Interactive stories are hard. I'm not talking about stories with interactive challenges, a la Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid, Half Life, or countless others. Nor am I talking about "story machine" games in which non-scripted stories emerge from the gameplay, such as The Sims or Civilization. I'm talking about scripted stories in which the player's decisions and actions actually influence the events and, often, the conclusion of the plot. There are many games that attempt this at a surface level, such as Infamous, Fable, and Mass Effect, though very few attempt truly interesting interactive narratives.
In Jesse Schell's book The Art of Game Design and in his game design class, he identifies five big challenges of interactive storytelling that make telling interactive stories really hard. I'll briefly summarize each challenge and then provide some possible ways to tackle the challenges.
1. The Combinatorial Explosion. That is, every time the player makes a choice in the story it branches into two possible paths, and every choice after that makes the story branch again. So a story that is completed after five choices would need to have thirty-two different paths scripted and implemented by the storytellers. That's a ton of work for a story with only a handful of choices, and that's assuming each choice is between only two options, which is rarely the case in real life.
One such possible solution is to make the branches merge back with each other, which would greatly reduce the total number of paths that would need to be implemented. Unfortunately, this makes the individual choices much less significant since it is likely that both options ultimately lead to similar or identical conclusions. While this may not be apparent on the first play-through, anyone playing multiple times will quickly realize that the choices aren't significant and the story suddenly becomes much less compelling. For example: The recently-released game Heavy Rain has a scene in which the player can either befriend or offend a non-player character. But after that scene, the player then defends her from an abusive boyfriend, thus cementing a positive relationship between her and the player. This essentially nullifies the choice to befriend or offend her in the first place. Being a curious player, I played through these scenes multiple times and was ultimately disappointed by how meaningless the original choice was.
The better solution, I think, is to use chapters in which the choices made in one chapter only affect the outcome of that chapter and not any other chapters. For example, let's say that we're making an interactive narrative with nine choices. Normally, that would be 512 total paths required. But instead, let's make a story with three chapters, each with three choices. That's eight paths per chapter, which works out to 24 total paths -- a far more manageable number. Dragon Age is a good example of this system in action: There are multiple storylines running throughout the game, and the choices made while playing any one storyline usually only affect the outcome of that particular storyline.
The potential downside of this latter solution is that the choices will still be less significant because most of them do not affect the ultimate outcome of the story. But if the individual chapters can be made compelling stories in of themselves then the choices therein will still be compelling, even if they do not affect the outcome of the entire narrative.
2. Good stories require unity. That is, a good story is tightly woven with a beginning, middle, and end that work together as a cohesive whole. The challenge here is in creating an interactive story in which every possible path through the story works as a cohesive whole. This problem is related to The Combinatorial Explosion in that, while it may be feasible to make each of a few paths cohesive, making all of a huge number of paths cohesive is impractical.
Since this challenge is so similar to The Combinatorial Explosion, the solution is also very similar: Use chapters that each have few choices and can be made individually cohesive.
3. Multiple endings disappoint. Jesse argues that this is because players viewing one ending will feel like they aren't viewing the best or intended ending. This is certainly part of the disappointment, though I think that the feeling of having experienced an incomplete ending is more important. In a story with multiple endings, both endings are thought of as being part of the story, not just the ending chosen by the player. This reasoning can also be applied to multiple game paths in general -- picking one path over another will cause a feeling that part of the story is being missed. I had this feeling after finishing BioShock for the first time: BioShock has two endings, and the player views one depending on how many little sisters he saves or harvests. Since saving and harvesting the little sisters occurs throughout the whole game, viewing the other ending requires playing through the entire game again.
The solution, I believe, is to make it easy to "rewind" the game and explore the multiple paths and outcomes. Do not force the player to play through the entire game again -- let them load the game to just before making a critical decision. (And please auto-save at that moment.) Ideally, the player would be able to access a branching tree of all the significant decisions in the game and the outcomes that have been explored, and they would be able to easily jump around the story to try all the possible outcomes. In that way they can experience the whole story without wasting time replaying parts, and they won't feel like they're missing any part of it. One of the games that comes the closest to this ideal is Pheonix Wright: The court room scenes in the game are interactive and allow the player jump around in time to try out different sequences of actions in an attempt to produce the desired conclusion.
4. Time travel makes tragedy obsolete. That is, the conclusion of a story will lose its its inevitability if the player can simply travel back in time and change the ending. There's really no way around this problem other than being aware of the kinds of stories that don't work well as interactive stories -- that is, pretty much any story with whose drama relies on its ending and in which the characters have the power to affect this ending. For example, Romeo & Juliet would lose its power if the player could alter the course of the story to prevent the tragic deaths of its protagonists.
