Nate Austin, designer and programmer of tactical role-playing game Wildermyth, sees procedural storytelling as stemming from tabletop board games like Dungeon and Dragons - experiences that provide rules and a structure from which a vast number of narratives can spawn. For some, it started with randomly generated dungeons of 1980’s Rogue for others, choose-your-own-adventure books. If you ask game makers about the origins of procedural narratives, you’ll get nothing resembling a consensus. Now it feels like this sandbox approach to storytelling is starting to bear even greater narrative fruit. They’re slippery, simulation-driven configurations of plot, setting, conflict, resolution, and people.ĭrama, as video games continue to prove, is harder to convince players of than space itself, which makes procedural successes all the more eye-catching - from mainstream hits such as The Sims to cult classics like Rimworld. (Distinct, it should be noted, from pre-written branching stories). But procedural narratives are a different beast. Just look at the endless variations of levels that define games such as Hades in the ever-popular rogue-like genre and the infinite planets that populate the virtual universe of 2016’s No Man’s Sky. Players have grown accustomed to procedural generation in a spatial sense. It’s what 2020’s viral sensation Blaseball and this year’s breakout indie hit, Wildermyth, share in common - two strikingly different games whose reactive stories are nevertheless cut from the very same cloth. You’ll know when it hits - a realization that the code and algorithms of the game seem to be generating a coherent narrative from your own impulsive, seemingly chaotic actions. Procedural stories in video games often induce a specific kind of delight.

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