The current pet project that I am working on is a story system to handle stories in a dynamic way. It's related to the TV-style content that I mentioned in a post in March. Anyway, while doing some research for this, I've veered into a look at procedurally generated systems - mainly through a blog post on The Age's website which was written by an old work colleague, James "DexX" Dominguez, on these types of systems.

This lead me to this image from Introversion's current, in-development game, Subversion which can be seen here (the thread on Introversion's forums about this cool city system which creates this image is here).

It's interesting, but seeing this spiderweb-like, image made me think of using a similar structure for narrative, where the 'nodes' of the story are interlinked, allowing the player to find their way through their own story. It does make me wonder though, if you were using this sort of abstract, visual representation, is the player starting in the middle of a web (from a fixed starting point) working their way out to one of multiple endings, or are they starting at one of multiple starting points working their way through to a fixed conclusion?

I think that the latter is more in line with the systems that I am visualising, where the point of the system is not to create infinite choices for the player, but to handle their game decisions dynamically so that the game feels that the story is reacting to the player, rather than funnelling them down a fixed tube ('tubes=evil' in my current thinking, which is probably just the response to a difficult project!).