But stories in which the ending is not crucial to the drama could indeed be very compelling interactive stories. For example, Hamlet may actually work well as an interactive story. Changing Hamlet's decisions and exploring the consequences of those changes could be really interesting. Hamlet may work better than Romeo & Juliet because the drama of Hamlet comes not from its tragic ending but from the series of interesting choices that Hamlet makes.
5. Not enough verbs. That is, in any remotely-realistic interactive story it is nearly impossible to fully implement all of the choices and actions a character may make. Classic adventure games, which make the most explicit use of verbs to perform actions, typically have a very small number of verbs that the player can use to control the actions of the character. Even text adventures, which attempt to interpret the text typed by the player, can only understand a limited set of verbs.
The solution is not to implement a huge number of possible verbs, for at least several reasons. First, implementing a huge number of verbs is technologically infeasible. Second, The Combinatorial Explosion problem will rear its ugly head if they player is given the freedom to do just about anything he chooses. And third, a huge number of verbs will confuse and scare the player out of playing the game.
The best solution, I think, is, in any given situation, to present the player with a few possible actions that are more compelling than anything else the character might be able to do in that situation. For example, let's say that the grass in Bob's lawn is way too tall. In real life he could buy a lawnmower or pay someone else to mow it, but in a game, why would you choose to do either of those things if you are given the options to either torch the lawn with a flamethrower or let a heard of triceratops graze it into submission?
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Cautionary Tales
In the art of storytelling, we game developers have many disadvantages when weighed against other mediums like film, literature, television, and theater. We don't have the visual expressiveness of film or television, or the liveliness of theater, or the analytic depth of literature. However, I believe we have some advantages that can be very useful when telling certain kinds of stories. My thesis here is about one such advantage and one such kind of story. It is a little brave and pretty cocky. But before I get to it, here's an introduction:
I often find myself drawn to stories about villains and bad guys, especially the ones that started with the best of intentions, only to end up the villain. They are the stars of their own cautionary tales. I like to know why the bad guys became bad. A couple such good-to-bad characters that come to mind are Darth Vader and Macbeth. but perhaps my favorite is Jimmy Markum from the film Mystic River. Mystic River starts with the murder of Jimmy's daughter and ends with him committing murder. The film effectively connects all the dots and shows his personal journey from distraught father to killer. Jimmy is a great character because we understand exactly why he does what he does, every step of the way. His tale is a cautionary one because he starts with the best of intentions and ends up committing a horrible crime.
So here's my cocky thesis for all you game developers and designers: Games can tell cautionary tales better than any other medium. Clint Eastwood, George Lucas, and William Shakespeare have got nothing on us.
But how?
One of the greatest advantages we game developers have as authors of fiction is that we have the potential to place our guest into our character's shoes (metaphorically, until Nintendo invents the Shoemote) more snugly than any other medium of fiction. I am not talking about our guest relating to, identifying with, or empathizing with a character -- anyone can imagine themselves in the place of a sufficiently strong character, and games afford this no better than any other medium. What I'm talking about is that we have the power to make our guest think and feel in the same way that our character does. When our guest plays our game, his mind merges just a little bit with the mind of our character and they act as one. When an obstacle or problem (gameplay!) is encountered in our game, the guest and the player solve it as a single entity. Because of this, we can use gameplay to indirectly control our guest's thoughts and feelings.
So now, imagine this hypothetical game: It is the great depression, and you play a character with a wife and children. You are out of work and must find a way to feed your family. Within the gameplay, you try to find a job, but all the jobs are either already taken or pay so little that your family can't even eat. The gameplay engine is flexible enough that it is possible to steal goods from shops. And so, without a single prompt from the game, you steal bread from a bakery because that's the only practical solution. You return home and your family eats, but the next day you are out of food again. So you go back to the shop, but this time the baker is waiting in hiding. He attacks you with a knife. To save yourself, you grab the knife from him and, in the heat of the moment, kill him. Maybe you didn't mean to, or maybe you did. Either way, you need to dispose of the body, because if you get caught and go to jail, your family will starve. So you go to the dock and dump the body in the water. But a guard sees you and attempts to arrest you. You kill him as well, and before dumping his body, you search him and find a valuable diamond. You take the diamond, but there is no way to sell it on the legal markets, so you take it to a black market. There, you find and get involved with shady thieves, working for them for good pay. Finally, a job that will feed your family!
