“Building Blocks” at FDG

This week, I have been attending the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) 2019 conference.  This year the conference is taking place at San Luis Obispo and the theme for this iteration of the conference is “building blocks”.  In the spirit of FDG, this theme lends itself to exploring interesting plays on concept areas such as game design, architecture, and artificial intelligence in games and digital media.  As part of the conference, I presented our paper entitled “Stories of the Town: Balancing Character Autonomy and Coherent Narrative in Procedurally Generated Worlds” which was published through the FDG Procedural Content Generation Workshop.  In this paper we implemented a narrative generation system that combines three distinct approaches to narrative generation (namely simulation, planning, and context-free grammars).  We believe that this project showcases an interesting way to generate narratives and look forward to expanding and improving upon this work in the future.