Last night I spoke to the Oxford AI Meetup about a variety of work going around artificial intelligence and (especially) game narrative. We talked about simulation-based and narrative-model based approaches to plot generation, agent-driven stories, dialogue selection and generation, and natural language understanding, with an emphasis on relatively recent or ongoing research projects and released games. (So I didn’t do a deep dive into the history of narrative generators.)
At the end of the talk, several people asked for links to the things I’d mentioned, so here they are:
Games and projects:
Dwarf Fortress and other dwarflikes
Talk of the Town (James Ryan et al) (or if the paper is a bit dense, you might also like Games by Angelina’s writeup of the core concepts)
IDtension / Nothing for Dinner (Nicolas Szilas et al); I discussed it a bit
Scheherazade project (Mark Riedl et al, Entertainment Intelligence Lab, Georgia Tech) using crowd-sourced event descriptions to generate a graph of possible story developments
Restaurant Game (Jeff Orkin et al)
Dear Leader’s Happy Story Time (Ian Horswill, relatively new/early but I thought an interesting contrast)
Ice-Bound Concordance (Aaron Reed and Jacob Garbe)
Event[0]
Firewatch (see also my review)
My own work:
Galatea (and this article on translating Galatea to Versu)
Versu and Blood & Laurels
Annals of the Parrigues (and other discussion about procedural text generation)
Other talks, tools, and resources that were mentioned in the talk or in subsequent Q/A time:
Elan Ruskin’s GDC talk on salience mechanism
Kate Compton’s easy CFG tool Tracery
My Beyond branching narratives post
80 Days (came up in discussion about player agency and visible mechanics)
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
I’m curious about “other dwarflikes” – what else falls into that category? I usually group DF with Dungeon Keeper and Evil Genius, but I wonder if I’m overlooking others that have more narrative possibilities.
That was a lead-in to talking about the Talk of the Town project (next link), which spends the first part of the game doing a dwarflike city-building simulation to establish the baseline history for the story.
I haven’t played either game yet, so take this with a pinch of salt, but I gather Rimworld is a Dwarf Fortress-inspired procedural experience that’s been getting very good reviews since it hit Steam Early Access a few months ago (it’s been in dev for a few years):
http://store.steampowered.com/app/294100/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RimWorld
I always regret not being able to play blood and laurels. I could never get a hold of an ipad and now I can never play it.