The Compulsion to Learn by Hearing and Telling Stories

Remember Blag, the spear-throwing caveman? Now let's look at two of his sons, Clag and Zug. They both like throwing spears at targets, just like their father, so they are both skilled hunters. At night, however, they can't see their targets, so they cannot practice spearthrowing. They must find something else to do.

This is when their behavior differs. Clag sits around and does nothing before going to sleep. Zug, for some reason, feels compelled to go and trade stories with the other hunters.

One day, Clag and Zug are out hunting separately. Clag finds a strange new berry and eats it. Zug finds the same berry, but he recognizes it as the new poisonous type that one of his friends told him about. Clag, not having heard the story about the new poisonous berry, eats the berry and dies. Zug's genes, which made him compulsively seek out stories from his friends, thus outnumber Clag's non-story-hearing genes in the next generation.

I recommend everyone read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. It's a great help in understanding evolution, and some of the non-obvious results of the evolutionary process. One of the principles of the book is that the "unit" of evolution is the gene, not the organism. This means that we are programmed to give advantages to our genes, not to ourselves as individuals. The interesting thing about that is that our genes exist outside our body. Our relatives often have exact copies of our genes. This means that genes which encourage us to help our relatives at little cost to ourselves will proliferate.

Since most of our evolution took place in very small societies, we are programmed to treat any friend as likely to have copies of our own genes. One way to greatly help friends and relatives at little cost to you is by telling them stories.

If you've ever seen the movie Apocalypto and managed not to burst out crying, you may remember a scene in the initial "happy tribe" section of the movie where one of the tribe's old men sits and tells a story at a campfire, while the rest of the tribe listens intently. Note how intently the younger people watch him speak. This is realistic. Human beings are genetically compelled to tell and hear stories.

The passive media we compete with -- movies, books, television -- are largely based on the story-telling/story-hearing compulsion. I don't think it is a good idea to try to compete directly with these established media in quality of embedded stories. Forcing an embedded story in a game requires serious design compromises. We can do it and it has been done, but it is not the strength of our medium.

Instead of embedding a story in the game fully formed, games can generate stories which players will then tell each other. Any FPS player will have a few stories about crazy plays he pulled off. I once walked into a room in Counter-Strike and killed three guys who were stacked on top of each other by filling the bottom guy with lead and letting the others fall into his place like Connect Four pieces. That was cool. Another time in Halo, I was firing from the minigun on Warthog and got hit by a rocket. I did an entire midair flip without ever stopping firing or losing my point of aim. That was cool.

These stories don't have to be about combat. The Sims has an entire array of features about taking photos of your Sims and assembling albums chronicling their lives, which can then be posted on the web.