@beige
I agree with tj963. It's not about making storytelling better, it's about making interactive storytelling better. It's not like books and plays will go out of style because of this. But books and plays does that whole interactivity thing less than satisfactory... The point (for me) is to further the interactive storytelling. I think there's great untapped potential for storytelling in games.

@swiftcoder
Never heard of it, but I'll certainly check it out.

@MiDri
A fully fledged world simulator would of course be an excellent complement to a storytelling system, but I don't think it is a necessary integral part of one. At least I hope it's not. I think you could expand on the story part of a game, without putting too much demand on the world simulation. The stuff about 'any possible path being open to the character' is the utopian simulation. More realistic is 'no obvious limitations enforced on the player' by combining various 'cheating' techniques discussed earlier with a somewhat sofisticated story system, and then letting it expand with the ability to do more detailed simulations. I would probably want to add some form of memetic NPC system into the mix, but that is a separate entity.

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Original post by Beige What is the dramatic purpose of interactive storytelling? Yes, the player can make decisions that affect the story. How does that make the storytelling better? If it's obvious to the player that they can easily manipulate the system, then they're not experiencing a story, are they? They're just punching in the correct dialogue options that get your and the love interest to make out. What makes players such great storytellers?

The player isn't so much the storyteller as they are the main character. Interactive storytelling immerses the player inside the story where they can live it themselves rather than leaving them to distantly view someone else's story like non-interactive fiction does. As tj963 says, when the player actively participates in the story it become more personal. So the dramatic goal is achieveing greater immersion, identification, emotional investment, and emotional immediacy than is possible with non-interactive storytelling.

In other words, as the game becomes more important, meaningful, and real to the player, the player will care more about playing and put more of themself into the game, using it to explore potential identities and relationships and build their personal mythology - which is, after all, the major underlying reason people consume entertainments, because they want to explore new ideas and learn about human nature, the world, and themselves.

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Original post by Wombah As long as the player knows what to do to move forward, the option not to move forward is not a burden.

I disagree, actually. Writers are always told to cut extraneous scenes from their novels to tighten them up because that flab distracts the reader and slows the pace, making for a less intense reading experience. A story should contain all the things and only those things which are necessary to fully tell the story. Consider the completist style player (i.e. me) If you put a sidetrack in your game I _have_ to explore it. So if I spend 10 extra minutes doing that, by the time I get to the next plot point that's ten more minutes I've had to forget what happened previously, or notice plot holes, or decide the game is boring because the plot is not advancing and quit playing it; all things you never want your audience to do.

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With the chair example, the problem is apparent when you have ten different chairs that are destructible, and then you find one that is crucial to the plot that you can't destroy. In that case, the player will certainly notice. One way to solve this is to make no chairs destroyable, another to not use a chair as the story-object and third way to do it is to allow the player some way to put the chair back together. None of those 'solutions' are perfect though...

In my system it is illegal to have some chairs be destructable and others not. So if you want to make an item crucial to the plot, you just have to pick a non-destructable item. Why isn't this a perfect solution? The object used to solve a puzzle is generally arbitrary anyway, I see no problem with restricting the engine to choosing non-destructable items for these purposes. Similarly, my system has other rules of puzzle creation to prevent the player ever getting themselves in an unwinnable scenario. For example, ideally all items needed to solve a puzzle should be contained within that area. If you want to put an item in one area that is crucial to gameplay in future areas, then the player will not be allowed to leave the first area without picking up the item.

As for the killing NPCs issue, in my design NPCs are unkillable, because I wanted to make a non-violent game. If you wanted to make NPCs killable then you would either have to make them non-essential to the plot, or you would have to give plot-essential NPCs individual abilities which logically make them unkillable, such as the ability to dodge much faster than the player can attack, or the ability to full-heal every turn, or something like that.

Have you ever played the game The Incredible Machine? That's the one where you build Rube Goldberg machines out of balloons and balls and pulleys and ropes and scissors and buckets and cats and brick walls, etc. My idea is that the story generation engine has such a library of objects with established properties and interactions to work with, and chooses from these each time it is asked to populate a new wedge/level to set the stage for a new story segment.

