#18: Propagation

[mikedsc]

Asking a computer to create an interesting puzzle is very similar to asking it to tell a story, make up a joke, or create a riddle. Of course, it's not impossible, but the time spent programming a computer to do it could be better spent doing it yourself. And the result is likely to be substandard, probably a repetition of other puzzles with slight variations.

Hmm... A thought, maybe some adaptation to Dramatica, A New Theory of Story (http://www.dramatica.com) might provide ways to develop stories on the spur of the moment. While yes, they won't be GREAT stories, you can hit extremely archetypal, yet highly meaningful stories by using Dramatica's Grand Argument Story. Fables and parables, really. I'm considering using their system to help me write myths and legends.

[Holliday]

Neat, I hadn't seen this before. From first look, it appears to be software to help you outline the story you are telling (helping you keep everything straight). You say it can also generate random stories?

As far as archetypal stories go, I've seen more than one online Story Generator for various genres. For instance, http://www.seventhsanctum.com/gens/storymech.html, generates quick Anime/Mecha storylines. As you might expect, it's just a sentence generator, but you can imagine the same thing done for computer games.

[necrosis]

Actually who says the computer has to make the story from the beginning? It just makes the first step then, depending on what the player does, it can build the next step, even if this is another quest that is forceful or even for someone else.
ex. Rob the rogue is asked to get a special sword, so he goes, and kills someone with that sword and takes it from him, since he found that easy. But when he gives it to the quest guy, Rob boasts to him that he killed a guy to get it (the answer from the quest guy since the murder the asking of how he got it, and the option to tell the truth or a lie was made after the murder of the owner of the sword) now the quest guy gets really scared since he already has a record of murders and stealing, and next time would be his death, so he sends Rob to get the body so that they can hide it, but oh surprise the body was stolen! By a Orcish/Troll/Gnoll/Whatever you want tribe! so rob has to go and recover it for which he might have to do quests to either kill the orcs or convince them of his worthiness and of the deserving to have the body. But the computer might have had the body gotten by a paladin, who belongs to an order that revives the murdered to get them to tell who murdered them and catch them, so Rob would have to get the body from them before they revive it, or do another whole quest to convince a naive rogue to kill a paladin of the order to get all of the atention. Or even before, Rob might have instead met the people necesary for the sword and get the metals, materials, etc necesary to get the sword, which would have gotten him to maybe later be called by this people for other jobs, since he got the first materials so well. And then Rob might have stayed with the sword instead of giving it to him, which would have made the guy follow him till he got his sword. And then, when the guy gets the sword: what will he do with it? This offers a whole new quest, which might be given to Rob again since he is so related to this, or might be given to another guy. And then Rob might find out what he wants to do with the sword and dissagree with it (ex slay all rogues in the world), so a quest to defend the sword from him, maybe give it to the right person (the order of paladins said above) or maybe take it to Mt. Freakyliyhotty, where only there might he destroy the one sword :D. So from a single stupid excuse, such as "get me a cool sword" a whole new story and a bunch of quests was made, it's more how do we know that this quest wasn't the result of another quest a guy made? ;)

[mikedsc]

Reaction #1: Whoa.

Reaction #2: You're INSANE. (And creative. I like that combination. :))

Reaction #3: Ah, I was talking about the computer making up a story and TELLING it to the players. Not quest generation. In the case you're describing, you might prefer checking out Chris Crawford's Erasmatron instead of Dramatica. =P

The thing is, the computer is stupid. You can't make it intelligent. Everything always proceeds one line of code at a time, one machine instruction at a time. You need to use smoke and mirrors to make the NPCs seem intelligent. And you can't pull things out of thin air.

[necrosis]

Ahh! Ok, I understand. Yet the idea can be done for computers also, so the computer tells you a chapter, x chapter randomly done, then you say that if you liked it, was good, or detested it, depending on the answer the computer will change of style in the next chapter. And also the computer will notice what things you seem to like, it will learn your preffered type of story, and then it can start offering to risk it more and write you a few chapters at the time, or something like it. So the computer writes a random story in a random style, by experimenting every so much it will slowly learn what is the style you like and what type of story. This type of AI does exist, its called genetic AI, also evolving, or likes. This AI was used by the nasa to test different conditions for an airplane, and it found out one way to make it cheaper and stronger than what it was supposed to be. The only problem is that the computer will have to learn, and of each individual person: why? because everyone has their own tastes.
Computers can be really smart, but the problem is that it takes a lot to "train" it and that it also sometimes takes steps back, since what it does is to change a random factor a bit (randomly) and it can do a lot of logic other than: if it's good change it just a bit, if it got worse, go back to original idea.

[mikedsc]

The method you describe is actually called backtracking, and it's used as a pathing algorithm, not storywriting.

I don't disagree that it's not impossible; it's just that no one's managed to program with that kind of depth.

Like I said, look up Chris Crawford's Erasmatron. That's the closest thing to what you're describing.