Emergent Narrative

If Game of Thrones was a response to Tolkien’s lack of interest in Aragorn’s post-Sauron tax policies and roving Orc gang mitigation initiatives, then Dwarf Fortress is Middle Earth’s .exe file. And Tarn Adams talk at UCSC on how he designed DF’s emergent narrative engine is a heady masterclass on how I think basically everything either does or should work. I’ll explain.

I’ve been getting pretty obsessed with emergent narrative engines in games for the last couple of months for a potentially non-obvious reason: I feel like they’re also a blueprint for how to create basically anything that’s deeply interesting. “Interest”, when you dig down to its Medieval layer, comes out to mean something in the neighborhood of having a legal claim, or defined beneficial relationship with something. This eventually extended explicitly into financial realms as a counterpoint to “usury” although overlap between the two exists, but in any context it captured a type of cyclical relationship in which an investment of some kind went in and a return of some kind came out. If we keep digging back to Roman times, we arrive at the preposition inter and the more obviously famous verb-of-being est which when combined mean to be among/amidst/inbetween/etc. I bring all of that up because when we call something interesting, we’re that it’s encompassing or enveloping and worth the time invested in a literal (though not necessarily tangible) sense, and building this sort of immersion takes real work.

All generationally great stories are believable. I don’t mean that their particular world mimics our own, but that the breadth of the narrative matches the depth of the contexts the characters are walking around in and on. Having those two dimensions in sync with one another is, for me, the key. X and Y don’t have to match 1:1, but I think they have to scale together in some golden ratio that feels natural to the audience. Which is to say, if you are going to write Dune, you need to contextually ball out like Frank Herbert. And if you are going to build a game that lets Dune create itself, you need to think like Tarn Adams.

As a quick aside, this is also why Murakami short-stories work so well. Given the limited viewport provided in collections like The Elephant Vanishes, we don’t need, say, the history of Japan or the corporate structure of McDonalds to be moved by them, but we do need the explicit or implicit history of the objects and individual people for it feel real in the midst of its surrealism. Murakami is one of, if not the, living masters of giving you the right detail at the right time to send you into a tailspin, and I point that out because my argument here isn’t necessarily a thinly veiled obsession with scale.

Anyway, I’ve been listening this morning through this talk from 2019 from Tarn Adams on Generative Design and Emergent Narrative at UCSC, and I’ve found it to be pretty profound. Tarn is like if Winnie the Pooh were a mathematical savant who only used his money for computers and pots of honey, and listening to him walk through each of the steps here is endearing enough for it to not need to matter that in making a game about dwarven mismanagement he may have also cracked the code of creation and so on. This is worth a listen if you’re a writer, or a creative of any kind, or anyone who likes to build or appreciate anything substantial.