ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN MODERN NARRATIVES

Laurynas Vainius Nordcurrent ,

The modern has exhibited incredible progress in advancement of graphical fidelity and scale exponentially surpassing table-top and other traditional game forms in market and overall social acceptance. Yet, with the aforementioned aspects of games constantly proving to be great improvements to their physical predecessors, in numerous respects, the narrative aspect of games remained either unchanged or, in majority of cases, regressed when compared to more complex tabletop role-playing games.

The vast majority of games feature ergodic, yet static narratives, incapable of adapting to a player if the plot structure is not planned for each user individually. These implementations seem vastly inferior to the function of a game master; a person planning, dictating and later adapting stories that the players experience whilst being engaged in a play. Due to the obvious constraints of digital games, this problem remained unaffected for the larger part of the video game history. Yet, with the new progressions being made in the field of artificial intelligence, more complex narrative structures and systems can be developed to be used in games including games that construct parts or even all of the story for the player acting as a virtual game master.

This presentation will analyze a practical example of a simple ergodic narrative structure featuring an engine capable of generating minor story aspects currently in-development for a mobile-oriented market. I will explain the reasoning of several objectives of the engine in addition to the best practices observed through play-testing and technological constraints that we have observed during the development cycle of the game in question.