Top-down Design Method: The purpose of this thread is to answer the question of what the Top-down Design Method (TDM) is. The short answer to this question is: TDM is an objective-oriented design method, where the design process is organized by a decision hierarchy, in which the most important (high-level) decision are made first, followed by the making of the decisions that depends on those higher level decisions. TDM itself does not dictate what kind of objectives are involved in the highest level. The common objective of a game story design can be stated as, "To create a meaningful game story that compiles with the desired style of gameplay." The following discussion describes a variation of TDM that is subjected to gameplay constraints, and is semantic-oriented. In other words, the following describes the variation in which the meaning of the story is most important. This variation is for the design of stories that are well-written and meaningful. To put the game story in this perspective, the game story can be divided into this decision hierarchy: Semantic Ideas - The meanings of the overall story is determined. Everything else in the story is determined by these meanings. Semantic Presentation - A style of presentation is selected to deliver the meanings of the story. The most common form is to show by examples. The general concern at this stage is whether the presentation of the idea is complete in terms of the meanings. Literal Ideas - The selection of symbols, situations, and settings that are used to realise the presentation of the meanings. The selection of symbols do not need to be traditional, in fact, this is the stage in which one can create new associations between meanings and symbols. Symbols include plot elements. This is the stage in which the endings or a multi-ending story are declared based on their roles in presenting the meaning of the story. At the end of this stage, a plot structure for a multi-scenario story will exist for further elaboration. Literal Presentation - The decisions on other story elements that are not essential to maintaining the meaning of the story, but are essential for the flow of the story. At this stage, all the plot elements are substantiated. All the "Who what when where why how" questions are answered if they have not been linked to a meaning in the previous stage. This is the process of filling in the gap while the overall structure already exist. A rough example:

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Semantic Idea: "love conquers all" Semantic Presentation: The presentation of this idea will involve the player character overcomming adversities due to love. The adversities will include both physical hardship and mental torment. One of the semantic adversary of love is mistrust and apathy, along with the denial of communication. Therefore, the story will present situations in which the main characters have to combat these opposing forces throughout the story. Literal Ideas: There are many choices of settings that can realise the semantic presentation. The judgement criteria is to preserve a sense of realism. Therefore, a historical setting is chosen. The physical hardship and denail of communication are introduced by a war, mistrust is introduced by an act of treason, and apathy introduced by replacement. Literal Presentation: Based on the literal idea, there are many possible scenarios. The one selected is: You are a female commander who have been fighting along a commander you are in love with. During a battle, your lover seemingly disappeared from the battle field. There were many versions pertaining to the truth, some beleved that he died, some believed that he had joined the enemy force, some believed that he simply gave up and ran away for various reasons. On one hand, you must continue to fight for the cause that you two once shared, on the other hand, you investigate his disappearance through clues from the past and present, from reality and dreams.

The semantic idea here is rather broad but it was chosen for simplicity. More common objectives and semantic ideas might take the forms:

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Cintura Cafe: This is a game about romance that would provide a relaxing relief to the common game genre involving violent and warfare. In this game, the player will be involved in a collection of touching romantic stories featuring realistic difficulties, emotions, and personalities. The meaning of the story is the deepest emotions can be often be found in ordinary lives. Cryo: This is a romance and mystery game that puts the player in a first person view of a cold case. The player is put in the situation to explore the significances of such cases and the moral implications. The meanings of this story include: Justice has to be served eventhough the victims are long gone; unaccounted faults cause tragedies to repeat; mistakes should not be hidden or forgotten but to be learned from and corrected. Thirteen Tails: This is a game in which the player is put in a situation to question the socially accepted views on moral. The meaning of the story is that true understanding of moral cannot be attained for simply believing or following the culturally accepted definitions. Only be engaging oneself in the contradictions and dilemmas can one get the perspectives to attain a higher understanding of moral.

Additional discussion on TDM includes how to represent a plot in a scalable model and how to weave together plots in such model to form a structure for multi-scenario stories, so that the decisions the player make are meaningful in terms of the semantic ideas and presentation. In conclusion, the order of questions one would ask while applying TDM is: 1. What do I want to talk about in this story? Why is the topic worthwhile? 2. In terms of the meaning of the story, what do I need to explain and explore to complete the presentation? 3. What kind of symbols can help set the stage for the presentation? 4. What other elements should be chosen to complete the story without distracting the viewer from it? Thoughts, comments, and critisims are welcome. [Edited by - Estok on December 29, 2004 3:59:52 AM]

Hmm, nobody has replied to this yet? I wanted to let someone else respond first, but if no one is going to...

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Original post by Estok Semantic Ideas - The meanings of the overall story is determined. Everything else in the story is determined by these meanings.

Before I can understand and try to use the TDM, I need some more info. All design processes should have some invariant question with which the decision-making cascade begins. What is that question for this system? Is it, "What Semantic Idea should this story convey?" If so, what are all the options, all the possible answers to this question? Do you recommend any particular techniques for deciding the answer to this first question? Once this first question is answered, what is the second question, and what are the options for answering it? How does the answering of the first question determine the second question, if it does? How do you know when you are done deciding the Semantic Ideas for the story?

For this variation of TDM, the first question is in this form:

What Semantic Idea should this story convey?

