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Games are typically categorized into genres based on their basic mechanics - such as Real-Time Strategy or First-Person Shooter - which of course is a great practice.
But lately I've been noticing a type of game that seems to exist across many different genres of games. For lack of a better term, I'll call it a "meta-genre" of game. Marc LeBlanc might argue it should be called an "Aesthetic Genre" of games, as these games are similar not on their Mechanical level, but in terms of a similarity in the kind of Aesthetic experience they produce in the player(s).
I'm talking about "Story-Generating Games."
Forging a Story
Probably the best example of a Story-Generating Game would be the indie game Dwarf Fortress. If you haven't played DF, I highly recommend that you do so as soon as possible. (However, please wait until you finish reading this article. Cause I like it when people read words I write.)
For those who haven't and/or won't played Dwarf Fortress, it's essentially a simulation game, comparable in many ways to both The Sims and SimCity. You manage a tribe of simulated dwarves in a fantasy setting; and you guide the dwarves in digging a new home out of the rock of a mountain, making it self-sufficient, and expanding it.
What this description misses is the amazing granularity and depth of the simulation. The game features a wide variety of systems. For starters of course, the dwarves (and the animals, and invading enemies) feature very sophisticated and interestng AI. But this is just the beginning: there are systems whose purposes range from tracking the health of every body part of every character; to tracking the like/dislikes of every dwarf (as well as things that have happened to the dwarf recently and what their current level of happiness is); to simulating fire (which spreads realistically based on which objects are flammable); to a robust simulations of fluid dynamics (very relevant when your dwarves mine their way into a lava vein - and begin catching themselves, and then everything flammable around them, on fire)!
Just from that description (and its implied story of the Unlucky Flaming Dwarves), you can already see how the richness of the systems - and especially the fact that the systems can interact in so many ways - constantly gives rise to sequences of unexpected, interesting events occurring within the game.
In other words... this game generates stories.
Before I leave the topic of Dwarf Fortress, I should point out that the fact that its tremendous capacity to produce interesting stories isn't an accident. In fact it's a direct result of the creative process of the creators (Tarn and Zach Adams). In a 2008 interview here on Gamasutra, the two brothers point out that they began the game's design by literally writing out stories that they'd like to see happen in the game world; then they simply sat down and began implementing features that would allow the various parts of these stories to occur.
Dwarf Fortress is probably the most striking example of a story-generating game, but there are many other examples. Here are the most notable examples that come to mind...
- The Sims. This game actually shares a lot of similarity with Dwarf Fortress: it's heavily built around simulation; and it's heavily built around AIs that are (mostly) autonomous and which sometimes demonstrate interesting behaviors and even personality. (It almost always makes for a good story when an AI character does something surprising.) The game also has two other facets that I think are important for Story-Generating Games:
- Sharing the Story. Starting with The Sims 2, the Sim games were built with elaborate tools to take not only screenshots, but also videos, of the stories that occur in your game. The game has additional features to support sharing these stories with others.
- Avatars. The ability to create Sim versions of yourself and your friends in a game tends to make the stories that occur much more interesting. It also makes those stories much more interesting to tell. (It's the equivalent of a father telling his daughter Nell a story in which the main character is "Princess Nell.")
- Left 4 Dead. This is an extremely good Story-Generating Game... which is interesting, since in every other way it's about as different from The Sims or Dwarf Fortress as a game could possibly be! Nonetheless, this game has been designed to create a unique but interesting sequence of events for every playthrough. The "AI Director", a core part of the game, exists solely to manage the sequence of events that happen to the players; it's specifically tuned to keep that sequence of events interesting (by ramping up tension and providing breaks), and to make sure that the events are different with every playthrough. Every time you play a session of L4D, you come away with an amazing story... a story that's all your own.
- Far Cry 2. This FPS is unique in that it's not built to contain a completely linear story (like, for example, Modern Warfare); instead it would be best classified as an elaborate "Mercenary Simulator." Or perhaps a "Story-About-Being-a-Mercenary-in-Africa Generator." The game takes a great deal of effort to provide a unique experience for each player, and its emphasis on dynamic systems and strong AI characters inevitably lead to unique and fascinating stories. Given that the game's development staff prominently and specifically featured a Narrative Designer, Patrick Redding, it should be no surprise that this game, as well, was designed to generate interesting stories that are unique to each player.
