- An Emergent Story Engine -
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.
In Chroniqueur, the player character’s destiny is not the only point of interest; players can be like reporters looking for a good story: a spicy love triangle, a tragic accident, a hilarious anecdote, an epic tale of bravery. We prefer not to presume what players might consider to be interesting narratives. We want to offer a world ripe with narrative potential to be explored following one’s own curiosity. We also want this process to be as simple as can be.
The building blocks of this design goal are:
Ocith Leverre, Who Could Not Live Up to His Mother’s Reputation
(An emergent story discovered in Chroniqueur, narrated by Jonathan)
Paulance Leverre had a difficult childhood; food was scarce and her family was always on the move, looking for a better place. After having to beg strangers to survive, she eventually resorted to stealing at age 16. This was a revelation to her: she was a natural. The payoff was much higher than anything else, and there seemed to be no consequences. She not only continued living almost solely on theft, but could even support a family doing so.
When she turned 30, she gave birth to her third child, Ocith Leverre. From his youngest age (and I really mean that) he was fascinated by his mother’s profes-sion, wanting very strongly to emulate her. We do not know whether Paulance encouraged this or not but he was obviously not ready for this line of work when at the age of two he attempted to steal food from Nieu Bettertime—his own fa-ther. Contrarily to his wife, Nieu had always been an honest gatherer, having never stolen even a radish in his life. Presumably, he was completely unaware of Paulance’ profession as he was outraged by his young son’s behavior and asked the clan leader to exile him
Horrified by this turn of events, Paulance made a moving plea to spare her child, but to no avail. Ocith was exiled to a faraway land where he survived a few years stealing (and getting caught every time) before being exiled again and eaten in the wilderness by a signa (a nightmarish predator of the world of Vitento).
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.