- An Emergent Story Engine -
en / fr
Chroniqueur

Chroniqueur is an emergent narrative experimentation platform. It is a deep social simulation generating a full human history that is completely documented. Players can both explore this archive freely and/or engage in embedded games.

Chroniqueur is developed by a team from the lablablab experimental games research group.

It is currently in a research and development phase.

Chroniqueur

Chroniqueur is an emergent narrative experimentation platform. It is a deep social simulation generating a full human history that is completely documented. Players can both explore this archive freely and/or engage in embedded games.

Emergent Stories

A main goal of Chroniqueur is to give players the opportunity to discover stories that weren’t written beforehand—stories that have emerged “naturally” from the complex interactions of each world’s unique simulated characters. There are no writers (not even AIs!) for this game, we strive to design a dynamic world in which stories happen.

Everything Simulated

Every new Chroniqueur game generates a whole new world with thousands of people whose lives are entirely simulated. From the moment a character is born to the time of their death, everything they do has contextual reasons, as well as consequences to the world and other people. No cheating! This complex social simulation is one of the foundations of Chroniqueur and the engine from which emergent stories happen.

Try it!

Chroniqueur is still in heavy development but you can:

Game(s)

Chroniqueur is a perfect backdrop for all sorts of games: life simulation, survival, management, politics, etc. This is our current area of development. For the moment, the main form of interaction is the possibility to play from the perspective of anyone in the simulation (thousands of playable characters). This is still experimental though.

Everything Documented

Chroniqueur is a History generating machine. Everything that happens in the world is not only simulated, it is also documented in a vast, ever-expanding Wikipedia of sorts. This is one of the tools available to help players discover emergent stories occurring in the game. If a character piques your curiosity as you play, you can find out more about them. Or about their father. Or their father’s secret 80 years old lover. Perhaps their hidden child turns out to be… your husband?!

Research

The design and development of Chroniqueur has led to multiple technical and theoretical contributions

Stay in touch

Updates

Contact

  • You can join our public Discord server to ask questions, share anectodes, report problems, or make suggestions.
  • You can write to Jonathan for all questions and comments.
The Team

Chroniqueur is a research-creation project developed by the LabLabLab research group under the direction of Jonathan Lessard, game design professor at Concordia University. It has received funding from the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture.