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CR: You've mentioned System Shock before.
PR: Well, I think that this is kind of a touch-point for a
lot of us. I mean, certainly amongst first person games, they're the ones that
have come the closest to sort of trying to do something that is really
supportive of a narrative in an interesting way, with tight integration
mechanics, a lot of emergent game play.
I think, as well, I look at games like X-COM and Fallout, that kind of classic, sort of action style RPGs in the
western mold that kind of did an amazing job of making me care about my
actions. Giving what Doug Church calls the "meaningful consequences"
in terms of the choices that I'm making.
And I think that's something that I've... I really value
that. I would rather play a primitive game that has that, you know? I'd rather
play Ultima IV than play a Final Fantasy game that's beautiful to
behold but which ultimately abducts me from the game every twenty minutes and
shows me a cinematic. You know what I mean? And that's just my personal taste.
I know some people who really love that stuff. It just doesn't happen to be the
kind of game that I want to work on.
CR: Jumping off on
that note, we kind of spoke about this at GDC a bit, but I liked your answers,
and maybe I can just mine them again. Far
Cry? I loved it. Great game. But, I think fairly obviously maligned for its
complete lack of any meaningful narrative. What makes you think this game is an
audience and demographic and franchise is supportive of your narrative
ambitions, and how did you convince Ubisoft as well?
PR: Because we're trying to be subversive? No, I mean I
think my feeling on the matter is that, okay, if we had just simply started out
saying, "We're going to make a game. We don't know what genre it is. We
don't know what any of the mechanics are. But we're going to make a game that
has incredibly complex, rich AI, with incredibly real, emotional reactions and
complexity in characters that can be either... they can be friends, they can be
enemies, they can completely dynamically alter the nature of the story."
If we just started out with that as a goal? Honest to God,
we would have just been stalled out at the start line. Because really that
problem is more massive than anything else that's being worked on right now,
right? It's like a full, rich, twisted, difficult AI problem that we're not
going to solve.
So instead, what we do is, we say, "Well, can we take what
is debatably one of the more lizard-brain oriented types of interactions, which
is in the first person shooter running around and shooting guys, and can we
make the mechanics of pulling the trigger and firing bullets sort of feed in at
a low level into this kind of larger dynamic narrative approach?" And
that's where the whole Infamy idea came about.
There's this notion that Infamy is this sort of the big
counter under the hood that's driving the story to unfold in different ways.
And the way I build my Infamy is by pulling the trigger. And by choosing to
pull the trigger in a certain way, I can accelerate my growth of my Infamy. I
can be a more cruel human being. Well, I mean, that's an easy fit for a first
person shooter. I mean, a first person shooter that's about being a cruel
bastard? Is not exactly a subversive idea. Right? And it's certainly going to
be an easy sell to people who buy first person shooters.
But a first person shooter where being a cruel bastard
results in meaningful consequences that affect the unfolding of the dynamic
narrative? That's something that's pretty stealthy. The player who picks this
up because they want to pay sixty bucks, and they want to have a good reason to
upgrade their machine, and they want to headshot guys from across the map?
They're not going to be necessarily thinking about that dynamic narrative. But
it's there.
And if they encounter it in little doses, or if they end up
embracing it a lot more fully than they even thought they would, then we've
accomplished something. We got them to maybe challenge maybe some assumptions
that they've made about the shooter experience. Maybe they walk away from it
feeling a little weird, or a little different about what that game was like. I
think that that's kind of what we set out to do.
I think, for us, Far
Cry... like people always say, "Why even bother making this a Far Cry game?" Like, what does this
have to do with Jack Carver running around with mutants on an island? I mean,
the simple fact of the matter is, Far Cry
is a Trojan Horse brand. You know? We can say, "Let's investigate
something that's a lot more deep and meaningful and interesting and
complicated, and let's do it within the framework of a brand that nobody has
any expectations for." I mean, not to be totally blunt about it, but
that's what it really boils down to.
We could fly below the radar there for a while, because
everyone's like, "Yeah. Far Cry.
All right. Yeah, it was a really cool PC game that you guys went and
over-saturated the branding on through your console efforts." And what
we're able to do is say, "Okay, that's fine. You just keep your
expectations nice and low. We're going to go do this thing that's way more
complicated than people are expecting." And I think what's cool about that
is there is a sort of bait-and-switch component to it, and I don't think we're
ashamed to say that.
CR: Obviously that
Trojan Horse idea is fairly comprehensible, but do you think that the really
impressive, frankly, level of simulation you guys are trying to do with the
weapon degeneration, with the persistence, with the fire spreading, with
characters not spawning in - all that stuff -combined with an expectation
players might have after playing games, that they will get static cutscenes
every twenty minutes - do you think that might scare players away? Is that
something you have to try to work on in the balance?
PR: That's a good question. I'm trying to think the best...
the relevant answer to that. Because the thing is, immersiveness just for its
own sake, I don't think is interesting. I think immersiveness that makes people
challenge their understanding of why the game works the way it does is useful.
CR: Clint spoke about
this at GDC.
PR: Yeah, I think immersiveness that allows the player to
use the attributes that he or she has as a human being rather than as a gamer
is interesting. And I think that by kind of doing that, what we're doing is
we're sort of... it's kind of like sticking a lobster in cold water and turning
the heat on them. We're kind of easing the player into this world that is much
more visceral, that is painful, and sticky, and sweaty, and dirty, and where
shit rusts and breaks down, and falls apart, and catches fire, and where their
own weapons can hurt them.
Like really kind of startling them every few seconds, we're
giving them that stimulus that kind of sensitizes them to this stuff. And then
as the story proves to be more dynamic, and more reactive to their actions,
then they're kind of in that - hopefully - that moment of epiphany where
they're like, "Oh, I get it. This world really is affected by my actions.
