“Yeah, seriously. I was playing a game where my facility had a major breach. The surrounding area plunged into an eternal winter and my facility was isolated for more months. My staff members slowly went mad and a cult formed to worship the anomaly that caused the whole ordeal. By the end, a bunch of anomalies and staff members teamed up to defeat the cult and escape the wintry prison, and they succeeded somehow. But just as they were about the get their freedom, the facility got nuked. This was all within the first quarter!”
A player tells his friend, and his friend is intrigued and buys the game.

To keep the player engaged we could define a template of engagement for the AI storyteller to use, for example:

• Hook
• Fall
• Rising action
• Climax
• Denouement

It could then apply this template on an in-game daily basis for example:

1. Hook: Head command sends a grant if you contain an anomaly. Will you accept it?!
2. Fall: The anomaly arrives and you take the necessary precautions to contain it.
3. Rising action: You assign a staff member to research it. Turns out he has a dark history with this particular anomaly.
4. Climax: The researcher freaks out in a chaotic outburst, almost causing a breach in the kerfuffle, that ends with him having to be locked up in his office
5. Denouement: The researcher calms down, and after a 2-hour therapy session with the onsite psychologist, they can return to work.

This is a basic story structure that could occur during the day. The story was emergent but still coerced by the storyteller. But how? This NPC never had a history with the anomaly, but the storyteller injected this trait into the NPC, in hopes of causing something. The storyteller also created the inciting incident of the anomaly grant being sent to the player.

This example shows how we could program the storyteller. An "AI" that detects lulls in the game, and fabricates events and information to create "stories".

A question comes to mind. Is it worth doing this? ABSOLUTELY. Not only is the structure of hooks and a climb to a climax engaging, but it's also addictive. Players should ask themselves "I wonder what's going to happen tomorrow?"

This is a basic daily application of the storyteller but what about broader terms?

The Wider scale

There is no reason why this storyteller should be restricted to day-to-day gameplay. Ideally, we would want to show wider story structures.

The story of the rise of a new facility, the influx of researchers and investment opportunities, an age of innovation and technology, a "fly too close to the sun" moment and the inevitable total collapse of the facility into disrepair.

Or perhaps, the story of a facility left in ruin, brought back to its former glory, only to fall again into ruin, but this time take the entire world with it.

These stories are all possibilities within the game’s mechanics but are diluted amongst the sea of randomness. By using the storyteller we can nudge the gameplay into making more interesting playthroughs over the many hours of playtime.

A possible implementation

We could simply apply the daily engagement structure to individual months, or perhaps more suitably, each quarter of the year.

So each quarter, the storyteller would try and follow an overall structure of:

• Status quo
• Introducing inciting incident; a challenge
• Players adapting to the challenge
• Players achieving their goals
• The storyteller introduces a twist or a cost to the player's success in overcoming the challenge
• The player has changed their outlook on the game and its mechanics or reassessed how they should play, effectively they have experienced a story arc

Since a year in the game is 608 hours at normal speed or 6 hours full speed, we could expect around 70 to 100 hours for a full year, and a full story with 4 "arcs".

4 arcs give us a lot to play with. We could create full act-like structures, each being a fully contained arc. We could then have the storyteller select act templates such as these 4-act templates below:

A Possible Way to Beat the Game

One thing we could do, which would be an interesting way to actually "beat" the game, is to guarantee players that they will have to face an end-of-world scenario. If they successfully save the world from this scenario, then they have beaten the game.

However, it may be tasteful to count losing the game, to a breach or an end-of-world scenario, as a valid ending. However, this is beside the point.

The point is having a larger scope structure that the storyteller will try to nudge the gameplay towards.

The Many Avenues of Nudging

We need a way to formalise how the storyteller can "nudge" the story along. We already gave an example of the storyteller giving the player grants, but what else can it do?

Storyteller should be able to do 3 things:

1. Generate Events
2. Log and present information
3. Inject New Information

Generating Events

The storyteller most simply should generate events based on their evaluation of the engagement and story curves. In lull points, it should generate exciting events, after a period of excitement it should hold back a bit, and in the perfect moment should generate story beats.

