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Analysis: Story And The Trouble With 'Emergent' Narratives
by Tom Cross [PC, Console/PC, Columns, Exclusive]
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July 10, 2009
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[Directly following his roundup of design perspectives on "new' storytelling in games, writer Tom Cross continues the piece by defining narrative in the context of games -- and why "emergent" narratives aren't quite a story yet.]
Narrative can’t help but have an internally coherent organizational logic (called "plot"). The important things about this logic are that it a) unfolds in time for a reader, that is, has a beginning, middle, and end, b) that the experience of reading is one of reading—of discovery and deciphering rather than production and self-creation, and c), that because of this, narratives appear for readers as pre-existing objects, things separate from a reader that demand to be seen and interpreted.
This last point is critical: narratives happen to readers, and speak of an intelligent, exterior design to readers. This is true even when we tell stories to ourselves (the principle on which psychoanalysis works)—we encounter a structure of meaning, or plot, outside ourselves, and re-narrate it to ourselves.
Narrative always comes first, and unless we’re very clear about what we mean by "story spaces" or "tools for making narrative," it’s unclear how we might provide readers with tools, rather than pre-existing narratives, out of which they themselves will produce narratives, ex nihilo.
Narrative is, to borrow an academic jargon, always there already. It’s naive to imagine for the sake of polemic that video games, just because they’re new media, are exempt from these rules about narrative, which are something like rules for human psychology. As Peter Brooks, cited in the last article, argues, we’re just wired this way. We see narratives everywhere, and when we as authors (or, yes, video game designers) produce meaningful artifacts, whatever we call them, we can’t help but encode meaning in them that a reader is going to decipher.
 Narrative Possibilities, Emergent Possibilities
It’s implausible to think that a game could ever exist where players could continually find a consistent, long-term level of narrative fascination without the aid of game-provided elements that are already narrative, elements that already have encoded in them some meaning that the reader has to interpret and put to work.
A game like Far Cry 2 is successful at playing with gamers’ expectations and goals because it has a strong back-story, varied narrative-based and setting-based game mechanics (the physicality of your character, your animations when healing wounds or taking pills, your connections to buddies) that allow players to create their own (hopefully meaningful) narratives within these game spaces.
To say that this is simply a "game space" is to deny the machinations of the designer (even in designer and blogger Steve Gaynor’s ideal game world), their construction of a world, a chain of actors, and a set of rules and motivations that propel multiple narratives through that gamespace. Still, if this is what narrative is today in a video game, then what could it be? What could the future of narrative look like?
I’m not talking about a set of conversations that you can only have with a set number of people, which, when activated in the (always the same) correct order, leads to a reward of some kind of all-encompassing, culminating narrative climax, or that same climax mixed with or preceded by a difficult in-game dilemma. I’m also not referring to multiple chains of branching dialogue and story paths that ultimately lead to one of several conclusions. This may be the form that narrative takes in modern games, but it’s just a certain kind of narrative, not narrative.
What's The Real Problem?
When I talk about narrative, I’m referring to the product of an author, a collection of ideas, settings and characters (and their actions) that can be interpreted by the viewer or player as a set of related occurrences and human interactions. As a human being who watches events unfold around us, we understand the potential for actions, reactions, missed opportunities (and missed failures).
While games today have rigid narratives, it’s wrong to think that narrative itself is the problem. The error lies in thinking that because some elements of RPGs and open-world games today are or are parts of a narrative, they can never be sufficiently dynamic or flexibly organized enough to allow user interaction with them.
These interactions can produce an emergent narrative, which, on the above definition, is something too complex to have been completely foreseen and provided for by the designers, and was produced by the user’s interaction with the simulated gameworld. This isn’t just the privilege of some soon-to-be-developed toolset of the future; the tropes and technologies are already here.
