Emotional State Machine

• https://chris.farkouh.net/blog/emotional-state-machine

Highlights

• Rather than producing vast branches of storyline that alternate based on player activity, what if the interactions within the story are bent as a reaction by the game to the way in which the player is perceived by the virtual world according to their actions?
  • In other words, the sequential presentation of key events does not necessarily change drastically in this scenario and as such the player is a guaranteed recipient of all of the core content which is produced by the studio as part of the game production, but the experience that the player receives within that narrative structure is significantly tempered with during the course of the gameplay by an underlying ‘game intelligence’.
  • In support of this @keith-stuart cited in 2019, ‘the mainstream future of interactive storytelling is likely to be a clever combination of A.I and authored content: we still get a gripping handwritten plot, but we also get characters and story elements that seem to be reactive to us as individuals’.
  • @emily-short, a prolific writer, game designer and academic of the subject of narrative structure within interactive storytelling, brings reference to this concept in an article from 2016 in which she coins the phrase ‘Salience-based narrative’, or put simply ‘interactive narratives that pick a bit of content out of a large pool depending upon which content element is judged to be most applicable at the moment’.