Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago
Emergent stories are great for games like Dwarf Fortress, but sometimes interactive stories have a required ending or structure they have to follow. In these situations, you need to plan your story in advance to anticipate the consequences of a player's choice on what is possible. Most planned stories are designed by hand (think Choose Your Own Adventure books), but there has also been 25 years of research on story planning algorithms that can rewrite a structured story while a game is running. This talk will give a short history of the challenges of representing a story as a data structure suitable for algorithmic generation, including how we model events, intentions, beliefs, conflict, and emotion. This history will be told though a series of bad stories generated by earlier systems and how those mis-spun tales motivated next steps in the research.
Emergent stories are great for games like Dwarf Fortress, but sometimes interactive stories have a required ending or structure they have to follow. In these situations, you need to plan your story in advance to anticipate the consequences of a player's choice on what is possible. Most planned stories are designed by hand (think Choose Your Own Adventure books), but there has also been 25 years of research on story planning algorithms that can rewrite a structured story while a game is running. This talk will give a short history of the challenges of representing a story as a data structure suitable for algorithmic generation, including how we model events, intentions, beliefs, conflict, and emotion. This history will be told though a series of bad stories generated by earlier systems and how those mis-spun tales motivated next steps in the research.
