Emily Marriott

University of Essex

Automated Story Generation for Games

Emily is researching automated story generation for video games, focusing on the use of Planning for real-time, dynamic generation. Ideally, the stories created will reflect choices made by the player during gameplay and will update continually throughout gameplay. The aim of this research is to create a system that could be easily utilised in the development of more adaptive games. This could improve player enjoyment, increase re-playability, and allow for the inclusion or exclusion of content that may only appeal to niche audiences. Emily’s current focus is on investigating story structures and pacing to create a template for generating good stories specifically for games that are consistent, well-structured and interesting. This involves studying the pacing requirements in existing games to establish what these are and how they differ the requirements for film and TV.

The system will ideally be integrated with existing game-development tools and provide an easy-to-use interface to make the creation of adaptive games easier and quicker. The eventual goal is a full story-generation system would support both the creation of quests that emerge from story requirements and a game world that fits the environment required for the story.

Emily graduated from Glyndŵr University with a BSc in Computer Games Development before completing an MSc in Computer Science at Oxford Brookes University. The substance of the MSc dissertation involved generating dungeon levels and quests using grammars based on the play style the player appeared to favour. Emily enjoys playing both tabletop and computer roleplaying games, especially ones in which player actions can have a dramatic effect on the game’s progression.