- An Emergent Story Engine -
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?!
One of our key design goals is to make this massive amount of historical information as legible, playful, and generally as accessible to explore as possible. For this we are drawing inspiration from wikis, infographics, and popular news platforms.
You can play games in Chroniqueur, but you can be content to play the historian of a virtual world. A historian with access to an exhaustive and accessible archive of everything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?!
The design and development of Chroniqueur has led to multiple technical and theoretical contributions
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.