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[Anthony Flack]

I agree with Paul's original observation that linear story-telling devices have always packed the most emotional punch. Taking Ico as an example, that game does a very good job of setting a scene, evoking an atmosphere, and establishing a bond between the two characters while you play. The music and graphics, and also, crucially, the mechanics of the game all work towards this. But still, the real emotional payoff comes in the scripted sequences. I mean honestly, what was the most emotional moment of the game for you? That time you helped Yorda climb up on a box?

There's actually nothing wrong with this at all; far from being something that we need to evolve beyond, this is a very successful and satisfying way to build a game experience and it's one that I imagine will be with us for a long time. The scripted sequences needn't be very long to be effective - the in-game sequences have already set you up for the explosive moment.Interactivity and non-interactivity both playing to their strengths and reinforcing each other.

As for Rohrer's article, notwithstanding that Braid quite clearly started out as an experiment in mechanics, with the symbolic layer applied later, I think it's interesting that he can appreciate the beauty and harmony in an abstract Kandinsky painting, and yet feels that game mechanics need to have symbolic meaning attached before they can qualify as proper art.

A finely-tuned action game is like a dance; it has rhythm and motion. Personally, my games always start with a vague notion of flow and movement; a balance of forces. That is the heart of my intent and my expression. Games will not be fully accepted as an art form until people are able to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of their essentially abstract mechanics. Music is abstract. Dance is abstract. Painting and sculpture are sometimes abstract. And so it is with games. Who cares if Roger Ebert can't see it?

[Alex Vostrov]

A finely-tuned action game is like a dance; it has rhythm and motion. Personally, my games always start with a vague notion of flow and movement; a balance of forces. That is the heart of my intent and my expression. Games will not be fully accepted as an art form until people are able to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of their essentially abstract mechanics. Music is abstract. Dance is abstract. Painting and sculpture are sometimes abstract. And so it is with games. Who cares if Roger Ebert can't see it?

Isn't it odd that we've started chomping on the abstract slice of the artistic pie first?  If this was painting, nobody would be able to paint a portrait and we'd be all arguing about the emotional content of red squares versus blue circles.  I think it's great that Rohrer and Humble are exploring that side of the spectrum, but it's pretty damn weird that we're stuck in the abstract corner.

This is not a voluntary choice on our part, but is due to our inablility to illustrate meaningful situations in a straightforward, representational manner.  We need games where the verbs are social and personal instead of spacial.  Once we have mastered that corner of design space, we can be comfortable in exploring the abstract side.  Otherwise, we're just hiding from the hard problems.

[Lyx]

@Alex:

From:

Hi wanderer.  A terrible thing happened recently!  A <role> of the <race> has recently stolen our only magic <object>.  If you return it to us, we will be very grateful.

To:

"<greeting>. <this-is-way-bad>. <a/the> <dangerlevel> <role> of the <race> <has-stoeled> our <precious> <object>. <reason-why-we-need-it>. <help-us>. <please-return-it> and we will <reward-description>."

And thats just one template. I guess this also makes it more obvious, why previously i portrayed the availablity of a searchable database as so important.

[Alex Vostrov]

And thats just one template. I guess this also makes it more obvious, why previously i portrayed the availablity of a searchable database as so important.

That's very similar to a random recursive templated insult system that I was thinking about recently.  You'd have all these different templates for NPCs taunting you; they would mention various attributes and history bits about you to add colour.

Other than solving the natural language problem and making NPCs understand grammar, I feel that the above approach is a decent first step towards natural expression by actors.  Others like Crawford have proposed exposing the underlying data structures and showing them to the player instead of natural language (Deikto in Storytron).  I remain skeptical of that approach, however.  It might be a necesary sacrifice to roll out a first prototype, but it destroys immersion.

In addition, that's only one piece of the puzzle, and probably the easier one.  We need the listening and thinking parts too.

