|
Following the wake of interactive storytelling, a more precise look at interactive story-driven videogames is needed. Let’s get a bit technical and conceptualize some definitions (yikes!) to share a common understanding about interactive storytelling. I’m not a game theorist so feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
What is interactivity? Following Chris Crawford’s definition, interactivity is a three-phase cycle in which the game and the players alternatively and metaphorically listen, think and speak to each other. Players communicate to the game through various input devices such as keyboard and mouse, joysticks, console controllers, etc.
The game communicates to the players basically through two output devices: the monitor and the speakers. The game system processes the player’s inputs and generates outputs. The player reads the outputs and re-generates his inputs. This is the essence of videogames: interactivity.
What is a story? Following Robert McKee’s definition,a story structure is a strategic sequence of events from the characters’ life to arouse specific emotions and to express a specific view of life. Note that this definition includes both interactive and non-interactive stories.
Going further into McKee’s definition, a story event creates meaningful change in the life situation of a character that is expressed and experienced in terms of a value and achieved through conflict. Values are the universal qualities of human condition that may shift from positive to negative (or vice versa) from one moment to the next.
Conflict, following Chris Crawford definition of games, are challenges with purposeful opponents, i.e., games are conflicts in which players directly interact in such a way as to foil each other’s goals. So there’s a link between stories and games: both revolve around conflict.
How to play an interactive story? Rules define gameplay. Structure defines storytelling. My point is that videogames can enforce both gameplay rules and story structures, allowing players to freely control gameplay and story at the same time.
The story-world structure encloses all possible well-formed stories. Gameplay rules define all possible interactions in the story-world. Players interact with the story-world and create a unique story with each game session.
How to design an interactive story? With a deep knowledge of the myriad of possible story structures in a videogame. When a writer creates a story for a non-interactive medium, he arranges only one sequence of story events in a beautifully crafted story-line.
When a story designer creates a story-world for an interactive medium, he arranges an abstract story template which will generate innumerable story-lines with every play session. Obviously, this requires a deeper knowledge of the story structure. A non-interactive writer creates one story. An interactive writer creates all possible stories within the same structure.
Let’s see an example. Vladimir Propp analyzed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest and recurrent narrative elements. Re-using Propp’s deep understanding of a concrete story structure (Russian folk tales), we can build an interactive story-world of Russian folk tales.
Note that its gameplay can be designed independently. It can be a platformer Russian folk tale videogame, a light-RPG Russian folk tale videogame or even a puzzle Russian folk tale videogame. Either way, players will create their Russian folk tale stories through gameplay. By the way, this leads to a clear differentiation between gameplay genres and story genres which I found very useful.
How to implement an interactive story? I’m still working on this one. Chris Crawford gave some snapshots of this process in Interactive Storytelling. A story system keeps track of the player’s story progress and gives the player the available story choices.
The player chooses between the options through gameplay. The game system informs the story system of the player’s actions. The story system processes the player’s action and re-calculates the available story choices. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
|
The onus is on writers to take this genre, and challenge it with literary skills that go beyond traditionally accepted writer's mechanics. Indeed, "The game system informs the story system......". To write, perchance to game, ah, there's the rub--with apologies to Shakespeare.
I think an issue with looking at stories primarily as structures is that, regardless of the structure, the content is what the author cares about, and wants the reader to experience. The structure is important in that it helps a writer get across what he's trying to say, but most of the time the meaning and moral of the story isn't in the structure itself, but what's been laid on top of that structure.
Therefore, if we just create a game with the right structures in place, we still aren't creating the actual content the user experiences - we have just made them a structure which they can lay their own story on top of (which is fine in some cases, but doesn't really carry out the intent of the storyteller).
Then again, the reason games are awesome is because you [i]can[/i] make your own story - you can be the hero, and actually make the choices as opposed to watching them being made.
I guess ideally a mix is best, which is what you're suggesting. I think with the right structure built into the game, and well defined non-player-characters - which can be the instruments of the author, there to tell their story - we might be able to achieve what we're after.
Another big issue with interactive storytelling is pacing. In most games today, what is stopping the player from standing around for a bit, and losing all of the momentum that the story has been building? In all other mediums that I can think of, you simply have to keep up with the pace of the storytelling (or, as with reading, you go at your natural pace, and stopping in the middle of a story doesn't make it suddenly feel weird).
