What is it about?

This article gives an overview of previous attempts at story generation within narrative games and reflects on the design process of creating a character backstory generator with an external partner. It then compares the attempt with the examples and reflects on where improvements could be made.

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Why is it important?

Generation of text within narrative games remains a tricky area. This project sought to create a targeted generator to generate only character backstories, an area which could reduce the burden on games writers in order to give them more time to work on quests and other more creative endeavours.

Perspectives

Working with an external partner on this project added an extra dimension for both of us. While in some ways we fell into similar traps as those already working in the story-generating sphere, having an external partner with specific needs and goals also lead us in interesting and unusual directions.

Dr Lynda Clark
University of Edinburgh

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Working Backwards: Creating a Character Backstory Generation System Using Idealized Creative Writing Outputs, September 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3555858.3555867.
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