It's hard to argue that you are a good character. Initially well-intentioned, yes, but ultimately your deeds are very, very bad. Your initial act of petty crime spiraled out of control and before you knew it, you were a bad guy. Certainly there's nothing unique about this story -- it's pretty generic and told much better in plenty other great works. But the difference here is that you, the player of the game, made every choice that led down that dark path. You acted out the cautionary tale. The game never prompted or hinted to you what you were supposed to do -- it merely set up the conditions that made your actions seem the most reasonable at the time.
When watching a movie or reading a book about a similar story, it's definitely possible to understand why a character goes down that bad path, but you can still say to yourself, I wouldn't have made those decisions. But by playing the game, you did make those decisions! There's no way around the fact that, yes, you are just as capable of being that bad guy as everyone else, given the right motivations. (And these motivations must be intrinsic to the world of the game, not extrinsic to the world of the player.) Hence, we have an awesome power to humble our guests, to open their eyes, and to teach them about themselves. That's why I believe that games can tell cautionary tales better than any other medium.
While there are many games in which you play or have the option to play the bad guy, there are very few that come anywhere close to telling cautionary tales as driven by intrinsically-motivated player actions.
Grand Theft Auto IV, despite its somewhat-deserved reputation as a mindless killing simulator, actually shows some hints of what I'm talking about. In GTA4 you play as Nico Bellic, a recent immigrant who is thrust into a life of crime for reasons largely beyond his control. The story told in GTA4 effectively conveys the journey of Nico from well-meaning immigrant to ruthless criminal, and he never loses the core of his humanity. Where GTA4 falls short is that the player rarely makes decisions that advance the plot -- most such decisions are made by the character in cut scenes. (Not to mention that the believable plot is surrounded in the "open world gameplay" by a lot of mindless killing that is out of Nico's character.)
Another game that comes to mind is Dragon Age, a recently-released Western RPG. The choices that the player has to make in this game are many in number and high in meaningfulness. Often the player must choose to help one NPC or another, and the choice between them is not clear. Dragon Age effectively puts the player in a situation where he has to make a choice and then deal with the consequences. What it doesn't do is provide compelling reasons to make bad choices. Yes, it's possible to be pretty evil in Dragon Age, but there is no compelling reason to be so, other than that it's fun, which is rarely if ever a reason in real life.
Many other games, like inFamous and Black & White, give the player the option of being either "good" or "evil". While playing an "evil" character is often a lot of fun, the choice to do bad acts is rarely backed by intrinsic motivations within the game world, rather than the player's extrinsic motivation of wanting to be bad because it's fun.
I'm hopeful for the upcoming release of Heavy Rain, which looks like it may have the kind of meaningful, intrinsically-motivated choice to do bad things that I'm talking about.
In summary, we game developers have the awesome power to make our guests think and feel in the same ways that our characters think and feel, and we can use this to tell better stories -- not just cautionary tales, but any stories in which we want our guests to go through the same thought and emotional processes as our characters. So why are we so under-utilizing this power? Certainly learning to wield it will not be easy and will take time, but if we don't explore our possibilities and push our boundaries then games will never mature as a storytelling medium worthy of standing side-by-side with film, television, theater, and literature.
I often find myself drawn to stories about villains and bad guys, especially the ones that started with the best of intentions, only to end up the villain. They are the stars of their own cautionary tales. I like to know why the bad guys became bad. A couple such good-to-bad characters that come to mind are Darth Vader and Macbeth. but perhaps my favorite is Jimmy Markum from the film Mystic River. Mystic River starts with the murder of Jimmy's daughter and ends with him committing murder. The film effectively connects all the dots and shows his personal journey from distraught father to killer. Jimmy is a great character because we understand exactly why he does what he does, every step of the way. His tale is a cautionary one because he starts with the best of intentions and ends up committing a horrible crime.
So here's my cocky thesis for all you game developers and designers: Games can tell cautionary tales better than any other medium. Clint Eastwood, George Lucas, and William Shakespeare have got nothing on us.
But how?
One of the greatest advantages we game developers have as authors of fiction is that we have the potential to place our guest into our character's shoes (metaphorically, until Nintendo invents the Shoemote) more snugly than any other medium of fiction. I am not talking about our guest relating to, identifying with, or empathizing with a character -- anyone can imagine themselves in the place of a sufficiently strong character, and games afford this no better than any other medium. What I'm talking about is that we have the power to make our guest think and feel in the same way that our character does. When our guest plays our game, his mind merges just a little bit with the mind of our character and they act as one. When an obstacle or problem (gameplay!) is encountered in our game, the guest and the player solve it as a single entity. Because of this, we can use gameplay to indirectly control our guest's thoughts and feelings.
