Erik Gieszelmann's confused ramblings (midterm)

Title: Nonexistent

Abstract: From the warring royal courts of chess, to the business tycoon-ery of Monopoly, to the creation of stars in katamari damacy, most games come with a built in plot. Game designers are now trying to leave these embedded narratives to make a new type of game with an emergent narrative.

As seen in games like The Sims, an emergent narrative game does not have a built in plot, but attempts to produce a story based on the actions of the player. When you can make your sim become a criminal, police officer, or many other jobs, giving the player freedom not presented with an embedded narrative game.

The problem most game designers and players have with these emergent narrative games is their complete lack of structure. Whether your Sim is a cop or criminal, the world around him does not change much outside of the money he makes. Some designers try to counter this by making games like Knights of the Old Republic, and Jade Empire, embedded narrative games with multiple paths, where your actions in the game (measured with a good to evil meter) affect your path through it. Even with these multi-pathed games, you still have embedded narrative, you just have more than one.

For the purpose of seeing if it can be done, I propose a game in which no plot or story is revealed until the player's actions dictate that story.