[Lyx]

I love the example of Mount and Blade. The first dozen hours I spent in that game were magical, I was in this massive world fighting great battles, laying siege to castles, pillaging the countryside with massive warbands, and winning jousting tournaments. I think I stopped playing once I realized that even though the map was huge, the possibility space and significance of the interactions were pretty limited. Beyond trading, which was the only thing I left out above, there isn't much variety to what you do. Mount and Blade turned out to be a few good ideas replicated across the board in a non flexible fashion. Every king is fighting a war that never truly ends. Every king has one usurper that needs your help. I'd say that's a game that failed to live up to my expectations specifically because they avoided having any sense of story or consequences. There are plenty of things to be interacting with but there is no weight to the interactions.

Well, i think here the aspects of "emergent mainstory" and "consequences" are important. Emergence is all about interactive feedback-loops. As i explained earlier with the quest example: Make the quest-result have consequences by modifying variables and aspects in the gameworld. Then make quest-spawning dependend on just those variables and aspects, and you got a feedback-loop. Add enough variables and aspects which influence each other interactively, and you get something which is much more than the sum of its parts. You get a dynamic "living" world.

The downside to this is: This significantly affects gameplay and overall game-balance. So, you need to have a system in place which can deal with this kind of dynamics. You need game-mechanics which can deal with temporary inbalances - just as any organism - material, biological, mental or cultural - have mechanisms to deal with that. Most games haven't. Their game-mechanics depend on stuff remaining statics.

Guess what? Mount and Blade also doesn't. Okay, i guess what i'm saying now will scare a few mount and blade fans. If you play mount and blade, then in many ways it will seem to you as if it has a dynamic ecosystem below it. It doesn't! It's all faked with hardcoded mechanics. The game-logic is cheating all the time, and AI-parties need no food, no money, no upkeep costs, no nothing, to do anything. It also has no limits whatsoever. All the stats which apply to the player? Irrelevant to AI-Players. Even things like AI-Partysizes are kept "believable" via magic - in the betas short before release, there were AI-parties with 1000+ troops, lords with -50000 gold, prisoner trains in the hundreds, and lots of other weirdness.

My point is: This game does not have a true dynamic ecosystem to deal with a truely dynamic ecosystem. It's all fake. And this is why all the things which you do in mount and blade have little consequences - first because the consequences again would require "magic", and second because the gamebalance-mechanics couldn't deal with it.

[Anthony Flack]

Isn't it odd that we've started chomping on the abstract slice of the artistic pie first?  If this was painting, nobody would be able to paint a portrait and we'd be all arguing about the emotional content of red squares versus blue circles.  I think it's great that Rohrer and Humble are exploring that side of the spectrum, but it's pretty damn weird that we're stuck in the abstract corner.

Not really so odd. It's just that it's a better fit for the medium (of gameplay). I mean, music started out abstract; it has always been abstract. But people don't say that music is stuck in the abstract corner.

[Lyx]

Okay, a bit more about consequences and ecosystems before i leave for today.

Lets first look at consequences a bit more. The link between consequences and story/guidance was mentioned before already. If the actions of the player are his story, then this is only possible if his actions have consequences. The first problem with this i guess is how to implement that. My prefered answer to that is an ecosystem. Not necessarily only in terms of resources. For example, if you pirate enough, the market and therefore its shopkeepers may become more poor. The issue is how to stop the balance of the system from going totally wacko.

This issue i think has at least two aspects. The first is which implementations there are at all to avoid problematic imbalances - so, the means to do it. The second aspect is how to do that without making the player again feel that his actions have no weight.  If every action immediatelly gets "repaired" someway, then it is quite obvious to the player that basically nothing changed.

Both aspects, as i will show, however share the same solutions. Regarding implementation, what IMO is needed is a need-driven ecosystem. If the balance is tilted one way, intentions to deal with it need to arise. If we stay with the quest-system, then the answer is quite simple: Create counter-quests and let not only the player do quests. Rather, create some kind of "job-market" in which the player as well as NPCs can take part, including the possibility of jobs interfering with each other (escort caravan / pirate the caravan).

