Argax Project

Marlinspike

Activity: 2007 - 2011

Stage of Development: Complete.

Platform: Inform 6

Overview: Marlinspike generates stories by interleaving story-significant user actions with a collection of pre-authored scenes. Its drama manager is guided by a simple neo-Aristotelean model of story structure: every story must have a beginning, middle, and end, and all its parts must be connected by causal necessity to produce a unified whole. These causal links form story threads, which the drama manager can fork and splice together through the selection of the next scene.

Marlinspike's design is inspired by a few ideas from improv (reincorporation of previous events into the current action) and table-top roleplaying games (stories constructed from open-ended encounters). This design intends to strike a balance between user agency and system control.

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