Procedural stories in video games often induce a specific kind of delight. 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. 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.
Players have grown accustomed to procedural generation in a spatial sense. 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. But procedural narratives are a different beast. (Distinct, it should be noted, from pre-written branching stories). They’re slippery,…
