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[Alex Vostrov]

(1992)

(but, imho, human simulator == unethical. alienation through medial phantom pyschology... maybe it's good that isn't possible (yet). but i personally don't think characters in interactive "story spaces" would really need that level of realsitic psychological simulation. it would be enough to use simpler, mental states, which would have a function for the actual story. more authored than engineered...)

I'm quite familiar with Crawford's work, 0rel.

I'm not sure what you mean by "medial phantom pyschology."  Perhaps you could elaborate your thoughts a bit?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I feel a bit like you're ignoring the specific points of my argument.  If my definitions are unsatisfactory to you, you should point out why.  Dismissively waving it away doesn't communicate much.  My reasoning was a bit more developed than "a pure linear story is not interactive."  I'm making a bit of effort to understand your viewpoint, Paul.  So far, I haven't gotten anything that I can work with.

I feel the same way. I think it's weird to say that you don't understand my viewpoint when I already wrote several pages about it (such as the quotes quoted in the first post of this thread). I'm not exactly sure how to be more clear than that.

It's also weird that you say I don't understand your viewpoint; I think I do. I don't agree with it, but that's not the same as not understanding it. I didn't intend to dismissively wave it away; I doubt anyone in this forum has read more about interactive storytelling or tried it more than I have, so it's not that I'm being dismissive of the idea.

But again, to summarize, this is what I mean: I felt that Blow was recommending against using traditional storytelling methods because he felt that they are fundamentally incompatible with interactive media and that if a game developer wants to evoke emotion they should not use linear stories. I disagree with that, because I feel that interactivity can be used and in fact has been used to make traditional storytelling methods better, and that interactivity doesn't replace storytelling, but adds to it.

[Alex Vostrov]

I feel the same way. I think it's weird to say that you don't understand my viewpoint when I already wrote several pages about it (such as the quotes quoted in the first post of this thread). I'm not exactly sure how to be more clear than that.

I just haven't been able to build a mental model of your ideas.  I understand that you think that narrative and interactivity are not in conflict.  You think that they can co-exist and enhance each other.  My problem is that from my point of view they very obviously DO collide.  My issue then is trying to understand why you think they don't.

I'll re-read your comments to see if things are clearer a second time around. 

It's also weird that you say I don't understand your viewpoint; I think I do. I don't agree with it, but that's not the same as not understanding it. I didn't intend to dismissively wave it away; I doubt anyone in this forum has read more about interactive storytelling or tried it more than I have, so it's not that I'm being dismissive of the idea.

I haven't claimed that you don't understand the issue.  It sounds to me like we have very different basic assumptions, which makes communicating difficult.  What I was bothered by is that I laid out my chain of reasoning and instead of addressing its specific flaws you argued against abstract theorizing.  That doesn't help me to understand WHY you see my reasoning as wrong.

Thanks for being patient, I know being in discussions like these can be a bit frustrating sometimes.

But again, to summarize, this is what I mean: I felt that Blow was recommending against using traditional storytelling methods because he felt that they are fundamentally incompatible with interactive media and that if a game developer wants to evoke emotion they should not use linear stories. I disagree with that, because I feel that interactivity can be used and in fact has been used to make traditional storytelling methods better, and that interactivity doesn't replace storytelling, but adds to it.

What I'm wondering is why you think this.  Haven't you said before that maximizing player choice will essentially un-make the game?  If this is the case, shouldn't it destroy linear narrative first, due to the inflexibility of pre-specified plot?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

re Alex:

Ah, understandable.

I think that you've only played one of the games on my top 10 list of favorite stories in games may contribute to you not knowing how interactivity can add to stories. But you've probably least played some games you enjoyed because of their stories.

I'm also troubled by your rejection of empiricism. I believe empiricism is the only trusted way to deal with reality: the evidence of the senses and the collection of data is all we have, the conceptual mind is impotent in comparison and mostly produces fantasy and illusion. But that's a different subject. But don't take my rejection of deduction in general as a rejection of your line of reasoning in particular: I reject lines of reasoning period. I don't feel that lines of reasoning are to be trusted when they contradict experience and empirical data.

In particular, it's a bad idea to me to reject the idea that interaction and traditional storytelling can work together just on the basis of definitions of interactivity and stories when clearly there are working examples (many, many games) where interactivity and storytelling are not in conflict. Rejecting empirical data like that strikes me as akin to a religion, where you take on faith that interactivity and storytelling contradict and ignore all evidence to the contrary or interpret it in such a way that they work with your definitions, usually by saying the people who enjoy them and find no problems with them are actually deluded into liking things which they should not like. And you do seem to take that line of approach with the "this game's story would be better in a book or movie" and other constructs -- just dismissing that they exist and saying they shouldn't because of some imaginary contradiction between interactivity and storytelling, even though millions of people are enjoying partially interactive traditionally told stories every single day.

