I think that all stories intend to take the participant to a particular emotional and intelectual state. Emotionally, know as the emotional arch of the Participant. i.e. your happy at the end because good has triumphed over evil. Intellectually, known as the moral of the story, ie. if you never give up you will over come. Books do this by causeing the reader to become emotionaly attached to its characters and follow their emotional arch and hopefully come to the same apiphany at the end realizing the moral of the story. Many computer games have tried to do the same thing and have failed horrably. Often because the interactivity or gameplay, which is the essence of a computer game, is soley a hinderance or distraction from the story line and not an essental part of it. Computers as a medium ofer a huge advantage over books and films in telling story, BECAUSE they are interactive. Two people and watch the same movie and leave it thinking entirely different things. The director cant effect this, no matter how long the movie is or how many times someone views it, it will always be the same. People bring completely different experiances and backgrounds to an experiance. But a director has to make ONE movie for everyone. Where as computers can cater the experiance to each particular participants state of mind. And that is where the problem lies. If he plays defensively, is it becauses hes being stratigic or is it because hes scared? If he opens the door to the secret room, is it because he discerned its location from the clues you as the designer left him or because he stumbled upon it? How do you guage a players state of MIND?

We get familiar with characters in a movie or story. If they act inconsistently with the character we know them to be, the whole story gets thrown out of whack.

Most of the time, the player is the central character in a game story. And the player can play the game in any mood they want on any given day, in effect making the main character inconsistent.

That would be my guess as to why games don't operate as conventional storytelling does.

You can set up a situation that will hopefully drive the character to participate with the feeling a situation is designed for, but there is never any guarantee that the player won't say to himself, "Okay, yeah yeah, that's scary, just give me something to kill", or something along that line. It seems you would have better luck telling an interactive story to someone who cares more about the story than satisfying their urge for a specific kind of interaction.

[edited by - Waverider on August 6, 2002 4:14:30 AM]

You have three choices in my mind.

1). Leave only one scenario for them to be. This is probably too hard to accomplish, as nearly everything creates different feelings in ones mind.

2). Just double check things. Like in your example you ask "Is he playing defensively or is he scared"... now if you sit and ask yourself how a scared person plays, especially different from a defensive person, you can find out the answer. When the trigger goes off(or you guess, I prefer the first) for an event, where it appears the person is either defensive or scared, first see what else they are doing. Take for example a Fps, if someone is defensive they will hoard defensive weapons(like proxy mines), find a nice camping spot, and wait accordingly. A scared person will run, find a place to hide, but probably run again. This of course is a bad example, but you should get the idea. The whole idea is to calculate what they are thinking(through processed events, such as you sending a zombie after then) then check all the possibilities, you have a margin of failure, but its better than a lot of systems. The trigger might be running away from a zombie(defensive or cowardly?), the second trigger indicates you have no low ammo, its still hard to tell but they are probably scared... not actually for the life of their guy, but they don''t wanna lose the game/lose effort put into the game before the last save. But if the above trigger indicated they had full ammo and life, they are either cowardly or conservative... either way it usually knocks itself down to two things, sometimes they are inseperable, but other times you can eliminate all but one choice.

3). Forget all about guessing what state of mind they are in(or at least leave it as unimportant). You will never be 100% right, and when you are wrong, people will not like the consequences(if any).

"Practice means good, Perfect Practice means Perfect"

one of the points that you make in your example is that a player gets scared when his character is about to die, not be cause the character is in any danger but because he will loose. I think this is the perfect symptom of bad story telling in games. If the story was told well, the character would mean something to the player, better yet they would personally identify with the character. As I have stated before, in games story telling is done by gameplay, and the constant save and retry of many games is BAD game play.

How could this be fixed. How could you make the player value the character and fear for his loss. How about having death mean something. Then take away the save functions. And bingo. When dead is dead it matters. What what do you do when your main character dies? Thats where good story telling comes in. the player simply takes over another character. When a general dies another takes his place. But that would be like endles continues, well not if every character is the same.....

Hey I''m just throwing ideas out here.

Yeah you guys are correct I think.

Players don''t associate with the main character on screen because to them the character represents themselves within the game environment.

This is enforced throughout many games especially FPS where the main objective is to place the player themselves in the game and center the story around them.

Any interaction where the player has to control a character in the game just forces the player to think of that character as an embodiment of themselves.

I remember playing Doom a long time back, and carefully studied the lighting effects, and concentrated more on getting to the end alive.

