Ceptre: A Language for Modeling Generative Interactive Systems [pdf]

I'm a big fan of this work. For the PDF-shy, there's some excerpted text on LtU: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5216 but you'll miss some of the goodies, like the graph of a scenario from Romeo and Juliet, showing the actors act concurrently at different locations.

See also the github repo: https://github.com/chrisamaphone/interactive-lp/

There is an emphasis on using Ceptre for developing interactive fiction¹ (text adventures/parser games.) From my perspective, a pain point in developing truly creative interactive fiction is the tools available tend to impose a world model on your work. I'm excited for Ceptre because it lets you write causal relationships directly and that makes starting from scratch a more realistic proposition.

1. With some work I think it could be (and should be) used in other kinds of games, such as sandbox games or anything that would benefit from a living world, even if only in part if the main story must be nailed down and deterministic.

As a linguistics student and amateur programmer I find linear logic to be very interesting since it gets used both in linguistics (associated with lexical-functional grammar) and, of course, math and computing.

I think it would be cool to parse the output tree of a Ceptre program and produce some kind of display (other than a visual tree, of course.) Maybe set the stages to auto, run it a a bunch of times, then produce some statistical analysis from the results - number of deaths per character, average speed at which a given character dies, and so on.

Anyone know if a Ceptre parser available? They must have written one for this article.