The set of possible answers is unbound. To get an answer, a systematic selection process is not required. However, in general, the following are some criteria for selecting a meaning:

1. The targeted audience can be satisfied;
2. The meaning is expressible with the given resource;
3. A commonly accepted belief is attacked or questioned;
4. An alternate perspective is provide for commonly discussed subject;
5. An old idea is elaborated, expanded, or improved;

These are some criteria to select a semantic idea. You can tell that this process is done when you have evaluated your choice from brainstorm and selected the one with the high score based on your criteria of selection.

After selecting the idea, the second question is:

How should the Semantic Idea be presented?

To answer this question you will need to identify the scope and elements involved in the idea. The choice of the first question is required because without the idea there is no subject to select a presentation for. The set of options can be unbound for the chosen semantic idea. The set of options to is doubly unbound if the first question is not answered. However, these are the considerations in the selection of a semantic presentation:

1. Conciseness
2. Completeness
3. Objectivity
4. Subjectivity
5. Focus

An actual semantic idea is required for definiing the criteria for these considerations, because of the existing hierarchy when a story is examined from a semantic perspective. By the same token, the options in Literal Idea is triply unbound, and in Literal Presentation quadruply unbound without using a decision hierarchy to limit the options.

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Original post by Estok For this variation of TDM, the first question is in this form: What Semantic Idea should this story convey? The set of possible answers is unbound. To get an answer, a systematic selection process is not required. However, in general, the following are some criteria for selecting a meaning: 1. The targeted audience can be satisfied; 2. The meaning is expressible with the given resource; 3. A commonly accepted belief is attacked or questioned; 4. An alternate perspective is provide for commonly discussed subject; 5. An old idea is elaborated, expanded, or improved; These are some criteria to select a semantic idea. You can tell that this process is done when you have evaluated your choice from brainstorm and selected the one with the high score based on your criteria of selection.

I don't agree that the set of possible semantic ideas a story can be about is unbounded. The semantic idea must be able to be expressed in words, right? There are a limited number of words in the dictionary - 300,000 according to my dictionary, and many of those are synonyms, proper nouns, or irrelevant for other reasons. Probably fewer than 100,000 would be necessary to express every concievable semantic idea. Further, the semantic idea should be expressable in relatively few words if it's supposed to be a simple philosophical or more concept, right? Shall we say 6 or fewer if we state each idea in its most compact form and don't count articles? So at absolute maximum, the number of possible semantic ideas might be 100,000^6, or 1 e 30. That's a very large number, but certainly not infinite. What we need here is a formula, specifically a generative grammar formula, that can generate all possible semantic ideas.

One way to find such a formula is to take a lot of examples of existing semantic ideas and try to figure out what they have in common. Previously I mentioned that the that the authors of the Dramatica system did this exercise. The answer they came up with (and I'm not saying it's right) is (paraphrased):

[adjective][type of person/people/other agent] faced with [type of problem] should not [have a type of attitude or use a type of approach] because this results in [type of bad consequence], and should instead [have the opposite attitude or use the opposite approach] becase this results in [type of good consequence].

This may be too specific for your purposes. For example, perhaps the choice of agent or the specific types of good and bad consequences are literal ideas and should be decided later. Simplify or change it however you need to, but in order to understand the TDM I need to have some sort of formula by which I can know that I have a valid and complete semantic idea.

Your argument on whether the number of idea is infinite or unbound seems irrelevant. If you view TDM as a tree where the semantic idea is the root, 1e30 starting points for the root is unbound from the perspective of a design. In addition, TDM provides a way to limit and to identify the suitable semantic idea, given the number of options, no matter it is bound or unbound in your opinion. It is unclear what argument you are trying to make.

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One way to find such a formula is to take a lot of examples of existing semantic ideas and try to figure out what they have in common. Previously I mentioned that the that the authors of the Dramatica system did this exercise. The answer they came up with (and I'm not saying it's right) is (paraphrased): [adjective][type of person/people/other agent] faced with [type of problem] should not [have a type of attitude or use a type of approach] because this results in [type of bad consequence], and should instead [have the opposite attitude or use the opposite approach] becase this results in [type of good consequence].

I don't know whether you are posing this as a contradiction of improvement from TDM. TDM includes this, and more. TDM does not prevent you from forming a semantic idea using templates. Changes and conflicts are general traits that a game story has, as I mentioned in the pervious post on the usual criteria for selecting a semantic idea. Criteria 3 and 4 are in this catagory. However this template does not answer the considerations involved in criteria 1, 2, and 5.

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This may be too specific for your purposes. For example, perhaps the choice of agent or the specific types of good and bad consequences are literal ideas and should be decided later. Simplify or change it however you need to, but in order to understand the TDM I need to have some sort of formula by which I can know that I have a valid and complete semantic idea.

I think that your notion that it is in the scope of Literal Idea is correct. It is not in the Semantic Idea level. It can be in the level of Semantic Presentation, because you mentioned that in that template, you will present the idea by a reward system based on attitude of the PC. This presentation is a choice out of many other presentation styles. It is not essential nor standard for all stories. For example, if you write a game story about a horrible act that human is capable of doing, you can present it through a thriller/horror game, in which the horror simply unfold as the game progresses--there is nothing about rewarding a good attitude, the horror is supposed to be traumatizing no matter what attitude the player expresses in-game.


TDM is not a template-based or formula-based design method. It is a method from which templates can be created. Your notion that the choices has to fit into some kind of formula is correct, and TDM is where those formulas come from. Semantic Presentation is the level in which the formulas are declared for the chosen idea. And those presentation rules that you find using TDM are what you will use to select characters, events, and other story elements.