How? A game could present multiple actors, and in-game entities that had their own goals, made decisions based on their own desires (as created by the designer), and thus affected their surroundings, and possibly the player. If the unit of simulation isn’t resources, vehicles, day-night cycles, but characters, agents with a scripted set of goals and behaviors relative to the gameworld and the other characters in the system, then it is possible to run a system whose compositional elements are narrative.
The possibility of creating such a system clarifies how much the vagueness of the idea of "story space" and "emergent narrative" depends on uncertainty about what narrative is. Saying that if we give users a good enough toolset, they’ll make their own stories, is as much to say, "we don’t know what story is, but we know that it’s out there."
Is Emergent Narrative No Narrative?
To return to Blade Runner: the game created a cast of actors who seemed to follow their own paths dictated by their own motivations. What is so impressive about this idea is that it allows for the “unique” gameplay moments that you’ll find in a game like Fallout 3 for Far Cry 2, but with the difference that those moments carry meaning in themselves that the reader has to decipher, rather than being opaque meetings of meaningless avatars in a simulated world that we naively imagine will “become meaningful” for a sufficiently imaginative reader.
It’s also worth noting that in that game, game spaces abounded. Every payoff for every interaction was determined by your investment in the game and your character, and your reasons for doing what you did, how you expected the game world to react. The fact that it could surprise you, did surprise you, shows that the game allowed for more “emergent” narratives than any recent game.
People like to say that the Fallouts, Far Crys, and GTAs of the world allow for unpredictable, unscripted, emergent narrative moments. In fact, those moments aren’t properly narrative, while Blade Runner was. Think of the kind of moment that people have in mind when talking about emergent narrative in those games.
If I kill a person who I was supposed to help, thus necessitating a firefight with their relatives or friends, then yes, it’s “emergent”—something unscripted and procedural happens and I participate. But it isn’t narrative except in a world where opaque, meaningless random occurrences between human-like entities, empty of content, can be called “narrative” because we’re imagining a user who, like a kid playing with dolls, fills in all the semantic gaps.
 And so what’s happened is not an "emergent narrative." It’s emergent, and the narrative elements are stage dressing that, insofar as the event was unscripted, cease to matter. If in-game actors start killing each other but there’s no narrative armature for why that happens, then it’s beside the point that the agents happen to represent people, friends and relatives or whatever.
Real Emergent Narratives
The new thing that’s happened with them happens in spite of and entirely separate from their status as characters, because they and the game world can’t speak meaningfully to us as readers about what’s happened. If we project meaning onto it, it’s separate from the meaning that was already coded into it (that the actors are characters in a story)—those elements become throwaway, even though the whole point of making them characters in the first place was, obviously, to create a meaningful world.
Unlike those games, Blade Runner attempted to simulate a game world that could quite happily continue to function without your input at each juncture, and a world in which “function” meant interaction between characters with goals, and “interaction” meant conversation and communicative action. Those things happened in the game, and it wasn’t supposed (impossibly) that the reader would bring it all from the outside. It was possible to miss events and characters, and thus have other events cut off from your purview.
This is not the same as saying “I had a different experience in Fallout 3 because I missed quests my friend did; we can now discuss our emergent gameplay experiences.” Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2 may provide users with hobbled narrative tools, but they do not provide actual independence. You may be able to “go anywhere and do anything” in these games, but what that actually means is “go into some areas, fight guys, and wait to activate missions and story segments.”
A game that actually allowed for emergent narratives would need a game with strong narrative blocks (like Blade Runner) to keep the flow of events cohesive, in the face of the player’s actual freedom and independence.
In Fallout 3 quests will never start unless you start them. Alistair Tenpenny will sit on top his tower waiting for a supposedly inevitable nuclear explosion for the entire game, if you see fit. This is in no way interesting or fun, nor does it provide me with an exciting experience.
In fact, knowing that Alistair waits atop his tower for me (and only me, no one else can do it, apparently) is unpleasant. Why doesn’t he go hire someone else? What if I then decided to kill that person, necessitating attacks against me by Alistair?
