Argax Project: Marlinspike

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.

Features:

Story is centrally directed by a drama manager.
Uses a simple yet general (not genre-specific) story model.
The player's deeds in the world (verbs) are translated based on the current story context into story-level actions.
Scenes and player actions serve as story atoms of equal importance.
Reincorporation of player actions into later events to form story threads, and thus a coherent narrative.

Games:

Demeter: Blood in the Sky

Details:

Articles:

"Demeter: An Implementation of the Marlinspike Interactive Drama System." (Tomaszewski & Binsted 2009)
"Marlinspike: An Integrated Approach to Interactive Drama." (Tomaszewski & Binsted 2008)