Toward Better Gossip Simulation in Emergent Narrative Systems

Interactive emergent narrative games often make use of social simulation techniques, including the modeling of character relationships and knowledge, to generate compelling gameplay and stories. Existing attempts at simulating the spread of knowledge and opinions between characters, however, strictly limit the informational and social content of the communications that characters exchange, making it difficult to create play experiences in which gossip is a core mechanic. In this paper, we introduce gossip simulation as an open problem in intelligent narrative technologies and present an abstract approach to informationally and socially rich gossip simulation for emergent narrative-oriented social simulations, as well as a preliminary concrete implementation of this approach.