Before reading this topic, please read through this short thread. If you like, you can also read through this explanation of the slice of life genre.

Ok.

How should I phrase this... In short, a slice of life can be any story that focuses on the everyday lives of characters in a setting. It could be sci-fi, high fantasy, steampunk, cyberpunk, etc. A more proper gaming term for this is probably "interactive fiction" or "role-playing". I'd like to know what you think of this genre. Do you think emergent stories work well in persistent world games?

Hmm... I feel that emergent stories don't work well in programming; has nothing to do with the type of game. It's the same reason it's so hard to make a computer look at a photo and figure out what it's a photo of, compounded by the fact that AIs are horrible conversationalists. If the game can't figure out what the player is doing within the game, it can't react appropriately in a way that helps turn the player's actions into story or helps direct the player towards more story.

But, disclaimer, I don't personally like slice of life stories. Interactive fiction is different - I love interactive fiction games, but not when they are emergent or slice of life.

Ok, I see. Thanks for responding. I know slice of life can be a boring genre sometimes, as it typically involves less action, but I think it can be a nice break from action-packed stories once in a while. There's an anime series I used to watch called Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit (not slice of life). I liked the structure of that story.

The lack of action doesn't bother me at all - I love stories that have lots of introspection, for example. It's the lack of structure and strong theme that bothers me. If there is no end and the story makes no progress, or if I get to the end and ask, "What was the point? Why end here?" that's the kind of thing I dislike.

Well, I guess the easiest way to explain the point of this genre is that it provides a means of "peaceful escapism" (that's the term I came across). Sometimes, the audience doesn't really want to focus on a story, but rather on the characters and the things they do. Often it's just interesting to see how they react to each other whilst going about their daily lives. Many of these kinds of series are structured by self-contained episodes with individual plots, whereas other series are structured by episodes that add to an overarching plot. It's common for self-contained episodes to end with an aesop, with the characters resolving some problem that arose in the episode, or with the characters accomplishing something (however small it may be). If you think about it, real life is actually like a slice of life series. There's no plot and many people do find themselves asking "What's the point?". I think the example one person used in the first thread I linked was that watching a slice of life is like hanging out with friends. Even if you don't get a lot done, you still [usually] enjoy interacting with them because they're interesting people, and sometimes it's just fun to see their reactions to various things. I don't really hang out with friends, so I'm not sure how accurate that really is.

In any case, I want to make an online multiplayer game that's focused on this kind of story--crafted from the player's interactions with each other. I have zero experience with D&D, but I think role-playing (players creating an emergent story through acting as their characters) was a big deal there. A lot of online multiplayer games have players quest through the same story, but I want to allow players to create their own stories in a persistent world. There would still be quests, but they would change according to the current state of the game world. I probably chose a vague title for this thread (and I think I'm moving toward discussing gameplay rather than a story here).