“If literature’s tide is receding, let us build it a lighthouse.
Together, let us carry computational literature into its next great century.”
[Emergent Procedural Narrative Engine]
Emergent Procedural Narrative Engine
In recent years, some universities have cut humanities programs, while employment and public funding in these fields have become recurring subjects of debate. Conditions differ across regions and disciplines, but these changes make me feel that the humanities’ place in society is under pressure from both technology and budgets. AI, systems engineering and algorithms are entering text, images, emotion and creation itself at unprecedented speed. The poets’ castle that once sustained our intellectual and spiritual ambitions is being eroded by technological dominance, commercial efficiency and a narrowing pragmatism.
Some regard this as ordinary, others sigh pessimistically, and many remain silent. We have grown used to AI producing tens of thousands of words a minute, and systems proposing countless plot directions and writing techniques. Pessimists declare literature dead. Hollywood writers, meanwhile, have negotiated protections concerning AI use, credit and pay. They are fighting over the rules of technological adoption; this should not be described as proof that creativity has already been wholly replaced.
Amid this confusion, I have become increasingly certain that literature means more than employment or a skill. It is a fundamental way of facing the world: an inherited spiritual code, one reason civilization survives war, famine and alienation. It is why we can wait when trapped, and still believe, when all paths seem closed, that the story is not over.
It is time, then, to reconsider what a story itself can be.
Across agrarian, industrial and information societies, characters, action and causality have remained central narrative materials, while oral storytelling, nonlinear fiction and interactive narratives have continually reorganized them. My question is whether explicit states, rules and feedback can further extend the limits of an author’s experience and deliberate arrangement. Traditional composition is poetic, but its limits invite exploration. As someone devoted to writing, systems design and scientific modeling, I keep asking: could a fictional world genuinely develop rather than merely appear to grow? Could characters become inhabitants rather than manipulated pieces? Could creation become an experiment in compiling and evolving a world, rather than only association and slices of time?
I do not want to leave that question to traditionalists in the media or to consumerism. Working along the boundary between literature and technology, I choose a more radical, more deliberate and lonelier path:
Use technology to examine the structure of stories, and systems to reconstruct literary worlds.
This is the starting point of EPNE—the Emergent Procedural Narrative Engine.