I am just a bit fearfull that even if a movie was made into a game (I've never seen Dead Reckoning), it would translate to maybe a maximum of 20 or so player choices. For such a story to be compelling, the visuals, the audio and so on must be of the absolute highest quality, coupled with reactions from the NPCs that gives a real impression, as if they really were human. Furthermore, the amount of choices at the players disposal must be legion, or at least more than the seven that is said to be the limit of options that can be easily considered at any one time, and many must have outcomes that do not end the story or trail it off to a dead end. I also share the fear that players will only consider tactical implications of their choices after a while. I'm a gamemaster/storyteller for RPGs for some one and a half decade now, and it is a rare day when I don't feel my players actions to be tactically based but disguised in emotions and acting.

That said, I think this kind of game would be wonderful, but I do feel that it would be better as a (essentially) combatless 1-5 hour persistant 10-50 players big MORPG where the players sign up for a slot on a shard/realm/world ahead of time, and all players are algorithmically given a backhistory, abilities, connections and such things that immidiatly ensures action and immersion. During gameplay events take place (both random and interactive induced) that affect the game. At the end everyone rank the top 10% players and the worst 10% players after acting abilities, opening some up to higher ranking servers to ensure less tactical gameplay for those so enclined. Naturally, gangwarfare and similar scenarios are going to be populair anyway, a low ranking wont put lowranking players off from the game. Possibly the ranking could be disguised a bit better. This is possible to create today on the XBox, PS2 and any other machine out there with networkcapabilities, and would imho be a riot to play.

An option I think would be populair could be a weekly reoocuring 2hours or so game, progressing much like a TV-series today. Those could be much heavier scripted and detailed by the staff ofcourse. It would be like playing one of the characters on Babylon 5, Friends or whatever show floats your boat.

/RC

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Original post by Rosecroix I am just a bit fearfull that even if a movie was made into a game...

That's not the intention. The idea is to allow for movie-like scenarios which the player(s) then resolve through preferrably non-violent interaction (and no silly puzzles littering the game world). Allow me to illustrate.

[Opening cinematic]
You are seated in a train, with a buddy in the same private compartment. Both of you are smoking, and your buddy is smiling wistfully, looking off into the distance. You are both wearing formal/decorative military dress, although rank can not clearly be determined from the visibile insignia. The conductor's voice comes over the PA system, "This is Richmond, ladies and gentlmen! Richmond, Virginia! We will be making a ten-minute rest stop here, so passengers headed further north are encouraged to take a minute to get off the train and stretch their legs. Richmond, Virginia! Next station, Washington, D.C.!"
"Almost there," your buddy says to you. "We should be in D.C. by three o'clock."
"Yeah, Steve," you languidly drawl. "Finally home after that miserable war. Say, what are you going to do once we've been discharged? Me, I'm going back home to New York, maybe set up a photography studio or something. I bet lots of returning GIs are gonna want mementos of their arrival with their ladies."
"I've been offered a teaching position at a small liberal college in Akron, Mike. Kinda looking forward to the peace and quiet after all those jumps. I'll be--"
You are interrupted by a senior officer bursting into your compartment. "Williams! Ducayne! Move out, on the double!"
"Sir?" you ask, in bewilderment. "I thought we were headed to D.C. for--" You look at Steve furtively. "--For the ceremony?"
"What ceremony," Steve asks.
"I don't have time to fill you pansy paratroopers in!" the officer snaps. "Ducayne, you'll have to receive your medal later." You glance over at Steve and see a look of mild consternation flicker across his features. "Right now we need you boys to perform one last drop for Uncle Sam, stateside this time. Now move out, on the double!"
"ALL ABOARD!" the conductor yells. As you scramble into your coat and grab your bag, passengers who had stepped off the train begin streaming back in. Making your way through the crowd, you look back and lock eyes with Steve. Something's wrong. His eyes say something you don't understand, something you'd never seen or heard before, hint at some fear you never knew he had. A tall man crosses your field of view while a pudgy fellow bumps into you near the exit.
"Excuse me." You turn back to look for Steve again, and he's gone. "Steve? STEVE!" You push your way off the train and leap to the platform, scanning both ways for your partner. The train doors close behind you and the engines give off that rumble that says they're about to push off. The noise is deafening, standing so close to the train, with all the people waving on the platforms and street vendors hawking their wares. You catch a glimpse of something to your left. It's Steve, still on the train, looking right into your eyes. His eyes speak again, communicating volumes across that space. They apologize, they say there is so much untold between you, and they plead for help.

