Shoelace: A Storytelling Assistant for GUMSHOE One-2-One

Abstract

In creative roleplaying games, game masters take on many roles, including keeping track of the game's story, remembering past actions, and improvising new content based on player choices and desires. This dynamic storytelling can be quite difficult, particularly in real-time play, and this paper explores how digital tools might be able to assist GMs with elements of this process. In particular, we explore issues that game masters experience in running the GUMSHOE One-2-One system by analyzing posts from the online role playing game community, and discuss the design of a digital tool that helps to address common problems. The resulting tool, Shoelace, helps game masters keep track of story events with a graph-based game world visualization, while also providing creative suggestions using Prolog queries over a database of game information.