Story and Simulations for Serious Games

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Automated Story Generation

In her seminal book Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray expands on the concept of ancient stories (such as the Iliad and the Odyssey) working as highly formularized communication systems. As she recounts, other examples, such as Russian fairy and folk tales, bear solid evidence that a few dozen basic plot events can generate hundreds and even thousands of stories. The storyteller of old—armed with “meta-data” about his story functions or morphemes—could easily shuffle his deck of “story cards,” redress them as necessary for the current location or audience, and produce a performance-specific, site-specific story to tell. Evaluating the audience immersion and understanding of the story (are they laughing? are they ...