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1. Curating Simulated Storyworlds

   There is a peculiar method in the area of procedural narrative called emergent narrative: instead of automatically inventing stories or deploying authored narrative content, a system simulates a storyworld out of which narrative may emerge from the happenstance of character activity in that world. It is the approach taken by some of the most successful works in the history of computational media (The Sims, Dwarf Fortress), but curiously also some of its most famous failures (Sheldon Klein's automatic novel writer, Tale-Spin). How has this been the case? To understand the successes, we might ask this essential question: what is the pleasure of emergent narrative? I contend that the form works more like nonfiction than fiction—emergent stories actually happen—and this produces a peculiar aesthetics that undergirds the appeal of its successful works. What then is the pain of emergent narrative? There is a ubiquitous tendency to misconstrue the raw transpiring of a simulation (or a trace of that unfolding) as being a narrative artifact, but such material will almost always lack story structure.

   Martin Li - 16.09.2020 - 14:43