Conceptually, I think the key ingredient you're missing from your model of my model is that I don't conflate story and plot. Stories don't necessarily have to contain a set plot, they can have a partially set one or even be plotless. Stories also include characters and setting. A lot of people say that World of Warcraft for instance "has no story" -- but it does, it just doesn't have a plot. But it has a setting -- one I find kind of cliche and boring, but it's a setting -- and it has a lot of characters, most of them players (which makes the story interactive). So I feel that if you think of story as characters + setting + plot rather than just plot, you won't see a contradiction between interactivity and stories.

[Lucaz]

On interaction damaging storytelling, I don't think so. Any good narration that's important in a game is merged with the gameplay. Even if the player interaction weakens the story, it strenghtens the storytelling, as the player is now a more integral part of it, and it also strenghtens the gameplay as it makes it more meaningful and deeper. As Paul says, storytelling is made multiple parts, so weakening the story doesn't necesarilly weakens the narration.

Also it has to be remembered that a story that works in a game isn't necesarilly good when looked at in the same you look at a book or movie, and vice versa.

@Orel: One way to go about procedural dialogue is to have an ample but limited array of generic subjects to talk about. The dialogue syste, in Maupiti Island will help me explain what I mean. The main character doesn't has any dialogue line, but you have a list of subjects to ask about, that includes every character, event, place and moment. Something like that, maybe with the plus of a text parser, and some slightly complex algorithm to get the character reactions, would allow for an ample and worthy dialogue. Maybe no the deepest one, but good enough.

[Lyx]

It's a very hard problem and a lot of people working in the industry don't naturally lean toward solving it.  What is needed is to develop algorithms to simulate a human being.  You need to have characters that have emotions and can act on them in a plausable fashion.  We've barely started on that problem.

What i was trying to show was that in some cases, it is not difficult at all. When it comes to simulating such things, the desired "deepness" matters. In a sandbox game with a very big world for example, it isn't necessary to have "deep" interactions - or at least, not often. Take for example a quest template in a roguelike - it doesn't need to have deep dialogue. It doesn't need to have a complicated backstory. All it needs is to have shallow variety. And if possible, it needs to have consequences.

Perhaps i wasn't making it clear enough in my post, that i was making a 180 degree turn and looking at the topic from an opposite angle. Before, we were talking about generating deep NPC interaction. But in the post, i was talking about having a high quantity and variety of interaction, but each of them not very deep. For games like knytt stories, mount'n blade or roguelikes, it isn't necessary to have deep complicated interactions - rather, the magic could come from being able to interact with many inhabitants in many different ways - and those interactions then influencing each other via their consequences, so that some kind of emergent story is created.

Let me explain this with my favorite target (as in "i like to bash them for the problem, because it is so ridicously trivial in their case") - quests in roguelikes. A roguelike has all its items and npcs nicely tagged and classified in all kinds of ways, and it has sophisticated means to generate those. Correct me if i'm wrong, but to me this practically means that the developer - practically (not necessarily technically) - has a SEARCHABLE DATABASE of modular game content right there in front of him. Often, even all important entities in the gameworld are accessible regardless of the player location. The developer also already knows how to create meaningful items and npcs via placeholder variables. The way how this works, is that a content-entity template has no static definition. Rather, parts of it consist of variables which define *selective randomization*. It works like a fill-in-the-blanks puzzle.

In other words: He has already all the prerequisites there, to generate meaningful quests. Whats missing? What would be left to do? Well...

1. The mental step to recognize, that you can do the same with quests.

2. The intention of doing it.

3. The additional step to recognize, that you can do this in a more complex way than is typically done in some games. You dont need to stop at randomizing some NPCs, monsters and items. You can also vary the greeting a bit (heck, you can even look at the player stats and make it apply to the player - i.e., different greeting depending on fighter or mage), vary trivial parts of the phrasing a bit, vary a minimalistic (1-3 sentences) backstory a bit. Heck, you can even go as far as not just generating fire-and-forget quests that way, but even full multiplart subquests - you'd just need to first create a few subquests by hand, then look at how they are structured and recognize that they are kinda modular structured, et voila, just vary the modules a bit.

4. Someone talented and creative in coming up with ideas... seriously, i think that THIS in practice is the most difficult part of it all - not the technical requirements, but finding someone who is talented in designing modular quests.