So now, imagine this hypothetical game: It is the great depression, and you play a character with a wife and children. You are out of work and must find a way to feed your family. Within the gameplay, you try to find a job, but all the jobs are either already taken or pay so little that your family can't even eat. The gameplay engine is flexible enough that it is possible to steal goods from shops. And so, without a single prompt from the game, you steal bread from a bakery because that's the only practical solution. You return home and your family eats, but the next day you are out of food again. So you go back to the shop, but this time the baker is waiting in hiding. He attacks you with a knife. To save yourself, you grab the knife from him and, in the heat of the moment, kill him. Maybe you didn't mean to, or maybe you did. Either way, you need to dispose of the body, because if you get caught and go to jail, your family will starve. So you go to the dock and dump the body in the water. But a guard sees you and attempts to arrest you. You kill him as well, and before dumping his body, you search him and find a valuable diamond. You take the diamond, but there is no way to sell it on the legal markets, so you take it to a black market. There, you find and get involved with shady thieves, working for them for good pay. Finally, a job that will feed your family!
It's hard to argue that you are a good character. Initially well-intentioned, yes, but ultimately your deeds are very, very bad. Your initial act of petty crime spiraled out of control and before you knew it, you were a bad guy. Certainly there's nothing unique about this story -- it's pretty generic and told much better in plenty other great works. But the difference here is that you, the player of the game, made every choice that led down that dark path. You acted out the cautionary tale. The game never prompted or hinted to you what you were supposed to do -- it merely set up the conditions that made your actions seem the most reasonable at the time.
When watching a movie or reading a book about a similar story, it's definitely possible to understand why a character goes down that bad path, but you can still say to yourself, I wouldn't have made those decisions. But by playing the game, you did make those decisions! There's no way around the fact that, yes, you are just as capable of being that bad guy as everyone else, given the right motivations. (And these motivations must be intrinsic to the world of the game, not extrinsic to the world of the player.) Hence, we have an awesome power to humble our guests, to open their eyes, and to teach them about themselves. That's why I believe that games can tell cautionary tales better than any other medium.
While there are many games in which you play or have the option to play the bad guy, there are very few that come anywhere close to telling cautionary tales as driven by intrinsically-motivated player actions.
Grand Theft Auto IV, despite its somewhat-deserved reputation as a mindless killing simulator, actually shows some hints of what I'm talking about. In GTA4 you play as Nico Bellic, a recent immigrant who is thrust into a life of crime for reasons largely beyond his control. The story told in GTA4 effectively conveys the journey of Nico from well-meaning immigrant to ruthless criminal, and he never loses the core of his humanity. Where GTA4 falls short is that the player rarely makes decisions that advance the plot -- most such decisions are made by the character in cut scenes. (Not to mention that the believable plot is surrounded in the "open world gameplay" by a lot of mindless killing that is out of Nico's character.)
Another game that comes to mind is Dragon Age, a recently-released Western RPG. The choices that the player has to make in this game are many in number and high in meaningfulness. Often the player must choose to help one NPC or another, and the choice between them is not clear. Dragon Age effectively puts the player in a situation where he has to make a choice and then deal with the consequences. What it doesn't do is provide compelling reasons to make bad choices. Yes, it's possible to be pretty evil in Dragon Age, but there is no compelling reason to be so, other than that it's fun, which is rarely if ever a reason in real life.
Many other games, like inFamous and Black & White, give the player the option of being either "good" or "evil". While playing an "evil" character is often a lot of fun, the choice to do bad acts is rarely backed by intrinsic motivations within the game world, rather than the player's extrinsic motivation of wanting to be bad because it's fun.
I'm hopeful for the upcoming release of Heavy Rain, which looks like it may have the kind of meaningful, intrinsically-motivated choice to do bad things that I'm talking about.
In summary, we game developers have the awesome power to make our guests think and feel in the same ways that our characters think and feel, and we can use this to tell better stories -- not just cautionary tales, but any stories in which we want our guests to go through the same thought and emotional processes as our characters. So why are we so under-utilizing this power? Certainly learning to wield it will not be easy and will take time, but if we don't explore our possibilities and push our boundaries then games will never mature as a storytelling medium worthy of standing side-by-side with film, television, theater, and literature.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Getting started with i3
We're only a few weeks into the Spring 2010 semester, but we're already hard at work on our big ETC project, code-named i3. This is the first of 3 semester-long projects that I will be participating in as part of the ETC's curriculum.
For this project we'll be designing and building a 2-story walkthrough, storytelling experience for CMU's Spring Carnival. It will have several cool interactive technologies, including a multi-touch "surface floor" and a motion floor.
