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[IndigoFenix]

As far as decision-making is concerned, it seems that there are two basic types of games out there.

On the one hand, you have plot-driven or level-based games where the objective is to proceed along a more-or-less linear track and reach the ending.  In these games, there are few real choices you can make that significantly impact the plot - all decision making basically boils down to making it easier or harder to proceed along the plot railroad to the inevitable conclusion.  Some games may make it a little more interesting by adding things like multiple branches, optional sidequests, or karma meters, but ultimately you're playing an interactive movie written by the game's writers.

On the other hand, you have sandbox games.  In the purest sandbox games, you are pretty much free to do as you please and be as creative as you like... but these games rarely have any clear goals to work toward, or if there is one it will usually feel kind of tacked-on or contrived, so it's hard to feel any sort of real progress in the game unless you create goals for yourself.  Sometimes a sandbox game may have a plot that advances as you complete certain missions, but this plot is generally just as linear as it would be in a regular plot-driven game.

The objective of the Lotus Project is to create a new kind of game, one that gives you choices and then dynamically generates a plot based on those choices, procedurally generating the world around you in order to create an engaging story.  It will feel like an RPG, but instead of forcing you to follow someone else's story, it will give the player choices, and make them feel as though their choices really matter.  How is this possible?  Read on...

Some details:

Spoiler: A Game on Many Scales (click to show/hide)

Lotus is a multi-layered gaming experience that encompasses many different genres without clear distinction from one layer to the next.  For example, the towns you can visit as an adventurer are a dynamic part of the global story.  Armies led by the leaders of each civilization will actually decide to fight each other, and your actions as an adventurer can potentially change the outcome of these battles.  Or, you can lead these armies yourself.  It starts as an adventure game with a single character, but you can acquire allies along the way and give them commands.  As you acquire more allies, the game gradually evolves from an adventure game to a strategy game.  Gather even more, and you can found a city, build it into a kingdom by conquering surrounding cities, and start playing on a grand strategy level.  And then, if you feel like it, leave your throne room to explore solo again.

Spoiler: Many Solutions for Every Problem (click to show/hide)

While Lotus will probably begin with a focus on the tried-and-true video game emphasis on killing enemies in order to expand your influence, one of the founding concepts is that every problem has many solutions.  You can also make alliances or trade routes, or spy on them to find out exploitable secrets.  Every problem will have at least three solutions: a combat/offensive option, a social/defensive option, or a sneaky option.  This will be the case no matter which 'level' you are playing the game, whether you are controlling a lone adventurer or an entire civilization.

Spoiler: Laws of Narrative Causality (click to show/hide)

This is the big experiment.

Instead of simulating an existing world and placing you inside it to do as you see fit, the world of Lotus begins as a blank slate, then gradually expands around you based on your choices (it won't look like that within the game, but that's how it will actually work).  Anything in the world you haven't actually seen can and will change with the goal of writing the best story.  The laws determining the direction in which the world evolves are based on various tropes typical of archetypal stories.  For instance:

Narrative Roles: Members of a group will tend to have one or more of six main roles: Leader, Warrior, Scholar, Merchant, Producer, and Rogue.  This applies to groups of any size - whether a squad of adventurers, a city, or entire civilizations (The Great Kingdom, Proud Warrior Race, Proud Scholar Race, Proud Merchant Race, Perfect Pacifist People, The Bandit Horde).  There is some leeway involved - an individual can have more than one role, and two individuals can have the same role within the group, but the game's events will conspire to enforce this structure as a general rule.  These names are not fully indicative of their actual roles, since depending on a group's mission, the nature of the roles may be different (for example: the 'merchant' role may not always involve commerce, but does always involve making alliances with members of other groups.  The 'warrior' may not always fight, but will tend to be the most effective member of the group for simple and direct tasks as opposed to strategy or leadership.)  You can take on whichever role suits you best.  For instance, if you like war strategy or tactics but don't like dealing with the economics of grand strategy, you can be the Leader of a Warrior 'city' within a kingdom.  The king will then command you to go on missions that involve subjugating the kingdom's enemies.

Personality Archetypes and Foils: There will be four twelve basic personality archetypes determined by a position on a two-dimensional axis: Response Level (extrovert/introvert) and Focus Level (task oriented/people oriented).  Your own personality archetype will be judged based on how easily you take on new tasks versus how easily you neglect carrying them out.  The game will tend to produce a 'foil' character by inverting your own personality archetype.  So if you take on new tasks quickly and lose focus easily, the game will give your character a 'sanguine' personality (which will affect your dialogue and things of that nature) and pair you up with an equally 'melancholic' foil.  Most NPC teams will tend to have a balance of archetypes.  Personality archetypes and role archetypes are generated separately, which should create a number of possible characters.

The Hero's Journey: The game will keep track of a basic archetypal 'plot' which it will keep track of, advancing the cycle of ascent and decline based on your choices.  If you don't keep moving the plot along, the game itself will force you to do so, because The Call Knows Where You Live.  This will work on many different levels: individuals, cities, and civilizations alike will have cycles of ascent and descent which operate according to similar laws.  Take on a heroic role, and you will face challenges and downfalls, but will probably succeed in the end.  If you play the game like a villain and create an evil empire, expect a hero to take you down sooner or later.

Spoiler: What I have actually done (click to show/hide)

It's sort of a basic strategy game framework, but there's no AI or graphics so it's not much to look at.  There are six commands you can give units: Join, Examine, Exploit, Trade, Defend, and Attack.  So far only Join (sets a unit to ally themselves with another unit), Defend (follow a unit around and attack enemies that come too close), and Attack (charge and kill the selected target) do anything, which allows me to construct armies and set them against one another in-game.  Also you can zoom in and out.
The whole thing is controlled by a 'game master' program, which is basically an AI DM.  It generates maps, enemies, allies, etc., just out of your range of vision.  The maps are pretty random right now, and until I get a proper plot generator going the stuff it throws at you won't make much sense, but the basic mechanics of the game are in place.

[Timeless Bob]

The Welsh Piper wrote a piece on something similar for pen-and-paper RPG's.  He was building off of a now unavailable article called "the lazy gamer’s guide to world building", but its something that may work for you, since what you're describing is similar in structure.

What you describe is certainly interesting, although it might be interesting for the world to be generated from the general to the specific in a layered fashion - civ to adventurer - with each layer placed over the last one to produce centuries, decades (10 per century), years (10 per decade), seasons (4 per year), months (3 per season), days, (30 per month) and finally the hours/minutes/seconds involved in each day.  If by playing at the large level, you are then able to choose one of the decades of the century to play with further granularity, and the same on down for each incarnation, then a "calender list" could be successively built up via previous plays of the game for the individual to both remember or have affect them as they occur.  Prophecies of floods, invasions or plagues would all be quite easy to implement in this manner, with the individual Players maybe only knowing the time frame of them at the level of granularity they were produced.  "In the Century of the Titan" or "On a specific hour on a specific day..."

Just some thoughts.

[IndigoFenix]

I'm not really sure how the progression of time will work.  Since the length of time between important choices on larger scales is longer, if the gameplay actually shifts into a larger scale, time will have to speed up - but then you will miss out on day-to-day events and subplots that happen between 'rounds'.

The alternative is to keep the game operating in real time and controlling a single unit (and giving commands to teammates in your immediate vicinity), and if you are in a command position, it will give you occasional decisions to make (like board meetings where you look at a map and decide the next movements of far-off units) that will affect the game on a larger scale.  But this may be boring for non-adventurers unless there is some kind of daily political intrigue stuff or something going on as well.