Events are simple in the sense that they can be easily predefined such as:

• Raid
• Contract
• Grant
• Anomaly sighting
• Prison fight
• Malfunction of device
• Natural disaster

The hard thing is that all these events have many variables such as, who is raiding? Why are they raiding? So the job of the storyteller is not only to provide these events at appropriate times but also to make them coherent. For example, if you just mended relations with a group of interest, it wouldn't make sense to be raided by them the next day, unless it was some sort of betrayal etc.

Logging Information

This is quite important as the player needs a way to inspect or find out about all of these story-driven occurrences. Broad events are trivial, we already have a system to display event notifications to the player, and even down individual significant character moments could be displayed this way. But what about character arcs, less significant character moments and overall character progression over time?

The best solution, taken from the pages of Dwarf Fortress, is keeping a log of all events. This log could then be filtered through to see events about specific characters, events that include a group of characters, or events that are broader in scale.

This would give the player a way to get a temporal overview of the overall stories that are happening in more detail.

Injecting New Information

Injecting new information is the hardest thing. How would you know whether to secretly edit the trait of a scientist in an attempt to cause an interesting scenario? There are two things we could do: Forget about the system and just use events or implement the system by giving every actor a secret trait that the storyteller can edit and activate at any moment.

This trait could be a hidden ability for an anomaly that the storyteller activates just after u recovered from a major breach or a mental illness that now randomly affects an NPC.

Though having a broad story is cool, all we have is just a series of interesting, well-paced events. But no story is complete without characters to inhabit it. We want to give players something to remember. A breach is memorable, but will probably be a shared and common experience. But I doubt many will be able to recall a time when Bob the heroic Category C saved the facility from a breach by releasing a bunch of anomalous cats, whilst simultaneously falling in love with their assigned overlooker. But having to ultimately choose between having the cats destroy the world or killing their lover.

That was a bad example but you get what I mean. A better example could be a scientist, who was a wimp, finally becoming strong and being able to run an experiment, but at the cost of losing all their colleagues.

You get the gist.

Character Arcs

Characters are interesting because they have:

• Characterisation through strengths and flaws
• They change over time

It would be amazing if Containcorp could generate character arcs, as this would catapult it to an unforgettably amazing story engine.

Characterisation

The characterisation is simple, we already do it in some aspects. "Characters" would only need a few attributes

• Influence- this would affect how often the AI storyteller interacts with this character. High influence is more akin to the main character.
• Traits - These would be various strengths and flaws that make the characters unique. They would need to balance each other out.
• Backstory - We already have this. Every character has a backstory that influences the pool of traits they can select from/guarantees they will get certain traits

This is all you would need, the physical attributes such as age, gender, and ethnicity are already handled.

Arcs

Arcs are considerably harder to formalise. The best way is to think about the different arcs characters could theoretically go through, and think of ways to represent these more programmatically.

Arcs can simply be described as a series of rises and falls, the most common are:

• 'Rags to riches' (rise)
• 'Tragedy', or 'Riches to rags' (fall)
• 'Man in a hole' (fall-rise)
• 'Icarus' (rise-fall)
• 'Cinderella' (rise-fall-rise)
• 'Oedipus' (fall-rise-fall)

We could assign each character an arc, and then also decide what a rise or fall looks like in the context of the character.

The best way to do this would be to perhaps assign a "value" to each character; decide what each character values, whether that's money, fame, freedom, bloodshed etc.

A rise would be a path to attaining this value in its purest form, whereas a fall would be losing this value and being thrown as far away as possible from it.

Regardless, at the end of these arcs, characters will change. We can change their value based on their arc to align with its end. I.e. if a character had a fall from grace, from high reputation to low, then they stop valuing reputation and instead value [Insert something opposite]

Conclusion

All of this is a top-down approach to generating interesting stories, but a laid-back approach. Ideally, we would want the game to create emergent stories from just the mechanics interacting, but not every story is going to be coherent or interesting. By using the AI storyteller, we can filter through the randomness and ensure the player is always presented with interesting scenarios and events to not only deal with but take part in, and observe how other characters fit in.

A lot of these ideas could be implemented in a bottom-up approach, but that would require a lot more deep simulation and complexity. The AI storyteller, though complex itself, offloads the complexity and eliminates the unavoidable noise that a bottom-up approach would create.