Making sense of emergent narratives: An architecture supporting player-triggered narrative processes

Emergent games have the particularity to allow more possible situations to emerge than progression games do. Coupled with procedural content generation techniques they also tend to increase the number of possible situations that players can encounter., However, in case the player is not creative or lucky enough these many emergent situations can have a low narrative value. This article addresses this problem through an architecture that gives players more responsibilities towards the story by allowing them to trigger Narrative Processes. A Narrative Process is a script capable of making meaningful modifications to the story in real time. Our proposed architecture relies on an Interpretation Engine whose role is to make sense of the emergent world as it is changing and inform the Narrative Processes with high level story concepts such as actors and places., We first cover the basics of emergent games and interactive narratives and then present the architecture behind the Narrative Processes as well as the Interpretation Engine. We conclude by a discussion of the potential impact of our architecture on the fundamental characteristics of emergent games.