This is not a far-fetched notion, and games attempt to provide such branching story paths all of the time. The problem is that there is never a question of the world’s self-sufficiency or linear temporality. If I sit on my hands watching zebras frolicking, the Jackal and other warlords will stew in their bases, waiting for some brave mercenary to aid them.
This is where proponents of emergent narrative have a point—the narrative elements of these games are indeed too static. But to say that those games are static because they use narrative elements, and to imagine that there are non-narrative, “emergent” aspects to these systems waiting to be mined (and that can be divorced from the harmful aspects of “narrative”), is to mistake one problem for another, insufficient dynamism for something inherently wrong with narrative.
 New Possibilities
It may be quite possible for me to, as Gaynor writes, find developers and games that create spaces to have exciting, new experiences. It’s recently become much easier to find them in fact, in the form of The Path. The Path clearly subscribes to the school of thought that desires emergent, unpredictable narrative experiences and creations (on the player’s and designer’s part).
Yet Gaynor contends that such games “Provide people with new places in which to have new experiences, to give our audience the kind of agency and autonomy they might not have in their daily lives; to create worlds and invite people to play in them.”**
But does this sound like a space that can be differentiated from its user-created adventures? It may all be well and good to have exciting, unscripted firefights against mercs on a field in Far Cry 2, but I would strongly argue that such player generated narratives (maybe, in your mind you’re just trying to let off a bit of steam, hang out in the plains, when you get jumped by soldiers.
Maybe you’re angry at one of these soldiers because they killed your buddy) are inextricable from (and thus highly dependent on) their structured, designer-produced settings and narratives.
In fact, insofar as they require the user to apply the backstory to them, as they surely do, they’re boring because they don’t have content of their own. And insofar as they relate to the broader narrative frame (as they often do despite themselves), they violate the dictum of story space as sole preserve for the appearance of that rare new species, “emergent narrative,” and smuggle narrative in the back door.
Furthermore, to say that a world – where you could do things (any things) and have those things be meaningful – could exist necessitates that the world be carefully, expansively designed, its players extensively fleshed out, embodied, and horribly, plotted. If a game, its world, and its denizens do not impose a logical set of responses upon your character due to your actions, then a player will always know the “gaminess” of their setting.
In most games, gamers instantly (or quickly) recognize the systems of action, reward, repercussion, and recognize their place and weight within the game. It’s rare that you find a game that knows how to make players explore their worlds conceptually as well as physically, and even rarer are the games that get this right.
Creating Meaning
I find it hard to create “meaningful” moments or experiences in a game that so clearly accepts (uncritically) the standards of FPS design as does Far Cry 2. It’s telling that what “emergent” gameplay and narrative amount to in games is a different kind of enemy assault, a riotous, chaotic battlefield. It’s still the Bioshock problem, the “two people killed the enemies with different powers” fallacy of “choice” gaming.
What if your interface for the shooting itself changed? What if the terms by which you “won” or “lost” an encounter changed regularly? What if these stopped being the only possible outcomes? Instead, your goals changed from killing everyone to getting captured, or doing something outside of the shoot/be shot at paradigm.
To move further outside the kill/die and win/lose video game rhetoric (to a more experiential model, say) is almost incomprehensible to games, designers, and gamers, and with the tools and examples we have today, I’m not surprised.
Gaynor’s argument assumes that a reactive, highly realized and modifiable world can elicit genuine emotional responses in me, possibly even responses I’m unfamiliar with. I don’t care how reactive your world is, I cannot be interested in the actions of my character if they are not couched in a broader human context and narrative.
This is why so many games fail to elicit responses from gamers. Their characters, plot, and world are at once artificial, unbelievable, and uncomfortable in their own skin. They consistently fail to transparently direct and modify the world in a responsive, enjoyable way (for the player).