Another guy I knew, however, played the game and freaked out whenever one of those in-your-face pig things emerged from the darkness and started knawing on his head. He would turn and run and get himself lost. Think of people like that when you program the situations, and you''ll probably make the general public happy

For a non-FPS game, look at the Sims. You don''t act as one of the characters, but rather as an overseer. None of the characters are you in the game. Players get much more attached to their "pets" and many times feel a loss when one of them dies. Just a different angle to look at.

Karg

The player doesn't associate the character with themselves. He associates it with his character. He's not depressed when the character dies, he's pissed off. Yeah, he's affected, but not the way that you want him to be (unless you want pissed off gamers) and if anything he's frustrated because he's got to play a bunch more to get that ability back that he just lost.

I know people who had a bad day that quit EQ because they lost a level. That's not what you want. Of course, I think that death penalties are stupid, life bonuses are much better. Yeah, I can hear you now... "reward them for doing what they're supposed to be doing?" How about this... IT'S JUST A GAME, they're SUPPOSED to die at some point in time unless they're cheating. Reward them for living longer and longer. Sure, they won't be happy when they die, but they'll be ecstatic when they survive a tough fight and don't lose that survival bonus. They definitely won't put a fist through their keyboard or the wall. I still don't know how my Commodore 64 survived... that thing was more study than the Armored Personnel Carrier I worked on in the Army.

You want to get people attached to their characters? Go play Final Fantasy 4-10. If you still don't got it, you haven't a soul. Not that I like the FF series, too linear for me, but they could definitely pull the heart strings, my wife got all weepy eyed every time whatever female in the game died. My response was usually something along the lines of "Yeah, right. She's at full health, I just kicked his butt and he kills her with one shot... whatever", but it choked my wife up every time.

[edited by - solinear on August 6, 2002 3:23:18 PM]

quote: Original post by NaphtaliMoore
I think this is the perfect symptom of bad story telling in games. If the story was told well, the character would mean something to the player, better yet they would personally identify with the character. As I have stated before, in games story telling is done by gameplay, and the constant save and retry of many games is BAD game play.

How could this be fixed. How could you make the player value the character and fear for his loss. How about having death mean something. Then take away the save functions. And bingo. When dead is dead it matters.

That would be really annoying. Permadeath only really works with online games that store characters on some outside server, if you have permadeath in a single player game, players will find out a way to back up their characters. As "moving" as you think it might be to kill the player off permanantly, if your game plays anything like any game currently on the market players will get extremely frustrated and stop playing, it won''t enforce a stronger attachment to their character. Also, when a tragedy happens to you it feels different than when it happens to someone else. The main character, or any character that you control in a game, is effectively yourself.

A better way of dealing with this whole situation is to try to build some emotional attachment between the player and an NPC character,and then kill that character off. This is easier to do in a completely linear story (that is, the character will always die, no matter what the actions of the player are), but I think you could pull it off in a nonlinear story. Players are likely to try to quicksave\reload in order to save the person that dies, but if the death is a result of actions a few levels back (or even at the beginning of the game) and the consequences are less gameplay oriented (that is, the death of the character doesn''t put the player at a disadvantage) and more story oriented, it shouldn''t be a big problem.

quote: Original post by NaphtaliMoore
I think this is the perfect symptom of bad story telling in games. If the story was told well, the character would mean something to the player, better yet they would personally identify with the character. As I have stated before, in games story telling is done by gameplay, and the constant save and retry of many games is BAD game play.

How could this be fixed. How could you make the player value the character and fear for his loss. How about having death mean something. Then take away the save functions. And bingo. When dead is dead it matters.

That would be really annoying. Permadeath only really works with online games that store characters on some outside server, if you have permadeath in a single player game, players will find out a way to back up their characters. As "moving" as you think it might be to kill the player off permanantly, if your game plays anything like any game currently on the market players will get extremely frustrated and stop playing, it won''t enforce a stronger attachment to their character. Also, when a tragedy happens to you it feels different than when it happens to someone else. The main character, or any character that you control in a game, is effectively yourself.

A better way of dealing with this whole situation is to try to build some emotional attachment between the player and an NPC character,and then kill that character off. This is easier to do in a completely linear story (that is, the character will always die, no matter what the actions of the player are), but I think you could pull it off in a nonlinear story. Players are likely to try to quicksave\reload in order to save the person that dies, but if the death is a result of actions a few levels back (or even at the beginning of the game) and the consequences are less gameplay oriented (that is, the death of the character doesn''t put the player at a disadvantage) and more story oriented, it shouldn''t be a big problem.