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Procedural Back-Story Generation in the Framework of a Murder Mystery
By: Jeff Lininger
Supervisor: Myque Ouellette
Masters of Interactive Technology degree conferred December, 2009
Thesis / Project completed: October 1, 2009
Procedural generation, the use of algorithms to generate content at run-time instead of using pre-generated content created by a developer, is not a new technique in the game industry. However, the current state of procedural generation in the game industry has left one area relatively untouched: narrative. Usually, attempts at procedural narrative generation focus on interactive stories, and are difficult to execute at a high quality due to player interference. Procedurally generating back-story, on the other hand, provides unique histories of the game world that other elements of the game can draw upon with none of the issues of player interference that plague interactive narrative content.
This thesis created a proof-of-concept procedural back-story generator that used a given set of actors, objects, and locations with differing traits to simulate the events of a dinner party leading up to the murder of one of the guests. A text adventure took each actor’s “memory” of these events and presented the sum total of these memories as a series of maps, representing the visual result of police interrogations. Players then acted as the detective, analyzing the event chain contained within the maps along with information about the guests and rooms to deduce the implicit events that led to the four elements of the murder: the murderer, the weapon, the room, and the hour of the murder. The two hypotheses of this thesis were that the generator could create event chains that players viewed as authentic, and that the deduction process players used to figure out the four elements of the murder was a moderately challenging task.
Results from performance and survey data suggest that players view the generated events as engaging and moderately authentic, which supports the first hypothesis. However, the results suggest that the gameplay was very difficult, which does not support the second hypothesis. Finally, the data suggests that the enjoyment of a player was closely linked to how engaged he or she was in the back-story.
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