When I relate to fictions, to the actions of my avatar and the hidden or visible results of his actions, it’s because they take place within a recognizable, human spectrum of actions, existence and response. If there’s no reason for the queen dying after the king, after all, I’m not sure I care. And I don’t care to dream up a reason all on my own.
 A Hopeless Cause
Much like in the blander shooters of today, all of the emergent gameplay and experience in the world can’t make up for badly realized characters and stories. Likewise (and far more importantly), the autonomy and ability of the game world to function, play out, and possibly self-terminate (in parts) is key to the realization of Gaynor’s ideal.
I think you need a tangible thread of narrative force running through a world to make these things important, otherwise every happening has the potential to be “meaningful” to me.
This thread can exist anywhere, it can be different for every user, but it will exist, and it will not do so just because a user willed it into existence in the absence of coherent emotional and logical stimuli. This isn’t the case in real life, and it’s not the case for one individual.
Yes, one potential gamer may find the relatable experiences of her in game character interesting, but there is a difference between one player and a community of players, and between interesting and engrossing.
Next week, I want to talk about how Gaynor’s goal is one that I appreciate, despite the impossibility or inadvisability of some of his prescriptions. As he hypothesizes: "Under the immersion model, instead of relying on an authored message encoded in a single traditional narrative stream, meaning arises from the content developers' ambient characterization of the gameworld itself and the non-player characters who inhabit it. Instead of gaining perspective by seeing specific events through the eyes of a particular character, the player gains perspective by himself inhabiting a world apart from his own daily experience and coming away with a sense of meaningful displacement."*
I think that this is quite possible, but that there are necessary designer-heavy elements that must inhabit this world, especially if the “sense of meaningful displacement” is to be achieved. I also think that these elements must inescapably answer to the broader rules and results of being part of narratives. To aid me in my discussion, I’ll bring up the notion of “Island-based” tabletop quest creation and modification, and the graphic adventure The Last Express.
* The Immersion Model of Meaning
Storymaking
** Being There
The Challenge of Non-Linearity
A Peek into Game Design
[Tom Cross writes for Gametopius and Popmatters, and blogs about video games at shouldntbegaming.wordpress.com. You can contact him at romain47 at gmail dot com.]
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Anyways... Games that draw me in are things I'm interested in in real life. Games I can use to further myself in life.
Many times I just wished I could be dropped in a world where I had to figure it out. I know there's hunting, and I know there fishing, and racing. So I go fishing, hunting and racing.
If I catch a big fish it's possible it goes to the leaderboard, if I do well in any of these area's certain things happen, if I don't do anything nothing happens.
In games there doesn't need to be a beginning, middle and end. There only really needs to be a beginning. Unless your trying to tell a story. Is it a novel, is it a short story... What kind of story you want to tell pretty much can determine the throughline or throughlines.
I believe that a story can be subliminal without doing so intentionally.
For example: If I want to tell a story about what pollution is doing to the world and what individuals can do to help clean it up I'd create a game based on fishing...
In this fishing game the player gets a log cabin and a plot of land along side a river, or lake or ocean, whatever.
In time a peice of paper gets caught in some weeds in the water, then a plastic bottle get's stuck in the weeds, fish get trapped in there. Polluted water is making the fish sick, and lesser of them. They are dying.
If a player picks up the trash, it is healthier for that environment, which in turn provides the player with better fishing. End of story
They can do anything they want in games, they just don't want to. To many time and money constraints.
It seems like you have some interesting points, but I really just can't get through it.
For example, in the card game "Race for the Galaxy", players play cards that represent planets or developments (like new technologies or societal concepts) in an effort to build an space empire. Nearly all of the cards contain a picture, a name, and a bunch of icons describing their powers. The information presented is enough to play, but on its own, it makes the player create a story for each card. For example, "Refugee World" produces goods, but reduces military power. It costs nothing to play. Although nowhere on the card is it described how the world became a place for refugees, the lack of information invites a player to imagine why. If it's played after the player plays a military-themed card, one can imagine that the refugees escaped from another planet, and can further imagine that the reduction in military is because the military must monitor the refugees. But if it's played after, say, "Mining Robots", one can imagine that the refugees were driven out of their homes by a greedy conglomerate. The narrative can be dependent on the context of what has happened before, but it can be unique through each playthrough because the game is designed so it is nearly impossible to play the same cards in the same sequence in a typical play period.
