Selling the drama

[Erkki]

Disclaimer: this post may seem a bit messy. I started with a bit of a different topic, but it got long enough that I deleted a good portion of the beginning and changed the title. And then I finally ended up nearly where I started but that's another story.

I read somewhere, in relation to game stories, about a hypothetical future "drama engine" that in an open-ended game (with a dynamic story) would gently push the player towards a story event (or vice versa). If Mohammed won't come to the mountain then the mountain will come to Mohammed.

I thought of a hypothetical game -- very dynamic and open ended where you could, among other things, run some kind of business. Umm... think of Fable + Morrowind + something else + a good dynamic story. You are managing your business and making profit, disregarding the main story for a while. But all this time the drama engine makes sure that you hear rumors of a quest that is waiting for you somewhere else, while on a smaller scale maybe making local life interesting. Finally you decide to take the quest, but you still want your business to make money for you, so you hire a friend you've made in that place to manage it while you are gone.

You return some time later. But the drama engine knows that the main story is going on far away and has decided to give you more motivation for leaving this place behind. So now you find that your friend has spent most of your money on drinking and hookers and your business is bankrupt.

Umm... what was I trying to say here...

• details like these could probably make a game more interesting and more emotion-provoking, especially if it would be dynamic and you could do it completely differently next time and still having an interesting story presented to you.
  
• the player could probably be very frustrated by this. Maybe even enough to load a saved game from before taking the quest, selling the business and then going on the quest, thus still having the money when after completing it. But this would take the palyer out of the game and destory the suspension of disbelief for a while, even though he might later think that this kind of "random" event was 'cool'.
  
• if the designer would want to avoid this player frustration, wouldn't it be better to not let anything this bad happen to the player at all?
  
• but wouldn't it be boring if only good events happened in such a way?
  
• what could be done to make the player be angry at that "friend" NPC who drank away his money and make him react to the situation in the game world, instead of being frustrated that the game took his hard-earned money away from him?
  
• or is that up to the player and not in the designers hands because of the very medium -- in a book (or a movie) when something like this happens you can't turn pages back and hope that things will turn out better, but in a game you can always load a saved game (if you know that it's non-linear and think that maybe this is one of the things you can change).
  

In such an open-ended game, as a designer, how would you make the player accept all the consequences and continue from there? Assuming that accepting consequences would somehow be an important part of the game design.

I suspect that I personally would play that kind of game so that if something went otherwise than I desired, I would load and try to do things differently.

The only partial solutions I can think of are:

1) disable saving/loading completely and let there be no permanent death -- this creates too many other problems

2) make the possibilities (seem) infinite and equally important so that the player learns early on in the game that even if something goes wrong, it is not some kind of lesser side path, but it will open up new options and may be even more interesting.

But what if for example you had a companion from the beginning of the game (like Yorda in ICO) that you grew attached to and at one point she died. Would any player accept that if he knew he could go back (to a save game) and change this and play the rest of the game with the companion still alive.

But maybe this is not the designers business at all how the player reacts in such situations. I mean -- I was the one who said that I don't really care about playing "the way designers intended" in the quicksave thread.

Umm... I think I now arrived at the question I wanted to ask in the first place -- could there be games in the near future where the player couldn't tell which part of the story was created explicitly by the game designer and which part generated or pieced together by the drama engine? So that no matter what happened, to the player it would seem like that is the correct way through the game, even if there are actually many ways.

[Erkki]

Man, I was pretty tired when I wrote that post. I'll try to rephrase it tomorrow maybe. Meanwhile ignore it...

I have thousands of thoughts somewhere in my head about this, but I can't really phrase them well.

[Intrepid Homoludens]

Yeah, Erkhead, work on this! Sounds like an interesting idea to address.

[Kluf]

I don't see actually your point....

But I think when a game would be open-ended like this and had this many possibilities and ways the storys could evolved you wouldn't need to save. It would be enough when the game gets saved when you quit it.

There is no actual frustration then in the game. I'm frustrated when I have to play the same parts over and over again. My mind just collapses when I fight against the death of my hero, you loose 20 times but don't proceed a bit.

In a game with possibilities so near to reality there isn't this frustration. When you die you can try it completely different.

This is very hypothetical of course. But for me this makes clear why the savepoints system doesn't work, not for me at least. I'm patient, but I hate repitive gameplay.

[Trithemius]

Is this level of dynamic story content (danger! meaningless jargon?!) possible in a computer-game, without having some guy stuck in a box somewhere?