- EVE Online. I nearly listed "World of Warcraft" here, but then I realized that the (many) stories that I (constantly) hear about WoW are usually about PvP encounters. Then I also realized that EVE is much more PvP focused than WoW... And then I realized that EVE has produced some of the most dramatic stories in the history of the games industry! (For instance, this one and this one.) It seems that if you give players a multiplayer "sandbox" to play in and some decent tools with which to interact, they'll always produce some very entertaining drama entirely on their own. (And why spend man-hours making a poor AI facsimile of a human mind, when you could just let real humans interact with each other?)
- X-Com. I've only played this game for about 20 minutes, but I've heard many stories from players who've gotten deeply invested in the "story" of their squad in X-Com... mostly because the squad members that were doing the fighting (and dying) were usually named after people the player knew! Another example of the Avatar effect mentioned above.
What's the Practical Benefit?
Gamasutra is a site for the "Art and Business of Making Games", so I feel like my blogs here should be relevant to both sides of that divide. The business-minded reader at this point is rightly asking: "So why should I bother making a story-generating game? The fact that two random brothers somewhere have made a game about dwarves that has entertained a niche audience and made no money for anyone anywhere doesn't exactly get me pumped! Wouldn't this just be diverging from what the players are used to? Why take that kind of risk?"
Although there are a multitude of good answers to the "why should I innovate?", there's an answer that's especially true for story-driven games: it gets people talking. Literally. When a player experiences a cool dynamic story in a game - a story that is totally their own, and that they know no one else will ever experience - then it's human nature for them to want to tell that story to anyone who will listen!
From a business perspective, this is incredibly valuable: it's not only free marketing, but it's word-of-mouth: the most effective type of marketing there is.
"But why would a player talk more about this kind of game than about, say, Uncharted 2?", my straw man now asks me. "That game had a great story! Better than any dynamically-generated story any game has ever cobbled together."
There are two reasons. First, if I haven't emphasized this enough already: the story belongs to that player. It happened to them and them alone; they're the only one who can tell that story. This gives them a certain connection.
A second, related reason to this is: people don't talk about linear game stories because of spoilers. If I'm recommending Uncharted 2 to someone, I don't tell them all the story beats, because I don't want to spoil it for them. But if I'm recommending L4D2 to someone, I'll say "Oh it's a great game! Let me tell you how it works... and now let me tell you this awesome story that happened to me just last night!!!"
Go With the Flow
My straw man is right about one thing: the linear stories of games like Uncharted can be very good stories, and usually much better than the "game-generated stories" I'm talking about.
But while games clearly do constitute an artistic medium that can be used for telling a linear story, it's also far from the strongest medium for storytelling. In fact, the defining things about games as a medium - like interactivity, immersion, and giving free agency to the player - either do nothing to help tell a linear story, or are actually in active opposition to telling a linear story
Trying to tell a linear story in a game has always felt a little bit like swimming against the current of a river. Storytellers want to relate a linear series of events; but games want to be dynamic systems within which events happen. "Let the player do whatever they want; but make sure that this event and this event and this event always happen", are two design constraints that are inherently opposed.
It makes a lot more sense to stop fighting the current; let it sweep you away and see where it leads you. Games are a medium where each and every player can play and come away with a completely different story. Why do so few games try to enable that, and so many fight it? Perhaps game designers are too much in love with their own stories; we need to focus our authorial control not on creating a linear story, but rather on creating a world in which the player can experience their own story.
I'll leave you with this final, important thought:
..."Unlucky Flaming Dwarves" would be a great name for a rock band.
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Why are you late? Well, these kind of games have been out for a VERY LONG time. I think it started with...when Videogames started! Games are by their very nature "story generating" because of how they are experienced by players. The first layer is the Digital Playfield that constitutes all the "rules" and "parameters" inside the game's systems. The second layer is the Universe which constitutes, art-assets, levels, art-design, enemy design and so forth. All these elements create the "Universe" that the player is interacting with trough the rules and parameters from the Playfield layer. And humans being humans...if there is no clear story present, we just make one up. If the presented story has a lot of holes, we fill it up
This is what Sid Meier means with his "Psychology of the gamer". That's how Sid Meier was making his games from the very beginning. Shigeru Miyamoto the same way and many others.
On a positive note, It's good to see that people are slowly realizing how games can be the story-telling medium of the 21st century, but letting people make their own stories inside interactive universes. This is how games work on a extremely basic and fundamental level. It's just that three-quarters of the people busy with this industry are so focused on videogames beating Hollywood, they lost sight of it.
Also, games you left out but are also great examples: Mount & Blade, the Europa Universalis series, the Total War series, the Football Manager series, The first Legend of Zelda game and many many more. So summarizing: story-generating games are just games, it's what they do intrinsically, it's not a new trend, do not make it a new trend, do not even pretend it is a new trend, this is what games are.
