem's hands, but suffered several wounds in the process. Struggling for his breath, he raised the bloody knife back towards Yurem and said he will die for his actions. Yurem slunk to the ground and began sobbing hysterically.
About this time, other members of the village were alerted to the unfolding scene and rushed to the room. When they entered, all they saw was Yurem crying in a heap on the floor and Yama with a bloodied knife. I tried to explain the situation, but things started happening so fast. The leader called for the exile of Yama and all of the villagers immediately followed suit. They cursed him! The poor child that only ever tried to protect his mother. The one that held so much promise. His body turned to bones almost in an instant, unable to carry the weight of all the curses. I stared, unable to speak, at the skull of my child. All I could pictures was his bright brown eyes as he looked up at me when he was a boy.
The villagers slowly filtered out of the room one by one. It was when the last one left that I heard it, a slow, menacing chuckle. Yurem was staring at me from across the room. I screamed for help and ran out of the room. I told everyone who would listen the story of what actually happened, but nobody would listen. Yurem disappeared at some point, maybe into the wilderness, maybe into the delivery truck that frequented our village. I lived the rest of my life in fear, hoping he would never return. The only respite was the love of my gentle sister and my many nieces. As our lives neared their end, my twin sister and I made our way to our graves. Her children came one by one to tell her they loved her. I stood alone, with only one random villager running by that said RIP to me. My sister died shortly before me and I could feel death's fingers enclosing. My last words were: Curse Yurem Nova.
not really sure if it's rich enough to count as "emergent", but i've been enjoying playing stellaris in what i think of as "story mode", i.e. taking actions that i would like to imagine as part of a science fictional narrative rather than caring about whether they are the winningest things to do.
The list of games you linked is very different IMO. For example the Gothic Games , you have a major choice to chose a faction but except that everything is always the same(same quests, same dialog, same NPCs).
The games listed in this article have a lot of randomness , random maps, random characters, random events, usually you can change the world and have your action be reflected, each play will be very different then the others. I like watching on YouTube talented people play this kind of games, I am not so creative/inspired to play them.
Probably The Sims series could fit the article criteria.
People wish sometimes that video game ai could keep up with a good game master - but then again, you would lose the fun of hanging out with friends in person