Or how about the cult favorite PC game, "Dwarf Fortress"? DF doesn't immerse a player in high-end graphics or elementary emergent techniques like GTA's, Bioshock's or Oblivion's. DF immerses a player in information.... lots and lots of information. I don't know of any other game that generates as much backstory for each character and location. In the case of a game like GTA, the emergent narrative might be, "I shot an unnamed prostitute in view of unnamed witnesses, and the cops came out and shot at me." That's not a very interesting story. DF might generate a story like this: "Otis Whitehammer crippled his co-worker, Helde Fylgavane, due to dissatisfaction over the lack of alcohol in the fortress. Helde lost her left leg. Her husband, Jaggar Blundercore, who became a hero 15 years before over his victory over the rampaging troll Huirtano and became captain of the guard, heard about the attack while patrolling the eastern mountains. Huirtano led his squad to the caverns and hunted down Otis, killing him with repeated blows to the face and body. Blood spattered the intricate carvings of Turno Whistlebaum and was never cleaned due to the distraction of continued goblin raids. When Turno saw the desecration of his life's work two weeks later, he went mad with anger, stripped off his clothes, and ran straight towards a hill troll, promptly getting his head torn off." Now THAT'S an emergent story, and happens regularly in DF.
To quote Law and Order prosecutor Ben Stone, "Objection, your honor -- this argument assumes facts not in evidence."
Perhaps you will publish the whole thing someday. In the meantime, Gama editors -- and you know who you are -- this is your fault.
http://gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=24019
I'll try to highlight it more, but this is the second part of the piece - that is the first part.
The visual quality of games like Crysis and Far Cry 2 suggest that most of what needs to be done to achieve a perception of photorealism has been achieved, and the rest is just tweaking. My hope is that this means game designers will now be able to turn their attention from photorealism to the even harder problem of "psychorealism" -- of actors in a gameworld who are capable of planning and performing goal-seeking behaviors that work as both narrative elements and gameplay challenges.
If this capability could be combined with designing gameworlds to be rich with objects that all actors can use in multiple ways, then, I think, immersive gaming takes an order-of-magnitude leap forward. Something like that is what I'm trying to articulate in my "Living World" design concept (http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BartStewart/20090420/1204/The_quotLiving_Worldquo
t_Game.php), but this article capably lays out some of the groundwork thinking that will be required to support such a game.
Having said that, it's important to address directly one of the fair criticisms of this approach, which is that if you as a game developer cannot determine ahead of time all possible game states (or, at least, types of game states), then you can't test them. And if you can't test them, then you'll be shipping a game that players may be able to put into a wedged state. Likely result: unhappy players, lost money, bad PR, and possibly even studio closure.
Those of us who favor the idea of emergent gameplay, whether on the rules-based play side or the emergent narrative side, need to tackle this criticism squarely -- preferably with practical solutions, and definitely now, before games that don't address this problem ship and create a public perception that emergent gameplay "can't work."
Consider that the "retold narrative" has existed since the beginning of video games. That is, events that a player experiences outside of a plotted context, and retells. Like life, video games feature events and variables that can occur in limitless combinations. The player experiences these combinations - a miracle pass in Madden that wins the game, a movie-quality unscripted combat encounter in F.E.A.R. - and retell them.
