Narratives in Procedural Worlds

Minecraft and Terraria, two of the current top-selling indie games, take place in procedurally generated and random worlds.  In these games, you can measure game progression in terms of how deep into the earth you've gone and the materials from which your gear is crafted.  In Minecraft, diamonds are a sign that you've reached the bottom of the earth, and once you have enough of them, you can craft the best equipment in the game.  The same goes for Terraria and Hellstone Bars.

With these simple systems, both games can easily absorb over 30 hours of your time (and in Minecraft's case, hundreds of hours after that), yet both go against modern game convention by having no built-in story.  When you start in Minecraft, you have no beginning quest, no introduction, and no clue where to begin.  You start with an empty hotbar and in the middle of a virgin land.  As of the current version of the beta, there are no other NPCs that will communicate with you.

Terraria has some NPCs that will talk to you, but their main purpose is trading some of the valuable resources of the game for money, which can then be used to buy the more mundane but necessary items they sell.  They don't tell you what to do, with the exception of the guide who gives you hints about the world.  They provide some flavor to the game with their banter about the other merchants, but they function as virtual pieces of furniture in your buildings.

In the same way that these two games have created inhabitable worlds without narratives, I've been contemplating a game that builds cities and societies you can interact with and build a story around.  I've been focusing that conceptualization around a small town-focused RPG where NPCs all fill essential roles:

• Farmer - He goes around a field all day collecting grain.  In the morning, he gives the previous day's harvest to the cart runner.
• Cart Runner -  The cart runner is responsible for transporting goods.  In this small concept version, his only client is the farmer.  He takes the farmer's crops to the Grocer and then takes money back to the Farmer for the day's supplies.
• Grocer - The grocer buys the farmer's crops and sells them in the town.
• Town Person- In the initial development version, townspeople have an unlimited supply of money, but a daily allowance for buying goods.  They make a stop by the grocer every day to buy their meals.

In this world, there are four simple roles, but the player would have the ability to interrupt or commandeer any of them.  If the player killed the cart runner, the farmer would have to take the crops into town himself until the player or an extra town person took over the empty role.  In this scenario, the farmer would only produce half the crops because the other half of his time would be spent manning the cart.  The price of food would go up and the town would grow hungry.  If they caught him, the townspeople would vilify the guilty player and chase him from the town.

Even in this simple design, things get complicated fast and there's the risk of over-design or horrible AI making the game unplayable.  But if done right, I think this design would open up a world that's inhabitable and immersive in a different way than Minecraft or Terraria.  It would natively build a narrative around the player's actions because he would get direct response from the characters in the game world.

Thought Exercise II: Conceptualize another procedurally generated world where the game builds a story around the player's actions.