We don't have much to show yet, but here's the video we submitted to the faculty when we pitched the project idea to them:
We also have a blog, which you can check out here.
For this project we'll be designing and building a 2-story walkthrough, storytelling experience for CMU's Spring Carnival. It will have several cool interactive technologies, including a multi-touch "surface floor" and a motion floor.
We don't have much to show yet, but here's the video we submitted to the faculty when we pitched the project idea to them:
We also have a blog, which you can check out here.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Danger! High Voltage - Music Video
My team, The Warner Brothers, recently wrapped filming of our final video for the Visual Story class at the ETC.
I star as the lead actor. Co-starring is Michelle Cohen. It was conceived and directed by Charlie Kim, and it was filmed and special-effected by Mike Honeck. Special thanks to the S&S Candy & Cigar shop in Southside Pittsburgh.
Future Walt is super proud that this video has become kind of legendary within the ETC student body, though he's a bit chuckled that this, of all things, is what he gets recognized for.
I star as the lead actor. Co-starring is Michelle Cohen. It was conceived and directed by Charlie Kim, and it was filmed and special-effected by Mike Honeck. Special thanks to the S&S Candy & Cigar shop in Southside Pittsburgh.
Future Walt is super proud that this video has become kind of legendary within the ETC student body, though he's a bit chuckled that this, of all things, is what he gets recognized for.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Evil Technology Center
Evil Technology Center is my final project for the Building Virtual Worlds class. It is the first time in the history of the class that green screen video with a live actor was streamed into the game.
Our personal goal, besides creating something new, was to provide a fictional through-line for the show. As part of the story, the show's host Jesse Schell is captured by the "Evil Technology Center". An exchange student named Clifford (with the help of the audience and an "audience-controlled jetpack") flies to the top of their tower, defeats the head of the Evil Technology Center, and saves Jesse. A live video feed of Clifford is streamed into the game. Clifford reacts to the dynamic events as they happen and provides a running commentary. The gameplay is that of a simple vertical shooter.
I feel like I poured my heart and soul into this game, and I really hope that it gets selected for the BVW Show. Sad note from Future Walt: It did not. :-( Regardless, I'm super proud of it and of all the hard work done by the whole team.
Our personal goal, besides creating something new, was to provide a fictional through-line for the show. As part of the story, the show's host Jesse Schell is captured by the "Evil Technology Center". An exchange student named Clifford (with the help of the audience and an "audience-controlled jetpack") flies to the top of their tower, defeats the head of the Evil Technology Center, and saves Jesse. A live video feed of Clifford is streamed into the game. Clifford reacts to the dynamic events as they happen and provides a running commentary. The gameplay is that of a simple vertical shooter.
I feel like I poured my heart and soul into this game, and I really hope that it gets selected for the BVW Show. Sad note from Future Walt: It did not. :-( Regardless, I'm super proud of it and of all the hard work done by the whole team.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Sadness
For the Visual Story class at the ETC, my team, The Warner Brothers, made this super-sad film. I personally didn't have much to do with it because I was super busy at the time, but I'm really proud of my teammates for pulling it off. Future Walt says: This was one of only 3 videos from the whole semester that were chosen to be shown during the end-of-semester Building Virtual Worlds show.
Dan Driscoll wrote and stars, while Mike Honeck directed and gorgeously filmed it.
Dan Driscoll wrote and stars, while Mike Honeck directed and gorgeously filmed it.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Tanky-Tank Infomercial & Scribblenauts Commercial
As part of the Visual Story class at the ETC, pairs of teams collaborated to create video advertisements for video games.
First, one team did the pre-production for a game, including writing the script and creating the storyboards. Then that team would hand off the pre-production materials to another team that would actually film and edit the final video.
For the pre-production, my team chose to create an advertisement for my own game, Tanky-Tank. I wrote the script, and "Columbia Pictures" (another student team) filmed and edited. Mike Honeck stars.
From another team we received the script and storyboards for a commercial for the video game Scribblenauts. We filmed and edited the final video. That's me inside the ninja costume, and also that's my giant hand descending from the sky.
First, one team did the pre-production for a game, including writing the script and creating the storyboards. Then that team would hand off the pre-production materials to another team that would actually film and edit the final video.
For the pre-production, my team chose to create an advertisement for my own game, Tanky-Tank. I wrote the script, and "Columbia Pictures" (another student team) filmed and edited. Mike Honeck stars.
From another team we received the script and storyboards for a commercial for the video game Scribblenauts. We filmed and edited the final video. That's me inside the ninja costume, and also that's my giant hand descending from the sky.
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