With a selection of creatives invited from across disciplines, the matter at hand would dominate popular culture for the next two decades: How could franchises expand beyond just one or two mediums? How could they achieve what EA's head of intellectual property development, Danny Bilson, called a "deepening of the universe"? That challenge and the book it inspired, Jenkins' Convergence Culture from 2006, turned out to be prophetic. At a time when movie attendance was on the rise, video games were hours long, and the internet was connecting everyone, Jenkins argued that media industries were missing a trick, and competing when they should've been collaborating. In response, he pitched a move into "transmedia storytelling"--a concept akin to the media mix in Japan at the time, where Pokémon dominated everything from anime to key rings. This would allow each medium to do what it does best, he wrote, "so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics, and its world might be explored and experienced through game play."

Artificial intelligence in games is often designed to be an actor, not a director. Typically, AI drives characters in games to behave and respond to the player in a way that feels believable and entertaining, but remains within the constraints of a world designed by humans. This is my open-world game, say the human developers, and here are the things players may do within it; a player may choose how and when to engage with the game's various facets, but the game will never create new stories tailored to the player's interests; It can't. What if you could design a game capable of generating its own narratives, via an AI that watches what the player does and tailors the game to their actions? That's the pitch for Toska, a new "procedural AI narrative engine" that Canadian developer Evodant Interactive has been working on, in some form or another, for nearly a decade.