Emily Short, an interactive fiction author and designer, writes about text games, narrative design, and dialogue generation.
HN commenters treat her as a core figure in interactive fiction and cite her guide to finding games and her writing on storylets.
We have gotten a lot closer to it, much more than Rimworld.
- World models with motivation-driven characters is a common subgenre of IF; you could do worse than starting with Galatea which is seminal and still very good. The author is an acquaintance of Crawford, and is aligned with his stated goals - you can read her critique of his book[0] and one of his more recent tools[1]. She has previously designed Versu, an AI-driven narrative engine, and has lauded work in virtually every major narrative game design tool.
- Façade did this for limited actors in a navigable virtual space in 2005.
- Elsinore was a popular game from 2019 that did this, also graphically, for Hamlet.
> If Erasmatron it was fully applied as imagined, it would allow you to stage Romeo and Juliet, but explore what happens if Romeo leaves Juliet alone for a week until things calm down, and work on the family relationships. It's quite lofty, but I believe we can still get closer to it.
This is an AGI fantasy, and definitely not the endgame of the Erasmatron. It will not be achieved by Crawford's authoring tools, and he refuses to consider even basic refinements to the UX of his authoring tools, let alone any paradigm shift. It will probably be achieved ~never, and would not be artistically interesting even if it was.
[0] https://emshort.blog/2017/08/01/chris-crawford-on-interactive-storytelling-second-edition-chris-crawford/
[1] https://emshort.blog/2017/06/21/chris-crawfords-encounter-editor/
Exactly, there's application videogames and interactive fiction[1]. I'm rather experienced in procgen for roguelike development so those techniques and their value and pitfalls have left an impression on me, but also illuminated how narrow the application of current techniques is.
Though there's some work that's been done in the area in terms of storylets[2], and story graphs[3], from a practitioner's point of view, there's a lot left to be desired. In particular accessible and demonstrable implementations, declarative syntax/language/config, ontologies of narration, and libraries of story elements.
In a lot of ways, it feels like the space is fresh enough that even basic questions like data-driven bottom-up approaches vs symbolic top-down approaches haven't even been thoroughly explored. Currently, the research space is small on the academic side, and small on the industry side, but for different reasons. I guess I feel like there's a lot of untapped potential, but the systems which would drive such innovation aren't yet poised to recognize the opportunity or incentivized to pursue it.
1. although IF is arguably a less popular medium, the approach is still applicable.
2. https://emshort.blog/2019/11/29/storylets-you-want-them/
3. https://www.aaai.org/Papers/AIIDE/2005/AIIDE05-019.pdf
> Creating the rules for it reminds me a little bit of writing a text adventure game from days gone by
Interactive fiction has long been the playground for conversation UIs since its inception (Zork's development is even directly entwined in the early history of MIT's AI lab). It's also a useful thing to ask someone starting a bot project: what was the last IF game you played? Have you written one?
There's a lot of advances in conversational UI in the IF space that are worth exploring when writing bots, too. It's definitely worth spending some time exploring recent and modern IF games for ideas. I recommend Emily Short's blog [1] for a lot of discussions and examinations of especially conversational UI in IF over the last few decades (that's one of Emily's particular passions).
[1] https://emshort.blog/
I think you're saying what the average person is thinking but is worried about being impolite. You are of course correct: it is the kind of fact about a game that non-gamers might still mistake for quality or depth.
The horseshoe theory of ai generation tells us that handcrafting and content generation extremism end up very close to each other: https://emshort.blog/2016/09/21/bowls-of-oatmeal-and-text-generation/
The fact that something is generated or hand-crafted is not interesting by itself no matter how much people try to pretend otherwise for social cohesion purposes. Mediocre thing + no AI and Mediocre thing + AI seem to be orthogonal to what people actually care about at the end of the day.
Yep, pretty cool - it's a very popular tool in the "interactive fiction" genre of game development/writing. It's widely used for "choice-based IF" (also called "CYOA" after the Choose Your Own Adventure books), with the other main side of the genre being parser-based IF (like Colossal Cave and other PC text adventures from back in the day). Parser IF is often built with a tool called Inform, might also pique your interest.
Emily Short's blog is a good resource for that field in general:
https://emshort.blog/
Or re tooling specifically:
https://emshort.blog/how-to-play/writing-if/
James Ryan's Talk of the Town does this
https://www.jamesryan.world/projects#/talktown/
https://github.com/james-owen-ryan/talktown. His PHD thesis on curated story worlds is here (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330855103_Curating_Simulated_Storyworlds) with a good write up by Emily Short here (https://emshort.blog/2019/05/21/curating-simulated-storyworlds-james-ryan/). The focus is on generating interesting narratives for games and stories, rather than social network simulation or research, but many of the techniques probably apply.