Who Killed Albert Einstein? From Open Data to Murder Mystery Games

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel framework that automatically creates murder mystery adventure games from open data sources, transforming Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, and Wikimedia Commons into playable narratives centered on historical figures.

Contribution

The paper presents a comprehensive generative pipeline for creating open data-based murder mystery games, including suspect generation, city modeling, and dialogue creation, demonstrated through Einstein's case.

Findings

Successfully generated games for 100 influential 20th-century figures.

The framework produces coherent and engaging murder mystery scenarios.

Evaluation shows the system's ability to create diverse and plausible game narratives.

Abstract

This paper presents a framework for generating adventure games from open data. Focusing on the murder mystery type of adventure games, the generator is able to transform open data from Wikipedia articles, OpenStreetMap and images from Wikimedia Commons into WikiMysteries. Every WikiMystery game revolves around the murder of a person with a Wikipedia article and populates the game with suspects who must be arrested by the player if guilty of the murder or absolved if innocent. Starting from only one person as the victim, an extensive generative pipeline finds suspects, their alibis, and paths connecting them from open data, transforms open data into cities, buildings, non-player characters, locks and keys and dialog options. The paper describes in detail each generative step, provides a specific playthrough of one WikiMystery where Albert Einstein is murdered, and evaluates the outcomes of games generated for the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.