The argument being made towards the end appears to be something like, "Why not unstructured story?", or "Who's afraid of a procedural wolf?" I'd assert that the reasons designers might lean towards, or be pushed towards, scripted story include the considerations of risk and the ability to draw more directly from knowledge of literature and film. In short, one may consider scripted story a safer bet with more opportunity to present with a targeted impact on the audience. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that many of the serious games I work on require our systems to drive the experience toward specific learning objectives; presenting a scripted story can ensure consistent and targeted experiences in some ways, while leaving other aspects dynamic.
But, this is where the efforts you mention above are changing the question, "Procedural or scripted?" Left4Dead's AI Director is, above all else, managing pacing. It might not be managing character, dialog or events outside a small pool of possibilities, but the designers at Valve took one aspect of storytelling, a significant component, and devoted a system to it. The success in the 'stories' that come out of playing L4D is primarily in the sequence and intensity of the events over time because that's what the AI Director system is targeted to do. It sounds like Dwarf Fortress is taking another approach, to define categories of events and character that fit the tone of a fantasy genre and devote systems to tackle those aspects of story. True story generation is not necessarily the goal. The goal can be to improve the procedural stories we get; to align more aspects of procedural stories to appear scripted.
By working from analyses of storytelling, of improvisational theater, of acting, of presentation in general, we are continually building up our repertoire of systems that address various aspects of story. This isn't far from the AI problem really. Like that problem, the innovators will reach out and experiment, while the risk-adverse will wait for more successful results to bring to market when it serves an audience.
So, much rather than, "go with it", I think I'd rather tackle the problem of making better procedural stories from a number of different approaches; drawing from a wide variety of knowledge, mixing the two types of story in various ways, and further analyzing the most significant elements of storytelling and how the audience receives story.
Tim, in a way I entirely agree with you: strictly speaking, every game is "story-generating", because the sequence of events that occurs in any interactive portion of a game is unique to each player. Even in my "counter-example" of Uncharted 2, the interactive portions of the game (where the games' storytellers finally give you the reins and allow the game to be a game) are, for instance, "shootout story generators."
But 90% of games don't generate (or very rarely generate) stories that are interesting enough to be worth telling! Obviously this is a vague criteria; but I DO feel that there's a new trend emerging in games that are being designed specifically around the generation of very interesting unique sequences of events. Left 4 Dead's AI Director is almost unprecedented, for instance; and I haven't seen many design methodologies that "start with a story" the way that Dwarf Fortress' designers did. (Although most Scrum methodologies claim to be based around "user stories", in practice I've found that game teams usually treat those "stories" as nothing but reworded task descriptions!)
I also forgot to mention Façade; as with the L4D AI Director, the game has an elaborate set of rules designed around managing the tension of the story, ramping it up as the game goes on.
Anyway, we're in full agreement that games are intrinsically story-generating. But these kinds of designs - ones that embrace the story-generating nature of games, and specifically focus try to heighten the drama or otherwise improving those stories AS stories - feel under-explored.
I must start with that I do strongly disagree with this being a much discussed topic, as this really is really about the debate between the dynamic approach and the linear approach to designing games. And Dwarf Fortress is truly a dynamic approach. Because what Dwarf Fortress does is that it creates a world, and then gives you the tools to interact with it, and no more than that! It’s up to you to decide what to do. It might be to lead all to their doom, or trying to do as much constructive things as you can, or supplying your starving people with only kittens and alcohol only to wait and see what happens.
It’s about making a world with algorithms, a world untouched by people, then creating the tools and means to interact with this world. And in the end putting people in this world and seeing what truly unexpected genius humanity will produce.
The approach of herding people though an experience is not the strength of video games, it’s the opposite, you can’t pause and look at a pretty view, or do an action that changes the world into the direction you want in books and movies, it’s only the medium of video games that you can do that in. So that strength should be explored more, we have seen what eve online can do. What may a dynamic game that is easily accessible do?
Ps: sorry for my confusing post, I am a bit tired.
I nearly mentioned Heavy Rain in the article as an interesting "edge case." I would classify Heavy Rain as an incredibly complex, deeply-branched version of the CYOA structure. (In fact I think it acknowledges this by calling itself an "interactive movie" rather than a "game" at all.)
Just because N is a much bigger number doesn't change the fact that it contains a finite number of pre-scripted stories; and I think this is fundamentally different from a system that can produce an infinite number of completely unique stories.
Though, again, the actual stories you get from Heavy Rain are usually much better stories than the ones you get out from Dwarf Fortress, The Sims, etc. Much of the value of the latter stories is that they feel so much more personal.
