Okay. As already established, not enough work is getting done. First off, I really ought to be working at school, not here. The temptation of and tendency for things to drift off is far too great. That being said, the work currently being done is pretty unstimulating as it is.

I'm currently gathering writings made by other people on the subject. The intention is to get a grip on the following things:

1. What makes a good story? What compels the reader/player to get involved in the things he's reading about/doing?
2. How can we reduce a story to component pieces?
3. What parts of a story are most relevant to video games?
4. How can we formulate a “narrative grammar” for those components relevant to video games?
5. How to we derive compelling gameplay elements from a grammar?

It's also become clear to me that I need a slightly better and more clear definition of what the goal of this research really is. Why do we want to have computer-generated narratives and quests in the first place? I'd like it to be clear that this isn't mainly done in order to generate narratives that can outperform a real writer. Instead, we want to generate stories in order to create better replayability, infuse variation into otherwise bland games, and find more ways to engage the player in the game other than visuals or gameplay mechanics. Think of it as taking a roguelike or Diablo to the next level, and make it interesting enough for people to want to play it, not just once, but several times over.

It occurs to me that there is a parallel to be drawn to other kinds of replayability offered by modern games. This article by Ernest Adams talks about various ways that narratives affect replayability, and there are many valuable things to take away from it, I think. In addition to non-linear static narratives, other ways to foster replayability that I can think of are things like race/class choices in RPGs or adventure games and non-linear puzzles. These probably deserve a mention.

I'm still having some troubles figuring out just how to structure the thesis. There seems to be some guidelines for what should be in there, but they are a bit fuzzy and I still don't know what each chapter is really supposed to contain, or where everything fits. What I just wrote should be in the thesis, for instance, but in what chapter? I'll have to think about it.