This is not a story. This is a narrative premise. It sets up natural questions - why didn't Steve get off the train? why did Steve run away? what is he hiding? where is he going? who is Steve? It also provides the first steps that must be taken in pursuit of resolution: once you've completed the drop, you head to Washington, D.C. and find out if Steve made it that far. If he did, you try to figure out his next move. If he didn't, you try to figure out where he got off, and where he headed after that. You brief conversation on the train gave you a clue, though: a teaching appointment in Akron. Even if you don't find him there, you can find a lot of information from a school that was going to offer him a teaching position. Et cetera, et cetera.

This premise is actually loosely based on Dead Reckoning, which helps me illustrate the next point. There will be a bunch of random initial encounters while trying to track Steve down, but once you arrive at a locus of action, you'll begin to discover characters with history with Steve, with detailed knowledge of his past, and perhaps with involvement with his presence. Through intelligent set up, you can constrain the number of subsequent characters as much as you desire, which means that getting to the bottom of the matter will require fairly extensive and subtle interactions, raising the number of choices well beyond 20.

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That said, I think this kind of game would be wonderful, but I do feel that it would be better as a (essentially) combatless 1-5 hour persistant 10-50 players big MORPG where the players sign up for a slot on a shard/realm/world ahead of time, and all players are algorithmically given a backhistory, abilities, connections and such things that immidiatly ensures action and immersion.

Why not just appoint a DM, invite all 50 players over to someone's house (with sufficient room), brew some coffee/hot cocoa or hand our beers and be done with it? I'm no fan of role-playing (I went to a role-playing session with a friend, to observe, and I was asleep less than an hour later), and I'm not looking to create a long-term online multiplayer experience, personally. I find that I enjoy games as temporary distractions, not as multi-hour activities, and I enjoy being able to leave and return at will, often frequently. The scenario you describe will eliminate virtually all of those, and is pretty much just an extension of a graphical MUD.

I think we're just coming to this abstract concept with very different backgrounds and expectations.

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Original post by mikeman I suppose that we would need to create not a story, but a "world". There will be a "mystery" that needs to be solved, and every NPC "knows" just a part of it, or can generally help in some part of the game(positive contribution) or,on the other hand, is trying to stop you from progressing(negative contribution).

I'd like to make one modification: not every NPC is connected to the mystery. Going about randomly asking questions should have a penalty, as information and rumors propagate through a community, such that any malicious characters may know about you before you want them to, or you may be considered a threat to the normal function of a community and the authorities/law will have you incarcerated/expelled. In the real world we are selective about who we ask certain questions, and what questions we ask of certain people. In most RPGs (the most "narrative-driven" games yet), you can ask the same question of every NPC without consequence.

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This could result into a very complex scheme, but one simpler one could be to divide NPCs into classes. We can imagine the story as a "puzze", and to complete the game we have to gather all the pieces. NPCs of the same class hold the same piece. Let's take class A, and NPCs A1,A2,A3,A4. A1 needs to be dealt with discussion,A2 with combat,A3 with bribery,A4 with trickery. Or even an NPC could be dealt with more than one ways, and you choose one based on your resources. If during the game you have gained a good gun, you deal with him with that, but if you have gained money, you bribe him. Anyway, when you deal with one of them, the game picks(randomly or based on your actions) an NPC of class B to throw at you, and so on until the end of the game. So, you can finish the game with dealing,for example, A1-B4-C3-D2 or A3-B1-C1-D4, generally any combination of those.

I don't like it. First, a critical NPC or "Supporting Actor" may serve multiple purposes, may have multiple pieces of information, and may have multiple dispositions toward the player character or "Actor" at various times during the course of the narrative. The system proposed eliminates that complexity.

