I’m currently in Germany for the Dagstuhl seminar Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games: AI Driven Game Design. Wednesday, I was part of a workshop focusing on social network analysis and its application to narrative: how are social networks graphed? What kinds of information can they contain? What data could be associated with an edge — number and recency of interactions? Emotional valence of average interaction? More than this?
And — given the graphs available — how might we build interesting narrative game mechanics that in some way made use of a knowledge of the network? Might there be games that turned on either a human or an AI interacting to modify a social graph as the primary mode of interaction? What about gameplay experience interventions that were triggered by the discovery of particular graph states?
This is interesting to me in part because I feel a lot of our game design is currently poor at facilitating stories about communities and group dynamics.
One of several contributions from the graph theory members of the group was the idea of a “motif,” a recurring pattern from within a larger graph, which could be reasoned about. The motif here might represent the idea of a small family — all the members know one another. Many other social situations could be represented this way, including ideas like “one character knows everyone else” or “this character is a loner.”
It occurred to us that this might make the useful basis for an authoring tool where motifs were used to specify prerequisites and post-conditions for narrative moves — a little the way StoryNexus specifies numeric range prerequisites and post-conditions for its storylets.
Depending on the rest of the system, eligible narrative moves might be presented as options to the player — it’s up to you to choose which one you want to use to advance the story — or executed by an AI automatically, in which the AI would need to select among all currently valid narrative moves.
The author would have a palette of motifs to work with, and could apply these to a story segment to say “if this configuration of relationships exists in the game, the following narrative segment is eligible for use; please fill each role with an available character who fits that slot.” (This is a system with dynamic requirements, a bit more flexible than a quality-based narrative system.)
For instance, here’s how this system might express a narrative moment involving a love triangle:
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Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 