From the doc: More on the quest system

I won't post the whole paper here, because it is long, duplicates some of the existing posts, and I will post it elsewhere in the future. But here is an excerpt comparing what I'm trying to do with the quest generation system to other similar work in dynamic storytelling.

There has been quite a bit of academic research into interactive storytelling. Chris Crawford has been working on his Erasmatron / Storytron engine for at least 15 years. There have been yearly conferences on Interactive Digital Storytelling since 2001.

Many different systems have been proposed and implemented to help computers generate interesting stories. These systems tend to focus on one (or more) of three things: Character-based story generation, choosing static narrative content dynamically, and Natural Language Processing.

Character-based story generators attempt to create stories based on rules defining how characters should behave in these stories. The sequence of events that arises from interacting with these believable characters is considered the generated story.

Many implementations of story generators have, at the basis of the system, a number of modular, small chunks of narrative content, such as dialog snippets or cutscenes. These systems generate stories by choosing, based on player actions, how to order this narrative content, and which content to exclude altogether from this playthrough. Two examples of such implementations are the games Façade and Prom Week. These games allow the player lots of freedom in choosing his actions, and then react to those actions by choosing dialog sequences to show to the player.

Much research has also gone into Natural Language Processing in the context of storytelling. The idea is that letting the player say anything he wants to say will increase player agency with respect to the story.

The Micro Missions Quest generation system instead takes a story-centric approach which generates rather than selects narrative content, and which uses fairly abstract and restricted player input but reacts to it in interesting, flexible ways.