Second, it makes the resolution to the entire narrative a fixed sequence, which it shouldn't be. Ideally, there should be multiple means to a given conclusion, and not just in terms of the characters interacted with or the items obtained, but in terms of the very narrative sequence itself. Two iterations might result in the death of Steve and a posthumous award of the Medal of Honor, to continue my scenario above, but they may not involve the same characters or locations. Of course, there will be overlap, as we will presume that only so many characters are motivated to kill Steve!

Arguably, though, there should also be multiple possible conclusions, as functions of the sequence of choices/events the Actor engages in. Calling the police immediately, while still at the Richmond station, might result in Steve's being apprehended on the train, but then courtmartialled and dishonorably discharged, cancelling the medal award. Ruined, he might then confide in you his fears, leading to an entirely different set of challenges. The guilt of not having handled his situation discreetly might motivate you to "make right" other things in his life, things he is now too broken to resolve on his own.

That is the essence of dramatic gameplay.

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I don't like it. First, a critical NPC or "Supporting Actor" may serve multiple purposes, may have multiple pieces of information, and may have multiple dispositions toward the player character or "Actor" at various times during the course of the narrative. The system proposed eliminates that complexity.

Well, I described the simplest system off the top of my head, although more complex than most linears games, where it's always A-B-C-D. It could get more complex. NPC (A1) and (D4) could be the same person, and when you meet him the second time(if you actually met him in stage A), he has the memories of that encounter, and possibly has been informed about your previous actions.

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Second, it makes the resolution to the entire narrative a fixed sequence, which it shouldn't be. Ideally, there should be multiple means to a given conclusion, and not just in terms of the characters interacted with or the items obtained, but in terms of the very narrative sequence itself. Two iterations might result in the death of Steve and a posthumous award of the Medal of Honor, to continue my scenario above, but they may not involve the same characters or locations. Of course, there will be overlap, as we will presume that only so many characters are motivated to kill Steve!

I don't think this system makes the narrative a fixed sequence. For example, if stage C is to rob a bank, you can reach that through:

1)A2-B3, which is, for example, bribing someone(A2) to give you the location of the bank blueprints which you must steal(B3), or
2)A1-B4:assemble a gang(A1) and steal guns(B4), so you can perform an armed robbery.

The action you'll take could affect the behaviour of the next NPCs you'll encounter. Instead of the linear structure I described, the narration could be described as an (overlapping) tree, where each node you reach defines the possible paths you can follow in the future.

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Arguably, though, there should also be multiple possible conclusions, as functions of the sequence of choices/events the Actor engages in. Calling the police immediately, while still at the Richmond station, might result in Steve's being apprehended on the train, but then courtmartialled and dishonorably discharged, cancelling the medal award. Ruined, he might then confide in you his fears, leading to an entirely different set of challenges. The guilt of not having handled his situation discreetly might motivate you to "make right" other things in his life, things he is now too broken to resolve on his own. That is the essence of dramatic gameplay.

The thing is, the narration ultimately needs to be described through a pre-designed structure. Linear or not, it should be fixed and well-defined.

There are basically 2 requirements:

1)The player to feel like he's in a real world, where every NPC has his own life and acts according to his interests. That, although needs advanced AI, can be done in some extent.

2)On the other hand, he also demands a dramatic gameplay, that is, all the actions of the NPCs and himself to ultimately construct a dramatic narrative.

Of all the gazillion combinations that can result from (1), only a few can fullfill (2). For example, the movie you described. It is a fixed sequence, where the characters' action appear to be realistic(1), but also to construct a narrative that gives pleasure to the viewer(2). It is a very special case where (1) and (2) are both true.

If we change one element of the story, the whole narration must be reconstructed, but according to what rules? Following (1), the NPCs can react realistically to the player's actions, but that isn't good enough. Realistically means they will act to their own interest, and not with the intention to give pleasure to a viewer, and certainly have no goal to climax or resolve an unexistant(for them) narration. 99,99% percent of the time, the produced narration will be crap. I certainly can't imagine an AI that can reject narrative paths that hold no dramatic interest, and choosing the most interesting one.

