Grand Text Auto

18 Cadence is a new piece of electronic literature that’s almost definitely not a game, something less than a book, and explores a rarely tackled corner of interactivity in interactive narrative: the choices and decisions of how to tell a story, what bits to include, what to leave out, how to arrange them. It’s available for free on the web or as an iPad app.

Prom Week is about to be released and Expressive Processing is about to come out in paperback — a confluence that has me thinking about humanities-based game design, something I’ve been more actively mulling since an NSF workshop on the Future of Research in Computer Games and Virtual Worlds that UCI hosted in 2010.

Obviously I’m not the first person on this scent — on some level people have been discussing humanities-based game design at least since Brenda Laurel’s dissertation. But working on Prom Week helped me realize that I think we need to go beyond “operationalizing” models from the humanities or applying humanities ideas gleaned from studying other media as design heuristics (though these are also important approaches).

There’s nothing really special about this map-looking thing, other than that you can’t get from the top-left corner to the bottom-right corner in less than 42 steps (I looks to take 56 or so). What is special here is how quickly we’re going to develop a flexible, style-ready generator for it. Set the clock for 50 lines-of-code, and let’s get started.

That’s right, we’re going to write this map generator right here in the blog post. If you want to follow along at home, download Clingo (a state-of-the-art answer set solver) and fire up your favorite text editor.