Can computer games ever be as good at personalised storytelling as conventional "nerds-around-the-table" type roleplaying endeavours? In hoping that they can be are we barking up the wrong tree entirely?

[Erkki]

I think I tried to discuss too many separate things in that post. I don't see my point either... I'll try again now and maybe leave a few things out...

The relationship between designer and player. I think a lot players want to see every detail the designers put in. Like wanting to hear every dialogue line in Monkey Island or like in Morrowind right now, I really wish I could join all Houses without starting a new game, to get to do those quests as well. But still, I know I'm not going to catch all the quests or details because there are at least seemingly so so many of them and there are only 24 hours in the day...

On one level I'm a little bit frustrated by this (not being able to see all the content), but on another level I really like this open-endedness. But I think it should to be taken even further (at least experimentally).

Could the possibilities in a game be even an order of magnitude greater than in Morrowind, so that it would be very clear to the player that there is never ever hope that they can discover every tiny detail in the game and that it's intended this way from the first place. To overwhelm the player so much that he must stop caring for every detail and choose a subset that he wants to explore during the game. It would be kind of like bringing MMORPG to single player, maybe (I've never really played any MMORPG for more than a few hours).

But creating such a game would have many problems...

1) If everything would be hand designed, it would take more than 10 years maybe. Maybe even way more. So some things would need to be generated by the computer (not necessarily randomly).

But could computers create interesting content? Or would the players feel that despite having great freedom, everything feels, well, generic and insignificant? That leads to a whole new set of questions and even science-fiction...

But I believe at least some amount of interesting content could be created by the computer even today if the designers supply enough building parts and if the systems are complex enough that the same kind of thing doesn't get repeated very often.

2) The designers would not have a complete vision of every detail the game, because only so much info can fit in ones head. And it would be a balancing and Quality Assurance nightmare etc.

The game world would need to be extremely systematic and all the systems fool-proof so that the computer wouldn't generate bugs and so that at least a complete vision of how all the different game systems interact would be possible.

I hope I made more sense now. I left some thoughts out, to keep the post "short"

[Erkki]

Oh yeah, and maybe some of you get the question that why would anyone even want to create such a game? Well, to give the player even more freedom, and expand that freedom in new directions, and maybe even make a game tailor itself to what the player prefers.

I think it's an acceptable goal, or otherwise there would be similarly no point to Morrowind or Daggerfall.

[Salka]

I have never liked that kind of game, where you are just in a world and you can do whatever you want. I've always felt them to be too vague. That said, I have never been a big fan of Zelda for a similar reason. While I appreciate that Ocarina of Time was an awesome game in many respects, one of the factors that many people loved; the freedom to roam around this real time world... didn't appeal to me. It felt too loose. It was too easy to wander around aimlessly without knowing what you were doing. I didn't know where I was supposed to be going (although I had a fantastic time exploring around trying to find out). If I'm playing a game, I want to know exactly what I'm supposed to be doing and where I'm supposed to be going. Okay, it wasn't so much the freedom to roam as it was the freedom to roam and a lack of definite direction. Did that even make sense?

So a game like the one you're suggesting would probably drive me insane. I mean, there would be - how COULD there be - any direction in it? It would, at least at SOME point, have to become pretty aimless. And wandering around freely with nothing to do... would make me... I would have to... KILL myself.

Or not. I'm probably wrong.

P.S. Zelda Rocks!!!

[Erkki]

Well, the game could make the main goals very clear to you and everything else you could do would be optional. In the first post I mentioned I read somewhere about a hypothetical story engine of sorts that could detect if the player is lost or something and gently guide her towards the main story. Possibly Marek linked to an article about that in his "Future of Adventure Games" article.

Found it. It seems actually Kingz linked to it in the AG forums and Marek linked to that post And here's a link to the article "Agitating for Dramatic Change" by Randy Littlejohn.

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20031029/littlejohn_01.shtml

[Salka]

A guy I know is in the last year of his degree in Trinity, and has developed a Story Engine kind of like that. It's still in early stages, and I nearly cried while trying to play the test game, but it's a really awesome concept.

And it made me sort of enjoy controlling both the camera angle and the character.

[Erkki]

The drama engine discussed in the article isn't so much about guiding the player actually... I searched for a quote and only found this

The sidekick could guide by helping to steer the character toward interesting places and away from areas that are boring or the player is not ready for. Sure, the player could ignore the advice, and the sidekick would still try to bail them out; but always trying to lead them back onto the path of the conflict that is at the heart of the drama world status quo, and thus towards emergent story and drama. The conflict at the heart of the drama world status quo is part of the dramatist's pre-defined setup.