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Original post by Oluseyi Why not just appoint a DM, invite all 50 players over to someone's house (with sufficient room), brew some coffee/hot cocoa or hand our beers and be done with it? I'm no fan of role-playing (I went to a role-playing session with a friend, to observe, and I was asleep less than an hour later), and I'm not looking to create a long-term online multiplayer experience, personally. I find that I enjoy games as temporary distractions, not as multi-hour activities, and I enjoy being able to leave and return at will, often frequently. The scenario you describe will eliminate virtually all of those, and is pretty much just an extension of a graphical MUD. I think we're just coming to this abstract concept with very different backgrounds and expectations.

I see where you're comming from, we're not really talking about the same thing. I can agree with everything you say and want, it seems interesting even if it wasn't my version of it. The reason I don't invite all those people is the same as one of your key points, the freedom to choose the place and time to play. I play a lot of poker for example, online, because of it's availability. I've never played in a casino in my life, sweden don't have many, and at friends takes a few days to set up as well as dossens of complications before and during play you don't have to worry about online. This kind of ties in with that I do not feel that a multi-hour investment is not too large an investment for this kind of experience. Movies and books are also multi-hour experiences. Longer running, less intense versions of my idea could be set up for the newly-child-haves and play-from-workers if that was a market, and you could make games just an hour long if that was more convinient, those thing would be easy to adapt to.

But since we're not talking about the same thing really anyway, what would drive your version? When you describe it I see for my minds eye a very advanced version of Carmen Sandiego, very much a thriller; a researchheavy detective story. I would belive constructing an engine to create one of those would be quite different from the soapopera emotionemphasized game I first envisioned you wanted, something much closer to Friends or Frazier than say CSI.

On one hand, the whole construct lends itself to te use of agents, and on the other hand, the many dramatic situation that must occur at a reliable and unrealisticly high rate immidatly calls for heavy scripting or algorthmic pruning of the starting conditions. And how to choose a setting, and connect a setting to the engine? Not only must it realize captains order people around on boats, it must also be clear on what is kitch, what is gay, what is kosher, and what object/character is this as well as constructing sentences in eubonics. All to create all those exciting everyday environments your average player never really encounter in their real life. It is a fascinating idea, but it gives me an overwhelming impression. Even if you don't got a working idea yet, what have you thought about yourself?

/RC

First of all, y'all should check this old game called The Last Express.
it goes halfway of the road we're looking at.
now, for the post:

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Original post by Rosecroix That said, I think this kind of game would be wonderful, but I do feel that it would be better as a (essentially) combatless 1-5 hour persistant 10-50 players big MORPG where the players sign up for a slot on a shard/realm/world ahead of time, and all players are algorithmically given a backhistory, abilities, connections and such things that immidiatly ensures action and immersion. During gameplay events take place (both random and interactive induced) that affect the game.

Hey, the new reality show! I'd watch that if they were moderated (as in, someone made sure its a good watch.. and that it's properly edited). It sure would beat people whining, since you can have much more extreme situations. heck, i've even considered doing that... making a tv series out of demos of good multiplayer gaming ^_^ ok i'll shush now.

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Original post by Wavinator While we're waiting for the natural language processor and speech recognition barriers to be broken down we'll probably still be on a mix of symbolic icons and text prompts that select the gameplay (maybe coupled with the motion sensor approach so you can mime slapping a character or hugging them). ----- Imagining a future where dramatic gameplay is the order of the day, I've always wondered one thing: When the player is an active part of a dynamically evolving plot that they help effect, will they still enjoy the story as a story? Or will the strategic parts of their minds take over such that they're more focused on conniving and manipulating their surroundings that they can't see the forest for the trees?

Until natural language processors and interpreting motion sensors are commonplace, they shouldn't be considered. I very much like the Sims context pie menu interfase, since its very intuitive and lends itself to many different controller styles (analog, mouse, remote)

About strategic playing: I was reading forums about Doom 3, and apparently many people decided to cheat and have a lantern on the guns and/or disable shadows so they could see everything that was nearby. They did not only ruin the atmosphere, but also completely missed the point of the game. Of course they hated it, and there was much whining.
No matter what you do, there will be always people who will want to rush trough your game only so they can claim playing it and finishing it. (and that it was crap/pants). I wouldn't mind them much. they might be noisy, but they probably don't make up the bulk of the buyer force.
For the rest, doesn't really matter if you're in the zone and having a grand strategy... if you are theatrical enough, they'll still get the shocks of the story (kinda like a good frag feels SO good and everyone looking goes OOOHH YEAH).