None of the mentioned were tongue in cheek actually :p. You should look up forums for all those games and look for AAR's (Action After Reports) sections. You could be pleasantly surprised.
But you're right that you can make a division in games who were made with the intent to be "story generating" and those that weren't. That does not take away that the latter can be greatly experienced as a "story generating" game by gamers (the reverse is true as well, a game that was intentionally made to be story-generating can be experienced by gamers as hardly story-generating). I believe that the players' experience has the last word, whatever any of us (journalists, designers, analysts, intellectual assholes aka me :p) says. The science should be to determine what triggers what experience.
For that reason I don't believe in "Narratives". Narratives are authorial constructs, sometimes even forced on people, but this does not guarantee people experiencing the story as the narrative wants it to be experienced.
While I agree that those kinds of stories can be interesting, and I'm certainly glad that people are making games like that, ultimately I think authored stories are still generally much more interesting. I still play Final Fantasy 7 and Metal Gear Solid at least once every couple years, largely because they have stories that continue to be compelling to me. Am I going to play Oblivion or Far Cry 2 in 10-15 years to experience another version of "my" story? Probably not.
Wonderful article. Reading this put me in a very creative mood. (Marc is struck by a strange mood! He requires shells. :P) I suppose I also want to drop a few words here on the subject, since it seems to be a popular trend.
I'm a software engineer (young and inspired and looking to take on the world), so I usually find myself tackling such design questions from a developer stand point. That being said I think perhaps this discussion may be a bit lofty. I think there are games out there that do the job of being dynamic and story-generating very well (Eve and DF are at the top of my list as well), but at what point do we stop trying to be more and more dynamic? Do we stop at the point DF stops at, or do we keep going?
That question might sound vague or off basis so I'm going to give a concrete example: I once spoke to my brother and told him about an "excellent game idea" I had where the world was created from the ground up to my specifications or parameters and then players were allowed to interact with this world as they pleased. Where they would create their own inventions, crafts, discover different lands... (He later said to me "Dwarf Fortress the MMO.") Quite literally what I was talking about was programming a copy of the world (the earth), with all its unique and different rule sets and then letting the players go out into it to do as they pleased.
Creating a whole new world is a vast undertaking. But that is the ultimate goal of such "story-generating games" is it not? A world where the players can interact with and become an integrated part of that world? How expansive should we make this world? How many of the myriad of systems can be implemented in this world? I suppose I just think to myself "The ideal dynamic and interact world is an exact copy of the world we live in now." And if that's the case, I feel the ideal is some time away. If I stood up right now and walked outside and picked up a pile of dirt, I've changed the outside world. It was slight and almost undetected (from my perspective, but then that's another set of questions entirely, the perspectives of other life forms on this world?) but it was changed. Until a game world can reflect such things I feel we're just creating gimmick stories. ("I pvped today and this paladin and I went back and forth on the battle field for half an hour! It was crazy!") Stories with real depth need a world with real depth in the level of interacting systems.
Interesting thoughts. I can see how you could feel like the logical extension of Dwarf Fortress, EVE Online, and other games I listed would be a full MMO simulation of the real world.
I'm not sure that's the case though, and anyway I don't know how relevant it is to the subject at hand. The article is really about the trend of games that are *optimized* towards story generation - they're designed around that. A "Second World" would basically be a zero-design game.
I'm sure interesting stories would occur there (especially since it would be seen as a consequence-free environment), but like the real world itself, it wouldn't be optimized for good stories.
Storytelling is largely an art of omission: when you tell a story of something that happened to you over the course of a year (e.g. your experience of leaving a job, moving, and finding another job), the events you relate are about 0.001% of the things that actually happened to you in that year.
Interestingly, game design is largely an art of omission as well. It's designing a system - a miniature world - that probably has some rules form the real world in it, but omits the vast majority of them. What's interesting to me about Story-Generating Games is that they're optimized to - as much as possible - get rid of that 99.999% of uninteresting events that aren't part of an interesting story.
The ideal Story-Generating game is one that's designed so that no event CAN happen that is not interesting and/or dramatic, and every event can be included in one or more interesting story. In other words, it automates the storyteller's job by making sure there ARE no irrelevant details to omit - and the result is a game in which everything that happens is interesting. (L4D might be the most successful at this.)
BTW thanks to all the commenters for their challenging questions, it's forced me to think through things much more and get a better understanding of my own thoughts. (Which is the real reason I wrote the blog - to force myself to put my vague ideas on the subject into concrete form, and to put those ideas out there for challenge and criticism so I'd have to define them even more!)