Defining story structure
Writing Blog: The Aspiring Writer
Novels:
Legacy - Black Prince Saga Book One - By Alexander Ballard (Free this week)
A story has a grammar (plot) and parts of speech (characters and objects) just like a language, and the grammar can be represented as equations similar to those of transformational generative grammar. The journey from the beginning to the end of the sentence (plot) occurs along the axis of time. The two rules of the grammar are causality, which works forwards in time, and teleology, which works backwards in time. A plot is not directly made by listing characters and objects, instead the words of the sentence are MRUs. A motivation-reaction unit consists of: Result(event), Evaluation, Decision, Conflict, and then the next MRU begins with the result of the conflict.) The story ends when the evaluation is that additional change is either not desired (happy ending) or not possible (life as usual and tragic endings). The change in question is always a change in the alliance/posession relationships between the characters and objects.
On the large scale, all stories begin with a disjunction, an evaluation (prompted by some event) that a relationship between a character and another character or object is unsatisfactory. Stories then end when the disjunction is resolved either by altering the relationship to make is satisfactory, or by changing the evaluation so that the original relationship is now perceived as satisfactory, or proving that the relationship is unalterable. The beginning and end of the story are fixed - the middle, on the other hand, may consist of a single attempt to change the relationship but may also loop through various complications or reversals and re-attempts. The disjunction, or desired change, provides the moral/emotional perspective which determines which characters and objects function as major characters, goals, obstacles, and tools/helpers. Major characters are any characters who do the evaluating/deciding in one or more MRU.
So, does any of that make sense? [wink]
I want to help design a "sandpark" MMO. Optional interactive story with quests and deeply characterized NPCs, plus sandbox elements like player-craftable housing and lots of other crafting. If you are starting a design of this type, please PM me. I also love pet-breeding games.
Also, Technogoth was aiming at story generation, where the structure is needed so the computer can connect the pieces of writing properly, he wasn't asking with the intent of making his own writing that formally defined.
I want to help design a "sandpark" MMO. Optional interactive story with quests and deeply characterized NPCs, plus sandbox elements like player-craftable housing and lots of other crafting. If you are starting a design of this type, please PM me. I also love pet-breeding games.
That brings me to one of challenges I'm having with story generation and that is sequence of events. If the story is state based then sequence of events is a fixed path through the game and the players actions do not shape the story so much as prune off irrelevant plot branches. But if the story is to be truly adaptive then a semi stateless system is need for the managing of events. As the player performs the evaluation and decision elements of the plot then the events need to be able to handle the choices made by the player. I suppose the only way to do that would be to have events be connected by the constant of time rather then a fixed sequence.
Also teleology presents an interesting point when it comes to define story structure and story generation. If there are fixed events in the future that must occur then how does that impact the structure of earlier events?
Take the notion of an irrevocable series of events. If no matter what the player does their girlfriend will die by the end of the third chapter how is this back propagated through the generation of earlier events? For one thing the player will need to make one of the Female NPCs their girlfriend and that choice will of course impact future events.
hmm.. It really is tricky when you think about it.
Writing Blog: The Aspiring Writer
Novels:
Legacy - Black Prince Saga Book One - By Alexander Ballard (Free this week)
Quote: Original post by TechnoGoth
If the story is state based then sequence of events is a fixed path through the game and the players actions do not shape the story so much as prune off irrelevant plot branches. But if the story is to be truly adaptive then a semi stateless system is need for the managing of events. As the player performs the evaluation and decision elements of the plot then the events need to be able to handle the choices made by the player.
I'm not sure about this. In a game, there are a limitied number of actions a player can take because you have to program the game to recognize each action, and any it doesn't recognize effectively don't exist. So since there are a finite number of possible actions, there is a finite tree of plot branches, and pruning off irrelevant ones should work fine.
I agree that teleology is difficult. The only practical approach I have found for teleology is to make the story episodic (your chapters would be episodes probably) and figure out what fixed events will occur in each episode before the player starts playing that episode. Then when beginning each episode you can impose changes on the incoming data from the previous episode or start state as necessary to set up the events which will occur in that episode. For example, say that at the beginning of episode 3 the player may or may not have a weapon. As episode 3 begins we can break or steal their weapon to make sure they don't have one, or give them a new weapon to make sure they do have one.
I want to help design a "sandpark" MMO. Optional interactive story with quests and deeply characterized NPCs, plus sandbox elements like player-craftable housing and lots of other crafting. If you are starting a design of this type, please PM me. I also love pet-breeding games.