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Original post by sunandshadow Quote: Original post by Beige What is the dramatic purpose of interactive storytelling? Yes, the player can make decisions that affect the story. How does that make the storytelling better? If it's obvious to the player that they can easily manipulate the system, then they're not experiencing a story, are they? They're just punching in the correct dialogue options that get your and the love interest to make out. What makes players such great storytellers? The player isn't so much the storyteller as they are the main character. Interactive storytelling immerses the player inside the story where they can live it themselves rather than leaving them to distantly view someone else's story like non-interactive fiction does. As tj963 says, when the player actively participates in the story it become more personal. So the dramatic goal is achieveing greater immersion, identification, emotional investment, and emotional immediacy than is possible with non-interactive storytelling. In other words, as the game becomes more important, meaningful, and real to the player, the player will care more about playing and put more of themself into the game, using it to explore potential identities and relationships and build their personal mythology - which is, after all, the major underlying reason people consume entertainments, because they want to explore new ideas and learn about human nature, the world, and themselves.

Yeah, that's what I was looking for. "To what end?"

Every time I see these interactive storytelling posts brought up every months, everyone seems to be enraptured with more interactivity, without really considering the consequences.

This is a discussion I get into a lot with other game developers, but I'm usually on the pro-interactivity side of the debate.

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Original post by tj963 Quote: Original post by Beige If it's obvious to the player that they can easily manipulate the system, then they're not experiencing a story, are they? They're just punching in the correct dialogue options that get your and the love interest to make out. I'd say that's pretty much the point. By making choices, for example dialog options, the player can attempt to lead the story how they want. No longer is it, "I have to go to the town because the designer said so," but instead, "It sounds like something interesting is happening in town, I'd better check it out." tj963

I suppose the question is, are they conscious of this from a meta-game standpoint, or from an in-character standpoint. This difference means volumes.

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Original post by sunandshadow The player isn't so much the storyteller as they are the main character. Interactive storytelling immerses the player inside the story where they can live it themselves rather than leaving them to distantly view someone else's story like non-interactive fiction does. As tj963 says, when the player actively participates in the story it become more personal. So the dramatic goal is achieveing greater immersion, identification, emotional investment, and emotional immediacy than is possible with non-interactive storytelling.

The example I like best for interactive storytelling is "Alice's Adventurers in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll. The original version of the story was made up by Carroll on several outings with Alice Liddell and her sisters. In that sense, it's very likely the story was interactive; with Alice dicussing the situation with Carroll and making decisions about what she would do next. It's clear that Carroll has most of the control over Wonderland, but the decisions of Alice strongly shape what he conjures up next.

Or there's the example of a Dungeon Master in table-top roleplaying; the DM has control over the world, but should also consider what the other players want to do.

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Original post by Beige Yeah, that's what I was looking for. "To what end?" Every time I see these interactive storytelling posts brought up every months, everyone seems to be enraptured with more interactivity, without really considering the consequences. This is a discussion I get into a lot with other game developers, but I'm usually on the pro-interactivity side of the debate

The reason why I'm interested in interactive storytelling is that it's an unexplored area that I think would be vastly compelling to people if implemented properly. It's also utilising the power of the computer to its full potential; interactivity is what computers do best.

The reason why everyone focuses on interactivity is because that's what's lacking in the stories present today. It's possible today to make a dramatically compelling game using standard writing techniques, so we can do "storytelling". Howeveer if you take a typical "interactive narrative" from a game, it might be about 5% interactive at best (warning: figures are totally made-up [smile]; you can't really quantise something like interactivity, but I hope you get the point). Since it's the interactivity that's lacking from the stories, it makes sense to focus on making the stories as interactive as possible. Someday we may go too far, so we can scale back. But (to paraphrase an argument I read from Chris Crawford) if you consider the entire spectrum of stories from "non-interactive" through to "fully interactive", the ones in games today are all bunched around the "non-interacive" end. Hence it makes sense to focus on the interactivity.

I suppose I am concerned that the sentiment I see is something like "interactivity for interactivity's sake," "because these are games, not movies."

