Murder mystery generation from open data

Abstract

This paper describes a system for generating murder mysteries for adventure games, using associations between real-world people mined from Wikipedia articles. A game is seeded with a real-world person, and the game discovers suitable suspects for the murder of a game character instantiated from that person. Moreover, the game discovers characteristics of the suspects which can act as clues for the player to narrow down her search for the killer. The possible suspects and their characteristics are collected from Wikipedia articles and their linked data, while the best combination of suspects and characteristics for a murder mystery is found via evolutionary search. The paper includes an example murder mystery generated by the system revolving around the (hypothetical) death of a contemporary celebrity.