However, this again brings up the "i didnt achieve anything" issue if the counterreaction is totalitarian. Depending on what is desired, there are multiple ways to fix that. One is to make counterreactions "soft" and "delayed" - so, allow inbalance, but after a while create counterreactions which not necessarily nullify the players actions, but which prevent a total collapse.

Okay, this way, we now do allow the player to affect the world temporarily. But no matter what he does, his actions still have no longterm consequences. Yet, it should also be obvious that we simply shouldn't allow a total collapse, because that basically would break the gameworld. By the way: Philosophically speaking, this is also the case with the world around you. You cannot make it collapse. You can create more or less longterm LOCALISED damage, but in the really really longterm, you cannot break it.

There is a reason while i capitalised the word "localised" above. What if we do allow localised collapse? What if we do allow the player to "break" parts of the gameworld, but not the entire gameworld? I guess the sceptical question to that will be "how can you prevent one from leading to the other"? If the player can break one location, why not the rest?

Simple: The same way as described before: Regeneration. Or even better TRANSFORMATION. Trivia: If the player destroyed a city, and then at a later time in the game, at that location something different would be built - would the player still consider his actions as having had permanent consequences? :-)

So my answer to this issue is: The player can shape/transform the landscape, but he cannot render it permanently unusable. He also in the longterm cannot stop the gameworld as a whole from making sure that it can sustain itself.

As i see it, there is one issue left with this. This can put the player into the role of a cheating bigass manipulator. The player may no longer consider himself living IN the gameworld... no longer being "immersed" in the gameworld - but instead simply look at the gameworld as a series of meaningless variables, ready to be manipulated however he wishes.

To understand the solution to this problem, it is necessary to be aware what the "role" of a manipulator is from a psychological POV. The manipulator sees himself as being disconnected/seperate from the things which he manipulates. In other words **he considers himself unaffected by the consequences of his actions**. What i'm hinting at of course is: The player may not escape the consequences of his actions - he must stay "in" the world which he affects, so that what he does, also affects himself (feedback). A simple way to do this is that the players actions depends on the availability of a resource-cycle. If he abuses the resource cycle, then this will also affect his ability to act himself. Example: Player raids convoys via weapon -> Weapon factories reduce production -> Player gets less ammo -> Players ability to raid is reduced.

There are of course many other ways to make sure that the player is affected by his own actions - like a boomerang. The above was just an example to visualize the concept.

[Lucaz]

@Lyx: One factor besides the resource cycle you mentions, is how much power and resources the player is allowed to have. In a simulated world, the player shouldn't be able to do things beyond a certain level, that depends on his character. Meaning, if the player is, say, a knight, he shouldn't be able to bring down a city, just to do things a knight might do. So if he can apply his resources in a way that allows him to ruin a city, he won it, the city is now ruined. Resources is central to this idea. After doing such a thing, the player must pay the consequences of such a use of resources, be those money, armies, allies, or whatever, and also the world should react to such a big action.

On interaction damaging storytelling, I don't think so. Any good narration that's important in a game is merged with the gameplay.

The big problem is that we have developed narration and gameplay to different levels.  We've had thousands of years to develop our narrative skill.  We've only had 30 years or so to develop procedural expression.

The topics that we can express best procedurally are resource management and power projection through space.  These are the subjects that we've spent the most energy on.  So, if you have a narrative about the pain of losing a loved one and the gameplay is about shooting monsters in corridors, is it any surprise that the result is schizophrenic?

To avoid that dissonance the designer must keep in mind that game and plot are the same. What isn't said through the game might as well not be said, and whatever happens in the game is part of the story. If stuff is said in cutscenes, then the game is about shooting things, with a few scenes of the character whining losing hi girlfriend, not a game a bout losing someone you love. There are ways to make a game with both things, shooting(gameplay) and lose(story), but if the designer can't find or apply them, then he must decide which to keep central in the game, and which to make just an extra.

If you want to have the two merge together, we need to be able to talk about meaningful topics procedurally.