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Original post by Oluseyi Arguably, though, there should also be multiple possible conclusions, as functions of the sequence of choices/events the Actor engages in.

Now, i'd have to disagree here. Since it's a story-driven game, having multiple conclusions is like having multiple end-levels and bosses in an action game. Also, your story gets fragmented. Instead, what would work is a single conclusion but different epilogues (that aren't used enough in movies nowadays).


Now for my ideas on the gameplay / coding

i had considered two types of NPC, primary and secondary. Primaries cannot be influenced by the consequences of the player (the player himself would be a primary... see? you can't change the player, only he can change himself), and secondaries can change allegiances and such. There should be a minimum amount of primaries, usually two.
About NPCs and information: each NPC should have bits of knowledge, and they should be propagated according to allegiance at the end of each stage/scene (this way you have the opportunity to stop someone from talking by threatening them, etc before they leave). Then the allegiances would be recalculated with this new knowledge. There should also be some avaiability rules so that characters cannot always recieve the info at the end of a scene, and the NPC queues it, probably along with an urgency rating, to communicate as soon as the other NPC becomes avaiable again.

If we go the symbolic language road, this is highly workable. how does this sound to you, Oluseyi?

edit: forgot to say my thread pretty much died =) but i'll stick here since its the same idea i wanted to discuss

edit 2: augh i forgot something else. Primaries do not change because they drive the plot. As a counterexample: that guy in the train that gets down, he would be a primary. If he could change, he could decide he doesn't want to see you anymore, and the game becomes unsolvable. Primaries are there to drive the plot, think of em as markers of what the story is about. In a mystery, the plot could revolve around finding stuff about the primaries. heck, i guess you could define meta-primaries (dummy characters like... a big bag of gold in the treasure room) to drive other kinds of plots.

[Edited by - Madster on December 27, 2004 7:48:49 PM]

You should try out some recent text adventures from the IF Competition (the 2004 results came out a couple of months ago). These games have strong narratives and stories beyond every graphical computer game I've ever played because they're more like interactive novels. Regular games require interfaces involving pointing the cursor and pressing buttons, but as you input your actions as text the interactions can be as complex as the game designer want.

There's obviously the problem of the computer not understanding exactly what you mean, but applying modern natural language developments would help this. I would absolutely love to see an IF game which had a speech input interface. The computer would display in text what you can see at the moment, you'd read it, say an action and the computer would then tell you what happened. If the computer didn't quite understand you, it could tell you what words it recognised so you could repeat it again with the wrong parts more audible.

Assuming the speech recognition is good (it has become very good recently) and the game designer handles everything the player wants to do (this can be done quite easily by looking at scripts of failed user actions from testers), these games would be really easy to play and have great stories. Most games today revolve around shooting things in the face, driving vehicles etc. because it's easy to translate what the player wants to do (turn right, shoot gun) into the equivalent on-screen actions. It would be nice to see how text-adventures could be improved with current technology, and I don't mean adding graphics.

Sorry for the delay - I had this typed out this morning but was postponed for a day - long story. Anyways - I think I'm beginning to understand what all of you are saying. Basically an ideal game would have these elements:

* Some form of opening cinematic that sets up the game - not tell the background story like traditional games, but rather put you in the action right after. Modeling Oluseyi's story - something that puts you in a position that you do not know much, but you can induce the fact that something is wrong and you have your first relative game objective [find wtf is going on]. I say from a narrative perspective that something shocking needs to happen - from Oluseyi's story, imagine that later the train explodes and there are no survivors (supposedly).
- The game then starts with the primary objective to go to DC and see if Steve made it,etc. There you will learn via a cinematic - or in game debirefing that does not take away control (such as having to go in a room and there is a projector screen that shows you what happened). Then the game continues.

* You should not be restricted to having one decision of what to do - and not all tasks should have only one way to do them - such as mikeman's bank robbery scheme. *BUT* the game progresses as the product of your decisions - as does real life - ie. If you do event A and event B is a consequence, if the task of event C is needed to fix B, than event C should not be required if event A never happened. If you wanted to get more realistic - there are different multiple event B's that could result from different event A's - let's say going into the bank blazing - compared to stealtly stealing it. This design is present in HitMan: Contracts.