5. Going one step further: Make the result of the quest modify variables in the gameworld. Then make it so that which quests are spawned depends on those variables in the gameworld. Depending on how complex you go there, this way you get the mentioned "emergent mainstory".

So, yes, if we're talking about deep emotional interaction and story, then the problems which you mentioned are faced. But they are mostly irrelevant if all you want to do, is generate some varied but shallow textual content.

- Lyx

[Lyx]

P.S.: Again, i just remembered that there was a game which did just that. It is among the gradfather family of sandbox games. It was Elite II / Frontier :-) Check out the blackboard :-) However, it stopped at adding the "consequences" and "emergent mainstory" aspect.

P.S.2: This by the way is the main reason, why none of the pseudo-remakes made me go "wow!". The X-Series and the like didn't impress me. Why? Because they felt sterile and cold. They felt as if you were interacting with boring machines all the time. It felt lonely and dead. In frontier, the character portraits were selectively randomized. The quests were in their phrasing selectively randomized. The game was given a feel of being part of a LIVING world, full of lifeforms, not machines. None of the remakes managed to create this impression. The coffeebreak world of "Adventures in infinite spaces" feels more alive to me, than all elite/frontier remakes taken together.

[Alex Vostrov]

I think that you've only played one of the games on my top 10 list of favorite stories in games may contribute to you not knowing how interactivity can add to stories. But you've probably least played some games you enjoyed because of their stories.

I've played many games where the story kept me interested.  The problem was that in many of them, the actual game was merely an obstacle between me and the rest of the story.  This is a bit of a different topic, but it's something that's of great concern to me.  I'm troubled by the possibility that a lot of our design tricks are nothing more than operant conditioning.  We don't want to be addicting our audience to our games, a topic that Jonathan also talks about, by the way.

I'm also troubled by your rejection of empiricism. I believe empiricism is the only trusted way to deal with reality: the evidence of the senses and the collection of data is all we have, the conceptual mind is impotent in comparison and mostly produces fantasy and illusion.

Ah, but when we stand in the domain of fantasy and illusion such tools are appropriate no?  I'm not 100% sure what you mean by empericism when you talk about games, but I can venture a guess.  I suspect that what you mean is that we should rely on examining what has and hasn't been succesful in the past.  My concern with this approach is that it imposes incremental innovation, at best.

To transcend the limitations of current games, we need to leap over them conceptually.  This approach is not so disconnected from reality as you might think.  Let me give an example from physics.  What is the electro-magnetic field?  It is a thing that we cannot directly see or touch, and yet the field is an idea that informs our understanding of the world.  Using this concept, we can make predictions about observations that have not yet been done.  Any time a physicist calculates on paper the force between a wire carrying a current and a charged particle, he is utilizing conceptual reasoning.  Neither the particle, the wire nor the field are strictly "real" objects.  They're merely ideas that are convenient to us.  We could just as easily imagine the wire as a collection of atoms or the atoms as more elementary particles.  Without such abstractions we would not be able to make generalized predictions about the world.

It is no different when we talk about games.  We can imagine them to have abstract qualities such as "interactivity" or "linear narrative."  We can then employ our understanding of these concepts to make predictions.  These predictions still need to be tested empirically, but to reject this method in general would be unwise, I think.

In particular, it's a bad idea to me to reject the idea that interaction and traditional storytelling can work together just on the basis of definitions of interactivity and stories when clearly there are working examples (many, many games) where interactivity and storytelling are not in conflict. Rejecting empirical data like that strikes me as akin to a religion, where you take on faith that interactivity and storytelling contradict and ignore all evidence to the contrary or interpret it in such a way that they work with your definitions, usually by saying the people who enjoy them and find no problems with them are actually deluded into liking things which they should not like.

I've never claimed that such approaches cannot function.  To the contrary, I have played many games where I greatly enjoyed the story element.  Sometimes, a well-made story has touched me emotionally.  I do claim however, that they're deeply conflicted works and that we must resolve that conflict for the sake of the medium.

And you do seem to take that line of approach with the "this game's story would be better in a book or movie" and other constructs -- just dismissing that they exist and saying they shouldn't because of some imaginary contradiction between interactivity and storytelling, even though millions of people are enjoying partially interactive traditionally told stories every single day.

I believe that one should work with the grain of a medium, not against.  Just as a skilled woodworker embraces the irregularities of his material, we should embrace the peciluar properties of ours.  Every artist in other media has an innate understanding of their strengths and limitations.  If we ever want to reach the same level, we must gain this wisdom as well.