A video game story is an experience. The game itself does not even need a beginning, middle and end, because the player's experience of the game obviously began and ended at some point. It is possible, however, for a designer to create a more traditional story out of an experience. That is, a story that features characters who are more than "enemy A" or "building block C". Consider 2005's Facade, which features two characters governed by a complex AI system that reacts to the players statements, or lack thereof. The player arrives at the house of a married couple, and the events that occur determine how their marriage ends, or if it continues. Here we are more in agreement: a designer can create a story with a "driving thread" in an emergent or semi-emergent environment. However, I believe that a player can be trusted to "fill in the blanks" of a story. When playing Facade, the realism created by the convincing voice acting, AI and writing destroyed any sense that I was playing a game. Even with the crude graphics. The player does not see the events that lead to the scene during which the game takes place, but by experiencing that scene, and through the references made to prior events, s/he becomes a willing participant in the game's "story". In summary, the experience is the player's unique story, happening directly and immediately at the time of play, and retold in a more static form. The designer's intent is what causes the experience to become a "story" with traditional "characters".
I apologize for any clarity, spelling or grammar errors I might have missed. I'm typing this from a non-PC device, which makes proofreading and editing a post of this size nearly impossible.
This is covered/developed in my patents/research:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/author/DrElliotMcGucken/1169/
"That will be $69.95 for the collector's edition, complete with a metal box. For $179.95, you will also get a life-like Gold 45 Revolver replica, based on the single-action Colt .45--the Peacemaker Smokewagon--the Judge Colt and His Jury of Six."
Best,
Dr. E :)
I think the problem is because these types of games are too damn big, too damn ambitious. I wish publishers would see it in themselves to fund smaller, shorter, story-oriented games. Preferably non-violent.
And for the people that commented on the grammatical and compositional inconsistencies, I'm curious as to your thoughts on the actual content of the article. Especially Mr. Adams, whose opinion I value from Designer's Notebook.
Example: in an MMO everything is prescripted or entirely random. If the NPCs and events and so forth actually interacted with one another and evolved, this would also mean that player actions would make a difference in the world as a whole. And that would be much more satisfying for players interested in story (face it, many are not).
If you have a lot of experience with tabletop D&D you've seen worlds where what the players do has no effect on the world, and others where what the players do makes a difference, sometimes a big difference, in what happens next. In some worlds, a "dungeon" is just the same as you left it even if it's a year later in real time or game time. In (a few) others, things happen in the dungeon when the players aren't around. I've experimented with dungeons where "things happen" when the players aren't around, and the results are very interesting (though it can be time consuming).
Or maybe the author meant something else entirely? There seemed to be a lot of assertions depending on definitions that were not always explicit (the definitions, that is), at least in this installment. It may be the kind of article that should be presented all at once, not in time-separated pieces.
But Dwarf Fortress' attention to tracking events is something that is sorely missing from other games. It is all well and good to inject into your game world the capacity for random events through design, such as saving a trader from a raider attack in Fallout 3 whilst enroute to your destination. But with no event handling in place it is like a loose thread. What difference is there between this and say, simply killing a bunch of raiders and selling their equipment to a trader you meet?
It is about creating a world that truly turns with or without the player. A difficult concept to grasp and something a lot of developers seem to turn away from, perhaps because the possibility that your content might be missed by the player through no fault of their own seems like wasted effort.
Perhaps form AI upon layers. Thus giving each actor a much wider set of possible dynamically determined actions, each making sense contextually. then just update these periodically (or mroe often if the player is directly interacting with them) For instance;
Physical Self -> mostly direct needs, survival, actually engaging in talk, sleeping, eating etc
Mental Self -> Personal goals, hate so and so, like so and so, want to be the strongest, searching for lost daughter etc, directs the talk vs fight nature of the actor in a given circumstance
Group -> The direct group they're associated with in the now. Takes on group goals, takes on certain physical actions related to the group, so certain group tactics, hold location, attack location etc. Could occasionally conflict with the self states (eg survival wins out in certain circumstances, as does personal affiliation e.g. particular merc likes player and lets him go rather than kill him)
Organisation -> the greater body they belong to, they incorporate it's goals as directives, while a greater AI controller determines the directives of the organisation as a whole.
