You Teach! Romeo and Juliet was created with a dual purpose:

It was a technological experiment in procedural narrative and simulated conversation.

Equally, it aimed to engage players in the act of education.

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An early working title, A Generative Discussion of R&J, sheds light on the overall vision of the project. That is, I wondered if I could somehow find a way to make procedurality enhance an interactive discussion. This lofty goal of making a computer generate meaning about a Shakespeare play enhanced the end result because it made me think through my process as a teacher leading a literary discussion enough to generalize and program my approach into a machine.

 

The artifact has value not only for students of Shakespeare but also for teachers in training looking to examine a pedagogy in practice. From a developer standpoint, it also has R&D value as a demonstration of deeply procedural narrative. Individual sentences in dialogue lines were built from smaller sentence fragments, and these lines were used to piece together back-and-forth exchanges between characters. The project is successful enough that I often imagine new directions to go with procedural narrative given what I learned from it.