* You want a game that is not like a movie trilogy! Something you can pop in and out of quite easily, as you said maybe 3 hours tops, but not something that will last on forever - like Neverwinter Nights. The gameplay should allow some sort of check point system as well as limited saves to avoid the save - quick reload syndrome.

* The UI should be simple clean, yet powerful. We don't want to see a whole bunch of kick the door, open the door, knocck the door options - just direct actions via mouse/keyboard. In Hitman 3, it was a pain to have to scroll through all those choice menus. One game that I think had a great UI was "The Thing" - if I remember correctly, you could richy click and hold and choose an action - similar to "The Sims".

Am I on the same page as you?

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Original post by Drew_Benton Am I on the same page as you?

Pretty much. I just need to take a moment to debate with a a few other people...

[Edit: removed assumption of inherent "correctness" of my idea; trying not to be arrogant here [smile]]

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Original post by Madster Quote: Original post by Oluseyi Arguably, though, there should also be multiple possible conclusions, as functions of the sequence of choices/events the Actor engages in. Now, i'd have to disagree here. Since it's a story-driven game...

Hold it.

Clearly, we have a miscommunication of what that term implies. To me, story-driven does not mean that there is a fixed narrative arc which the player explores or attempts to complete. To me, that can also mean that the "story," as it were, is generated by the player's actions. There is a premise, and when they game ends there is a conclusion. The former is fixed, the latter is open, and the sequence of events that bridge the gap is entirely player-dependent. It is this chain from premise through multiple events to conclusion that is a "story." I don't want a user to play through a story; I want her to create a story.

This is important. I spoke earlier about a shift in roles to being as much narrator as participant/observer, and exporting the story to share with friends. Obviously, if the story is fixed, doing so is meaningless.

This is not a video game version of "Choose Your Own Adventure" books.

[Edited by - Oluseyi on December 28, 2004 7:59:15 AM]

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Original post by mikeman Well, I described the simplest system off the top of my head, although more complex than most linear games, where it's always A-B-C-D. It could get more complex. NPC (A1) and (D4) could be the same person, and when you meet him the second time(if you actually met him in stage A), he has the memories of that encounter, and possibly has been informed about your previous actions.

Okay, I see what you're saying. It definitely sounds interesting.

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The thing is, the narration ultimately needs to be described through a pre-designed structure. Linear or not, it should be fixed and well-defined.

I don't get this fixation upon an immutable narrative. Isn't the ultimate fantasy of video games the ability to create your own narratives? Isn't that the central appeal (from a designer's perspective) of MMORPGs, that you can engage in a wide variety of actions that are not scripted in advance, such as the rally or ceremonial procession held in EverQuest a while back? For the guy who organized that rally, has he not, in essence, created a cinematic moment for himself?

Yes, a completely dynamic narrative is a difficult task and a near-amorphous concept, but if we aim for that and fall short, we will at least have attempted to push the envelope slightly. Otherwise we just end up with another point-and-click adventure. *yawn*

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If we change one element of the story, the whole narration must be reconstructed, but according to what rules?

This harbors the assumption that we have to have constructed the complete narrative at all times. Why? Why can't the narrative be a progressively defined quantity, where the actions and interactions of the player up to the moment define "the story so far"? All that is necessary for an interesting narrative is an acceptable amount of constant/consistent tension. This can be mathematically modeled based on the player interactions with primary NPCs (to borrow Madster's taxonomy) and the interval between interactions (ie, tension decays over time).

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Following (1), the NPCs can react realistically to the player's actions, but that isn't good enough. Realistically means they will act to their own interest, and not with the intention to give pleasure to a viewer, and certainly have no goal to climax or resolve an unexistant(for them) narration.

True as that may be, the role of player is quite different from the role of viewer, and the parameters of pleasure differ significantly. By allowing a player to export (and perhaps edit) a completed narrative, maybe with previously unseen NPC-NPC interactions made available for integration into the published export, turning the player into an amateur filmmaker, we can cater to the viewer after the fact.

What do you think?