It's no wonder that the most successful story games (point and click adventure games, Bioshock, etc) have been more about uncovering a story slowly, rather than living the story itself. However, I've often wondered about exploring story games where time and pace is more of a factor - The Polar Express is an example of this kind of game, but it's an avenue that just doesn't seem to have been explored that much.
Anyway, just a few thoughts from someone who maybe thinks about this stuff a bit too much ;) Keep writing!
I will still refer to Japanese adventures, visual novels and simulations as the pinnacle of game storytelling. Some of the fundamentals elements of these genres are in other hybrid products, of course, and some of those hybrids have even been offered through mass distribution to the English market. Actual adventures, visual novels and simulations have been offered but only through direct, limited distribution due to the English market distribution network censoring the selection of consumer products.
I'd like to offer my disagreement with Chris Crawford's definition of conflict, though. Conflict comes in many, many forms, as does conflict resolution. Essentially, all of existence is conflict and conflict resolution. The same is true for all games, even interactive stories. However, conflict does not need to be physical in nature nor must conflict resolution mean zero-sum (winner, loser). Going back to Japanese adventure games and their related kin, the conflicts in such products (as far as gameplay is concerned, not story) are cerebral in nature. Players must make decisions at various key points, and some decisions will alter the future path and events of the story, eventually leading to one of many possible outcomes. This is much like real life except that in real life we cannot simply play again to make different choices and experience the consequences of those choices. If players wish to see one or more specific endings and the events associated with those story paths, they must figure out the necessary choices and decisions that lead to the desired consequences.
I'd like to offer one additional observation regarding the issue of pacing in games. I don't think this is actually an issue worth worrying about too much because it's an issue in any and every media, even live performance such as theatre. One person may experience a story and feel that the pacing was too slow, another may think that the pacing was too fast, and yet another may feel that the pacing was perfect. Game designers should focus on what they feel is the best pacing for the story they wish to present and allow audiences to make their own personal judgments just as audiences do for film, novels, and other non-interactive works. This includes the option that Jason mentioned where the player chooses to just "stand around" and interrupt the pacing of the game story presentation. There's nothing wrong with that because it's the player's choice, not the designer's. Plenty of players stop playing games for various reasons and then come back to them, sometimes days, weeks, or months later. As long as the players can experience the work that way without needing to restart, there's no problem even if the designer is not capable of doing so. Everyone's different, after all.
Here are some of the issues I can see with trying to design computer games to support interactive storytelling:
1. The opposition of rules-based gameplay to emotion.
Sound and graphics, and even the animation of those graphics according to rules of play, are concrete things. It's generally pretty easy to imagine how to represent a truck, or a dog, or a missile launcher. Even imaginary things like aliens and magic can be (must be) implemented to have specific forms and functions.
Abstract qualities like "pity" or "betrayal" or "joy," on the other hand, are much harder to represent. Consequently, most game developers who offer a story focus on plot, rather than emotion. They simply concentrate on doing the sufficiently difficult job of instantiating a concrete world with concrete objects that have well-defined properties.
2. The opposition of interactivity to narrative structure.
Much of the power of a good story comes from the direct relevance of every piece of that story -- the plot, the dialogue, the setting -- to the overall effect the author is trying to produce.
But when players of a game can make meaningful choices (which is the beating heart of gameplay), how can each choice a player might make be assured of contributing to telling a particular story in a way that will be emotionally valid for that player? To what extent can freedom of action be consistent with a clear and powerful narrative?
3. The mirroring of the inner journey of a character through the outer action in the gameworld.
Where a developer does make an effort to tell a story in a game, it's usually superficial. There's a story in a setting, but the action of the game is usually just a series of obstacles to be overcome -- the "story" is no more than a progression through various gates (such as boss battles) that do nothing to dramatize an overall theme.
Interactive storytelling in computer games will be accepted as a viable art form when game designers create gameplay not in, of and exclusively for itself, but when every bit of that gameplay action is carefully chosen and implemented according to the degree to which it illuminates the overall theme of the story to be told. When we can say that for most games, the outer action of the gameplay mirrors the inner journey of the player character, interactive storytelling will have become a mature discipline.