The interactivity needs to be FOR something to be useful; not just in a general fashion. To have a choice, there needs to be not only a sensible reason to make a choice, but gameplay context for the choice to exist, dramatic/narrative context for the choice, and an understanding of the impact making the choice will have on the player - as well as considering the mechanism by which the player makes the choice.

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Original post by Beige I suppose I am concerned that the sentiment I see is something like "interactivity for interactivity's sake," "because these are games, not movies." The interactivity needs to be FOR something to be useful; not just in a general fashion. To have a choice, there needs to be not only a sensible reason to make a choice, but gameplay context for the choice to exist, dramatic/narrative context for the choice, and an understanding of the impact making the choice will have on the player - as well as considering the mechanism by which the player makes the choice.

I agree that; interactivity without meaning is pretty pointless. This strikes at the heart of what I've been trying to wrestle with in my mind for the last few months; defining the set of possible actions the player can take such that it is both expansive enough to be a prototype for interactive storytelling, yet minimalist enough to be implementable.

I suppose that I should also make it clear that "interactive storytelling" doesn't have to mean "video game"; Facade is an example of interactive drama that isn't really a game but something else. In my case I'm trying to fuse the two to figure out a way to make games with interactive storytelling (and I suspect most people here are trying to achieve the same thing), but they don't have to be the same thing. It might be a worth having a discussion over whether there are any incompatibilities between interactive storytelling and games (as we presently define them), as that's something I haven't considered in a while.

Maybe it's time to stop thinking of interactive storytelling as an overarching system, and to look at it from a narrative perspective, and on a case-by-case basis.

See where choices fit best, instead of creating a huge nonlinear framework which does a few things well and a lot of things badly.

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Original post by Beige Maybe it's time to stop thinking of interactive storytelling as an overarching system, and to look at it from a narrative perspective, and on a case-by-case basis. See where choices fit best, instead of creating a huge nonlinear framework which does a few things well and a lot of things badly.

What kind of approach are you suggesting? I can't think of an approach that doesn't involve design as an overarching system, but I'm certainly open to different design methodologies. Can you explain further, or provide an example to help me understand?

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Original post by Trapper Zoid I agree that; interactivity without meaning is pretty pointless. This strikes at the heart of what I've been trying to wrestle with in my mind for the last few months; defining the set of possible actions the player can take such that it is both expansive enough to be a prototype for interactive storytelling, yet minimalist enough to be implementable.

You refer to "defining the set of possible actions." The context of this statement leads me to believe a couple of things.

1) This set is relatively constant throughout most of the game.

2) These possible actions are useable throughout most of the game.

Let's have the actions available change dependent on the context. If I'm in a swimming pool, there shouldn't be a run command. If I'm in a locker room, the "FLAP WINGS" and "FLY" commands should probably be disabled as well. These are simple examples, of course.

And if the player wants to "FLAP WINGS" and "FLY?" Shouldn't it be obvious from the context of your story that this makes no sense? Why would you be concerned about the immersion-breaking qualities of enforced limits if the player obviously doesn't care enough about your immersion to self-enforce?

Unless, of course, your character has a pair of angel wings and is the star quarterback at the high school. The odds are against that - I suppose it could make an interesting story :p

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Original post by Trapper ZoidWhat kind of approach are you suggesting? I can't think of an approach that doesn't involve design as an overarching system, but I'm certainly open to different design methodologies. Can you explain further, or provide an example to help me understand?

Look at instances in your narrative where player choice would have the most meaningful impact, and design around each of them.

I want to post something more detailed here, but I'd like to make sure I'm on the right wavelength first, and avoid any of those nasty misunderstandings that arise when people's terms and definitions don't correspond.

I also wanted to add, on a seperate note, that the player doesn't make choices simply by explicitly choosing an action from a set of commands. The player needs not be made aware of all the choices they have made. And what the player does in a non-gameplay context within the game can be either disruptive or beneficial to your narrative, dependent on how you decide to interpret it in your design.

edit: Oh, oh. Final Fantasy 4j. The dark knight becoming a paladin. Earthbound, the three minute password. Those just came to mind suddenly.