Not necesarilly. The same way gameplay can be interactive without having any procedurally generated elements, storytelling can allow interaction without having procedural content. RPGs allow interaction that affects both gameplay and story, but most don't have procedural content, they do it through branching. It is a limited interaction, but it allows the player to make meaningful decisions that might change the plot.

And there are also games that lack a plot but still have storytelling, and it's created procedurally during the game either by the player or the game. Examples of this are Dwarf Fortress, Darklands and Pirates!. They have no plot, but the interaction with the player creates a story. Those might not be deep stores, but having the player produce them, makes them powerful.

And games like The Last Express have deep plots, allow interaction between it and the player and still are mostly linear. Most games have the player reacting to the story and the game, when you invert that, the player can make decisions and interact with the game freely, even if he doesn't have multiple possibilities. Being the motor of the story means that he makes thing go forward, and even if the path is already stablished, it's his actions that make it happen.

[Lyx]

Okay, one more post, because i just noticed something significant. Basically, i'm going to go full-circle back to my first post in this thread.

In that post, i pointed out that most linear stories contain no mechanics, no "why". The story may explain the why, but if it happens in a program, the program actually understands nothing about whats going on. Thus, the program mechanics have no clue how to react, if stuff changes. The programmer basically has to constantly hold the hand of the program, and tell it how to deal with every single difference.

Later in that post, i mentioned that in my current project, i make it so that the decision-logic of the AI often (though, not always) does not depend on past events, but instead on the state of the involved characters. Now, the important difference between "event" and "state" in that regard is, that the app doesnt really understand an event - but it can understand and do maths with its state. So, in the case of events, you'd need to deal with every possible combination in the game as a unique exception - you again need to hold the app's hand - with states, you dont, because you can apply a generic decision logic.

Notice a pattern?

Now, with the talk about ecosystems, quests, consequences, plot and so on, i think we are dealing with a similiar pattern. Most current games have nearly no accountability at all. Things appear out of thin air and there is magic everywhere (why does that remind me about modern physics?). What's happening? Well, the programmer again is holding the app's hands, and tells it how to cast the right spells.

Hmmhmm. I wonder what would happen if you wouldn't start "spawning" things out of thin air, to begin with? I wonder what would happen, if instead you defined a limited set of resources for the entire gameworld, then define which products can be created from which resources. Interesting thing here is: You may skip steps via magic - as long as stuff doesnt appear out of thin air (no resources needed). I wonder what would happen if you wouldn't just "cast" stories of "loved ones" out of thin air, but instead programmed right into the game logic that NPCs may fall in love with each other. Furthermore, i wonder what would happen, if you then add need driven tasks to the world, so that things start moving.... hmmmm....

- Lyx

[Glaiel-Gamer]

i made my computer generate a dynamic story

http://spamtheweb.com/ul/upload/140509/47130_pokemaxcaveodyssey.txt

I'd say it's powerful and emotional, wouldn't you?

[Lyx]

LOL

Dont say you were the one commenting on the emily short article on the frontpage? :-P

[Pacian]

You know, lately I've been playing quite a few turn-based strategy games.  Two of these games had the worst integration of story and gameplay I've ever seen.  The bits where I was moving little people around on a grid felt completely unrelated to the bits where characters were talking to one another.  But in another couple of these games, I really felt like in the gameplay sections I was helping these characters to struggle towards their urgent goals.

In both of these cases, the story was completely linear - in the sense that the player has no control over what happens, or what order it happens in (actually, I think one of the games with poor integration had a branching story, but I couldn't get into it enough to find out).  The thing that the games I liked did differently was that, although the gameplay never affected the storyline, the storyline was constantly affecting the gameplay.  If a character turned out to be a traitor, if you were lured into a trap, if someone who'd gone for reinforcements turned up when your back was against the wall, it was all stuff that you had to react to in the game.

I certainly think that games should explore dynamic, interactive narrative.  But I also don't think we should fall into the trap of assuming that players can't genuinely participate in a linear story.