And you know, in Morrowind there are times when I have too much to do. You really have to fill in some things using your imagination with that game, but you can always pick one thing and focus on doing that. So mostly the problem is not directionlessness, but deciding between possible directions

---

So what was that story engine / game like, Yufster?

[toblix]

Games with multiple paths that can be jumped between are really problematic for me to play. In Indy: FoA, there are three separate paths, right, but you choose one explicitly and that's it. In games like Deus Ex 2, though, you can choose your alliances and stuff but still jump back and forth and do quests for all the sides. For me, this results in bad roleplaying and a lot of changing alliances and messing up the flow of the game because I know I won't be playing the game again, and I want as much of what it has to offer as possible.

[jokemaster]

My thoughts:

First: There should always be something that makes it clear to the player where to go to keep on with the story, but not forces him there

Second:The characters should be interesting,

[jokemaster]

My thoughts:

First: There should always be something that makes it clear to the player where to go to keep on with the story, but not forces him there

Second:The characters should be interesting, I wouldn't care about just killing my friend if he's the cookie-mold scoundrel, make him have some reason for why he spent all your money

[Ryam BaCo]

a friend of mine is working on something related to this. they're creating a framework called g-system for creating an envolving universe and plan to use it in a mmorpg. i don't know exactly how far it can be used for "story-creation", but my friend (using the pseudonym phoenix) bothered me so long about their project till i finally had a look on it and i'm pretty excited about it now (and how i can use it for my ideas).

if you want to have a look at the project and its progress just visit their homepage.

for further information about mmorpg+g-system you can have a look at a discussion with one of the developers i had some time ago: click me! (this guy called parmenides is my former c#-teacher )

[Salka]

This guys Story Engine is where the NPCs come and talk to you when you go off course and give you hints as to where to go or where you're currently headed. Depending on what you do in the small mini-game he made, the NPCs will be talking about it if you listen in on their conversations. And other stuff. It's pretty cool, but too much effort to use at the moment...

[Erkki]

That G-System sounds promising. I'd like to check out the demo, but I suck at using Linux and have never compiled anything on it. I do have Mandrake 10.0 installed, though, so I'll give it a try.

I've wanted to do something like this myself (on a much smaller scale), but I haven't even managed to start yet.

[baconian]

This guys Story Engine is where the NPCs come and talk to you when you go off course and give you hints as to where to go or where you're currently headed. Depending on what you do in the small mini-game he made, the NPCs will be talking about it if you listen in on their conversations. And other stuff. It's pretty cool, but too much effort to use at the moment...

yep.

that's me.

i just submitted aweek ago and am suffering from complete lack of something to do, so if you still want a hand with luna let me know, yuf.

here's my thesis, if anyone wants to read it.

the demo game is a pile of shite, but was just meant to find out how people reacted to the approach, not be a real game. you can see how they reacted in the thesis if you want.

im a bit unconvinced of the usefulness of this stuff, especially since im such a fan of well crafted story in games, and this ai storytelling stuff means youre relinquishing a lot of control over details. anyway, it's stuff that makes me think about storytelling in general, and since im a computer geek and cant write a story to save my life, i thought i could learn a bit about it by programming it. sort of a standard defense mechanism for programmers, i suppose.

[SiN]

@*****ian:

awesome paper! i went thru the whole thing reading quite a bit of it (especially the computer game implementation chapter ... ch4 it was) and skimming thru some (the theory stuff which i think was ch2,3) and was pretty impressed. im a relatively experienced hobbyist game coder myself, so id absolutely love to see the demo in action ... mind passing me the link to it?

SiN

[baconian]

how come my name comes up as *****ian when people quote me?

annoying fucker admins.

this one might get me banned. ah well.

[loonyboi]

I think ***** is a no-no on this board.

Clearly, it's run by conservative jews.

B***n, P**k and other such things are out, and the meat and dairy forums have to be kept separate at all times.

[Jake]

Some jokes go on for a little too long...

(bacon)

[Erkki]

How about tasty?

PS. Baconian, I plan to read that thesis of yours as soon as I get a chance.

[baconian]

ah right

mmmm. bacon.

[Erkki]

I just had the idea that maybe experimental games like I proposed earlier could be made -- even by amateurs -- if the "low-level gameplay" (probably just made that up) like moving in the world and shooting things would be removed and the player would have interfaces and maybe a 2D map of the world like in many strategy games.

This would probably destroy much of the drama potential, but could be a great way to make creating such a game manageable and experiment with things without having to bother with much of the work that goes into creating a big 3D world.

But would anyone play such a game nowadays?