Conceptually, I think the key ingredient you're missing from your model of my model is that I don't conflate story and plot. Stories don't necessarily have to contain a set plot, they can have a partially set one or even be plotless. Stories also include characters and setting. A lot of people say that World of Warcraft for instance "has no story" -- but it does, it just doesn't have a plot. But it has a setting -- one I find kind of cliche and boring, but it's a setting -- and it has a lot of characters, most of them players (which makes the story interactive). So I feel that if you think of story as characters + setting + plot rather than just plot, you won't see a contradiction between interactivity and stories.

Your definition of a story is different than mine, but once we get past that minor detail, I agree with you.  There's nothing stopping interactive stories from having great characterization and setting.  As a matter of fact, I suspect that eventually our ability to describe character will be greater than static media.

[Alex Vostrov]

Let me explain this with my favorite target (as in "i like to bash them for the problem, because it is so ridicously trivial in their case") - quests in roguelikes. A roguelike has all its items and npcs nicely tagged and classified in all kinds of ways, and it has sophisticated means to generate those. Correct me if i'm wrong, but to me this practically means that the developer - practically (not necessarily technically) - has a SEARCHABLE DATABASE of modular game content right there in front of him. Often, even all important entities in the gameworld are accessible regardless of the player location. The developer also already knows how to create meaningful items and npcs via placeholder variables. The way how this works, is that a content-entity template has no static definition. Rather, parts of it consist of variables which define *selective randomization*. It works like a fill-in-the-blanks puzzle.

Do you mean something like the following?

Let's say we have five types of creatures in the game, 4 roles and 3 types of objects:

Creatures: Human, yeti, orc, elf and demon
Roles: Pirate, king, warrior and mage
Objects: Sword, ring and chest

Then, if you wanted to generate a quest, you'd do something like this:

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.

Maybe once you did the quest, the questgiver would like you more and give you different quests.  The guys that you killed would like you less.

Do I have the right idea, or were you thinking about something else?

[Alex Vostrov]

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?

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

[Lyx]

@Alex:

Yes, i mean that approach, but my most important point (besides of "consequences" and "emergence" - will get back at that later) was that you can do more than that. Developers of such games often are focussed on their entities and rules in the gameworld and (!!!) consider purely story-related aspects as "unimportant". Think about that: A developer wants to generate stories, and then considers just that aspect ... unimportant?!? I suspect that even at this point, it may still not be obvious what i'm talking about. I'm talking about all this (marked in red):

"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."

I mean all those things which you didn't make a variable, because it makes no difference to the "gameplay". The thing is: This IS important! To the gameplay, it may make no difference which phrasing you use to explain the quest-mechanic - but from a story-POV, it does. It not just does because reading the exact same phrasing again and again is repetitive (though, thats relevant too).

To understand this, think about what the above quest-description is. It is a story-summary. Now, think about popular stories in books and movies. Compare their "main plots". You will see a damn lot of repetition. Many stories and books - when looked at from a gameplay-mechanic perspective - are identical - and yet people dont interprete them as identical?!? When i point this out to game developers, i often get the reply:

"We are not interested in adding stuff which makes no difference to the gameplay. The fact is: There aren't that many types of generic quests. So its not really easy to add more variety".

Well doh, You missed the point of a story, hacker! Differences in all the minor details IS what gives stories variety. Plus: Things which are meaningless to the gameplay, may very well make a difference to the story. When a player does a quest and is interested in story, then he doesn't just want to know from where to where he needs to carry an item - he wants to know WHY, for WHOM, etc. - even if that makes no difference to gameplay-mechanics.

To summarize: If you only care about gameplay-mechanics, then you will create something which is only about the gameplay mechanics. With this, i do not seek to imply that story-aspects should be SEPERATED from gameplay mechanics, so that both may be in conflict. No, i just mean that to a story, more than gameplay mechanics matters - and that therefore, in a story - even if its just a few sentences long - there are aspects which may not change the gameplay, yet still change the perceived "whole". What i'm talking about here, is a synthetic process: Two agents interact and the interaction creates a higherlevel entity - the relationship. In this case, the gameplay aspects and the story aspects are perceived as one compound entity. If you vary the story-aspects you get more variety in compound entities. You just shouldn't rely ONLY on variation in story-related aspects, because if in the game you have only story variation but no gameplay variation, then the player notices that, and therefore again perceives story and gameplay aspects as seperate.

[Alex Vostrov]

By the way, I think that this article by Jason Rohrer has relevance.  It's almost a year old, so you might have seen it already.  If not, you should check it out.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_155/4987-The-Game-Design-of-Art

[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.