Mysterious Murder - MCTS-driven Murder Mystery Generation
We present an approach to procedurally generate the narrative of a simple murder mystery. To do so, we use the rule evaluation system as implemented by Ceptre, which employs linear logic to resolve valid actions during each step of the simulation. We extend this system with a concept of believable agents to make consecutive actions appear to have a causal connection so that players can comprehend the °ow of events. The parts of the generated narratives are then presented to a player whose task it is to figure out who the murderer in this story could have been. Rather than aiming to replace highly authored narratives, this project generates puzzles, which may contain emerging arcs of a story as perceived by the player. While we found that even a simple rule set can create stories that are interesting to reason about, we assume that this type of system is flexible enough to create considerably more engaging stories if enough time is invested in authoring them.