Here is a selection of academic writings and talks I’ve given about game narrative over the years:
Deep Dive: Cultivating randomness in the peculiar branching narrative of Astronaut: The Best
(GameDeveloper)
After completing development of Astronaut: The Best, I wrote an article focusing on my process for structuring its narrative events. I aimed to provide a generally applicable overview for anyone considering mixing randomized and conventional branching narratives, and to encourage more designers to try doing so.
Everything Means Something: The Creative and Destructive Potential of Themes
(GDC Vault)
At GDC 2021, Kyla Furey and I gave a talk in the Narrative Summit about managing a game’s narrative themes, based on our experiences writing and rewriting Wintermoor Tactics Club. It’s partly an argument for critically evaluating your game’s themes as they might appear to different audiences, and partly a discussion of techniques to improve thematic clarity through cross-team communication and playtesting.
Quicksilver: Infinite Story: Procedurally Generated Episodic Narratives For Gameplay
(USC Library)
My graduate thesis describes the Phoenix Engine, a procedural narrative program that can create premises and full screenplays of a cartoon adventure show. Writing the story engine was the easy part – the thesis also describes my travails in making it into a full game.
Ensemble: A Computer-Aided Story System
What if a video game could understand your character’s custom backstory, and tie it into the game’s events and setting? What if a computer could perform the role of a good DM, and find ways to connect characters’ backstories? Co-authored with Joe Osborn, Ensemble is an interface for encoding and connecting stories. This talk was presented at the 2011 USC Annenberg Graduate Fellowship Symposium, where it won the Viewer’s Choice Award for Best Presentation.
A Survey of Algorithmic Narrative Generation
(PDF here)
Before I could write my own procedural narrative systems, I first had to research what was already out there. This fairly exhaustive survey was my undergraduate computer science thesis. It’s somewhat out of date (written in 2009), but if you’re curious about the ways in which people have tried to get computers to tell stories, this’ll give you some grounding.