Some friends have been telling me interesting things about the
upcoming game The Sims (see
"http://www.gamecenter.com/Peeks/Thesims/"): in particular, I'm told
that all the emergent behavior of the Sim people is based on
programmed reactions to the objects around them. I haven't seen this
in action yet, and I don't know if I believe it (I'd believe "some"
or even "most" but "all" might be an exaggeration) -- and even if
it's true, it's still a far cry from creating stories. But it does
suggest possible approaches for keeping lots of irrelevant minor
characters running around in a story-world to make it look
populated... Not only street crowd- and traffic-behavior simulations
(which I've now seen in a couple of 3D games, after first
encountering them at SIGGRAPH a few years back in a German company's
demo), but miscellaneous people populating buildings and such...
--jed