It works thus, the Organisation AI Controller has the ability to form a group, assign actors to that group, then give that group a directive. Actors then act out that group level directive above their own directives until they come into conflict with their self directives, when in conflict some measure of loyalty/stupidity/need could determine whether the actors self directives over-ride the group directive. (resulting in cowardice, turncoat behaviour, disobeying unsavoury orders, sleeping at their guard post)
Each Actor could be given a weight in the Organisation, that determines the overall detriment to the organisation should that actor be removed. So for instance the leader/s(?) is effectively the most cherished actor in the organisation. And the organisation AI would attempt to put him in locations of safety. Certain realistic conditions though could cause him to come out from safety, for instance lets say a highly weighted actor must "give the commands", or "authorise a command". So either the leader or a lieutenant must personally "activate" a group. This could be as complex as you want it to be. It could be a simple, Actor travels to locations, spawns group there , group is given directive and leaves, actor retreats to safety or moves to next authorisation request. Or you could add radios and codes (allowing for players to listen in, intercept messages, relay false commands etc).
The effect of this is that a) the loss of a highly weighted actor reduces potential group activations (destabilisation), remaining high weighted actors are worth more so safety becomes tighter (e.g. paranoia), b) the Organisation must react either to; promote an actor (conditions would be given for this), or by retaliating (an attempt to balance the total weights of itself and it's opponents). In addition, other organisation level entities, might notice this lack of comparative weight and determine new actions based upon it (aid, assault, neutrality etc).
Along these lines, Organisations could be given a Modus Operandi, a descriptor that determines the manner it "prefers" to operate in....Or perhaps a set of Operands, for instance;
Normal -> mode for everyday operation (economic, aggressive, defensive, stealthy, a combination?)
Destabilised -> the mode when suffering heavy attacks
Strong -> the mode when stronger than a particular opponent
Opportunistic -> the mode likely to take when another entity (not necessarily a direct opponent) becomes destabilised.
This Operand basically determines the types of groups and directives it gives them. Or at least the relative likely hood of spawning any given group/directive. All that's left to do from this point is spawn physical structures, give them weights that designate their importance and type, and have actors treat them in certain ways. Allow for their capture, destruction, modification and repair by actors. Apply weights to the map indicating favourable locations, so that new structures might be built and held. Include some method for altering these, define some overarching goals and attributes for each organisation, spawn actors, determine territories, weight the organisations strength in each territory and hit "go".
Meaning could simply be imbued by giving certain actors/groups/organisations certain operations. For instance a bunch of Mercenary Actors are told to destroy a village, but they see a chance for personal profit, and instead loot the place, kidnap the women and children to sell into slavery, THEN burn the place to the ground. So the player could come across(quite a graphic scene if you wanted) mercenary's in the middle of piling women and children into trucks to take to slave camps. Could come across the woman they met in a local village on a slave stand in a market place. Could meet a man whose mental goal has become "find wife, kill men who took her", of which the player could be one.
The player could have a family living in a village, and what happens to them could change game to game. In one they're left alone, in another they're slaughtered half way through the game and you go seeking revenge. In the meantime without your support the cause you were working with begins to falter and a new array of options exists once you finish seeking revenge. Perhaps disastrously, and the player is forced to choose between saving their family and saving their cause. In fact the engine could be built to challenge the player, so when something happens to their family, the engine reacts and something major begins to happen to a friend or your organisation etc. Perhaps if the player joins a merc band, they discover that the merc leader intends to rape and pillage. OR that they're attacking his families home town.
Apologies for writing such a long post, I kind of got carried away somewhere in the middle. Anyway I do imagine such a system would be awfully complex to implement (with heavy time cost, implementation cost, all sorts of code inefficiencies, and most importantly, AI would need a significant budget allowance, lets not even get into play testing and bug finding), but still it's an interesting concept and it wouldn't surprise me to see such things in our future.