I had some thoughts about heists & mysteries, with regard to plot generation.
Mysteries and heists are interesting for generation because they’re, in a literal sense, formulaic.
Every classical (Sherlock Holmes / Agatha Cristie) mystery story has basically the same format:
- there is a real story / world-state,
- bits and pieces of that world state (clues) are revealed gradually,
- then there is a total reveal in which the detective character tells the story using only already-revealed clues.
You’d think this would be easy to generate (and it is!). But, it’s very hard to generate a satisfying mystery of this type because the joy in a mystery story is being in the thin sliver of the information spectrum where the set of clues makes the conclusion neither obvious nor impossible but also ultimately only produces a single possible result. Doing this means having a pretty good idea of what’s in the reader’s head — what are the reader’s priors — and engineering clues around that.
Maybe I’m wrong about how often the resulting stories are satisfying & we can just generate pretty satisfying mysteries with only a handful of heurstics about what kinds of clues should be chosen, but Ithink we’d actually need to create several kinds of planners/ontologies to simulate different figures:
- stuff the murderer knows
- stuff the detective knows