It's affected at a very, very low level when I bump into things or set things
on fire, or unjam my weapon, or yank a bullet out of my arm with a pair of
pliers. And it responds at a high level when I choose to assassinate the leader
of one of the factions, or abandon my buddies in the time of their need."
I think we need to ease them into that idea, and it may be
better to ease them into that idea low-level mechanics that they're going to
encounter from one second to the next, so that there's that kind of
understanding that that's just the way the universe is working. I hope that
answers the question.
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And I fully - given the number of talks on narrative that were happening - I fully expected to have somebody show up and go, "Hey, look what we did." And totally just render moot everything we've been working on. And it never really happened."
I didn't attend that talk, but I've been working on modular and systemic storytelling since 1995. I taught it for six years at one-day tutorials at GDC beginning in 1997, and continue to present it at conferences today. My book, Character Development and Storytelling in Games, published in 2004, goes into detail on how to create stories in the way Mr. Redding describes.
In the beginning I was told by people who thought stories must be linear and strictly authorial that games and stories didn't mix. Then when I started talking about modular storytelling, I was told it wouldn't work. Then I was told okay, maybe it would work, but it was too hard. Now that I've moved my systemic storytelling to virtual worlds, I'm told that narrative-driven virtual worlds won't work, especially worlds with on-going stories. We're building one now.
And for the past two years at Indiana University I have been teaching the techniques Mr. Redding describes, and other skills, to the next generation of videogame and virtual world storytellers. They get it.
The next step is to convince the majority of game companies that hiring 70% programmers , 30% artists, and 0% writers may not be the best way to build games that transcend, challenge, and inspire.
"The sense that we must push the medium toward a form of interactive narrative that is as strong and vital as the innovations in other areas of gameplay and technology has taken hold with many creators."
I guess my reaction is: "It's about time."
Even with modular storytelling you'll probably get a better experience by letting a group of people drive the creative process, and just acting as a guiding force to this group (creative director?). You might be pleasantly surprised to find that many of the programmers and artists have very good insight into what makes a great game play experience, what constitutes a great story, and in general, what interesting characters are all about.
By the way, I should mention, I'm one of those 70% programmers you mentioned, and yes, I often feel like my creativity is not being put to its full use. :-)
"You might be pleasantly surprised to find that many of the programmers and artists have very good insight into what makes a great game play experience, what constitutes a great story, and in general, what interesting characters are all about."
They'd better be able to do more than have insight. They'd better be able to write, too.
My point was that the practice of creating a game development team composed of 70% programmers and 30% artists guarantees you aren't going to have any dedicated writers around.
I have several friends who are equally good at programming and writing, but it takes more than insight. I have insight into the jobs programmers and artists do on my games, but nobody in their right mind would hire me to code or draw.
I guarantee the actors at the Globe Theatre had insight in all of those things. Only one of them was Shakespeare.
And those aren't my percentages. Those were given publicly at a conference I attended in June by a senior HR person who works for a huge game publisher.
I look forward to playing Far Cry 2 and witnessing the degree to which it drives me to emote. While working on "COH Opposing Fronts" I was able to do some user testing in relation to narrative and it proved very helpful, though in post. I imagine more robust narrative related user-testing during production would be tremendously valuable, to understand just what a particular narrative element, narreme, is conveying to the VUP and how that narreme might be improved to encourage concinnity with the intended metanarrative.
Speaking just as a lowly critic, the way I think of these kinds of games is that they are a series of inter-operating vignettes. Moments or scenes that are created by a writer are activated based on the actions allowed by the game design and given meaning by the art and speech.
In other words, the writer doesn't create events. He creates reactions.
I too echo Stephen Dinehart's remarks that it's nice to hear from a narrative designer in the trenches. It's always a good thing to hear about the work of game writers who "get" games.
As freelancers, Anne Toole and I are lucky that Writers Cabal does get the chance to work with developers at the earliest stages of game development.
If you have a bad day, there are any number of events that could make it a bad day.
You can go through these even in any order and still have a bad day.
You could even have the same dramatic "This is the last straw -- worst day ever" moment regardless of which event happened last.
The theories behind it have essentially already been in a lot of games, but those games have described them in a far more abstract way... Civilization, Total War and X-Com (as mentioned), feel more like emergent, player owned sets of events than guided narrative. Those games have never represented themselves as if they're *trying* to tell a story, and so they aren't landed with the criticisms that most conventional literary figures point at game narrative.
Instead, they create something *new* - a medium unto itself. A player's generated story is not necessarily going to be Dickens every time, sure, but the important fact is, it belongs and responds to them. That creates a completely different relationship with the audience. They're not an unpaid actor in a scripted world anymore. They're being listened to, responded to. While designers still have the "hands off" control through systemic design, the players forge their own path through possibility. I think that that, alone makes it a unique medium worth pursuing. We're growing up as a medium, and realizing that this whole interactive storytelling thing is NOT about self consciously, cow-towingly trying to make a perfect generative Dickens with every play-through, or trying to ape narrative conventions of fixed storytelling in order to justify the endeavor. We're discovering that we're making something brand new - something different from what the movement set out to create.
FPS game productions have typically had to be more focussed on their own core gameplay - the moving and the shooting. So much focus is required just to get those fundamentals right that higher level things suffer. Focus on the higher level things instead, and you get pretty clunky core gameplay (I'm a deus ex fan, obviously, but seriously... its combat is not what you'd call "fun").
Because of this deep focus required, the scope for adding this extra layer of *deep*, granular narrative interactivity on top of an FPS is rare, to say the least. It requires a lot of guts to back, from the money men all the way down to the devs in the trenches. I salute you!
I'm so glad we're over the notion of Branching Plot structures being the be-all and end all of interactive narrative, by the way.