(I'm going off on a tangent here, just to warn all of y'all right at the outset
)
Procedural storytelling FTW, I say! To achieve that, I think we'll have to reconsider how exactly we tend to define a "story", though. The RL genre already has something going for it in your typical "a day in the life"-posts, where a player will fill in the blanks to make a pseudo-coherent story out of what happens to a certain character. For instance, if you double cross the assassin prince, only to be put down by an assassin on the very next level you enter, that can be viewed as some twisted sense of irony on the part of the RNG. (Pardon this uninspired example, but I trust you catch my drift). It may be immersion is especially strong in RLs because of permadeath, and they're certainly games where the unexpected can happen around any corner.
Building on this, I think it would be possible to implement some kind of procedural narrative. On the other hand, it seems close to impossible (at least for now) to make random narratives that are presented as coherent prose or (god forbid) cinematic scenes. You probably need the player to fill in the gaps and make sense of the fragments of story that arise. Part of the solution might lay in thinking that drama needn't necessarily be expressed in dialogue – it can also be gleamed from the actions of various personae. Consider a story like the one told in Kurosowa's film
Yojimbo (remade, I think, as
A Fistful of Dollars, but correct me if I'm wrong), where the rogue protagonist goes back and forth between two rivalling bands of robbers, sabotaging their projects and turning them against each other. A similar narrative would be quite possible within the frames of a RL, given conventions like unimodality, "monsters are similar to the player" (having more or less the same options and anatomy), "many ways to solve a given problem", etc. Your typical computer game can hardly aspire to copy the strengths of any other creative medium (any more than a novel can substitute a rock album), but I'm choosing this example because the story in itself doesn't rely too heavily on dialogue, for instance. A game system where NPCs have reputations and disperse rumors could be built to allow stories in the vicinity of
Yojimbo, without too much fixed quests, dialogue trees, etc. I'm not saying it would be easy. Stuff like procedural quests should probably be presented in a very schematic way to the player ("N wants you to blow up M's house."). Even if that leaves us a bit lacking in the flavor text department (as if anyone plays for the flavor text
), it draws on other strengths, proper to the medium, such as the element of choice: You might do as N says to gain a reward, or promptly kill N in hopes of gaining the favor of M, or (as in
Yojimbo) scheme to have them do their own dirty work and see what comes of that, or something completely different. After all, let's all just go fishing.
On a side note, I really think procedurally generated settings have been overlooked in the past, and I do believe more work on that front might (more or less unintentionally, even, quite in the spirit of the whole PGC cult) bring about innovations in the field of random story generation in games.
Hm. I've been hoping to make a longer, more coherent text of some of this -- maybe tying it up with Deleuze's and Guattari's idea of rhizomes (more or less: the notion of thought structures (in our case, games) consisting of a multitude of elements that are extremely reactive to one other, and can be combined in endless or unexpected ways)) -- for some edition of XLambda's RL magazine revival, which
sadly seems to have petered out. Ah well, maybe some day I'll manage to hack together an article to post somewhere.
As always,
Minotauros
