Defining story structure I’m trying to devise a way to have the story be adaptable and changing as part of game play. In this way I hope to be able to intertwine the story and game play together rather them having be separate and distinct elements. But in order to do this the first step is to be able to define the structure of the story and break it down into is constituent parts. So that it can be understood and defined by the story architect who and the story author. In this case I’m defining the story architect the individual who crafts. As I see it a story is made up of Literary Compounds (LC) which are the different meaningful parts of the story, including locations, characters, and events. Literary Compounds are made up of Literary Elements or Qualities (LE). These define the different aspects of the LC. There are three types of LE Particles – Intrinsic qualities that don’t change. <> Mutable – Qualities that can change. [] Null Sinks - Qualities that must be defined. {} Null Voids – Qualities that can be defined or ignored. “” So a Character might have the following qualities. Name: <Bob> Personality: [Outgoing] Nick Name: “” Based on this during the course of the game Bob’s name will never change, his personality may change, and it is possible that he may acquire a nickname. One of the problems I’m having though is coming up with a way to qualify the relationship between different LC. Since one of the key aspects of story is the interactions and relationship between different LC. There is also the issue of breaking down compounds and elements how much should a LC encapsulate. Take superman and clark kent, they are different persona of the same person but they are also distinct and separate characters. So would they be separate LC linked by a special relationship or would they be a single LC that encompasses both characters? As part of being able to define the structure of story I also need to devise a literary language which is a way of describing events based on the elements that make up that event. This is what I’ve devised so far. Take the scene of Kate’s birthday party; in this case Bob is the main character. Two events that can occur at the party are: Bob and Sue have a bitter fight over the fact that Bob slept with Lyndsey even though he has been seeing Kate. Kate introduces Bob to her father In the literary language I’ve devised they look like the following: <MC> interaction [Argues][Kate’s best friend] context {Betrayal(MC,Kate)} <MC> interaction <introduced><Kates father> by <Kate> context {Relationship(Kate,MC) > 50} In the first event the person the main character is arguing with is mutable so it will be whatever character is Kates best friend at the time. The context is a null sink so the event will only occur if the MC has betrayal relation with Kate, meaning they have done something to betray Kate, again this where finding a way to defining relations between LC is important. The purpose of the literary language is to be able to describe events in a meaningful way so that the story are architect can produce a manuscript that both the story engine can interpret and the story author can transform into a game script. So what do people think? Does it look I’m going the right way in terms of being able to define story structure? What improvements or mistakes seem evident? And what about the literary language could you use it to describe a game scene from both the architect are author perspective?

Lol I've been working on the problem of defining story dtructure for years. I don't know how to put my conclusions into your terms, but I'll tell you want I've learned.

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]

Do all these forumlas and theories about structure really help you guys with your writing? It's just a shock to me, because I've always though of writing as being more about feeling. So can you explain to me, how does this help?

Well if you get stuck, or if you notic that a scene feels out of place, what do you do? Me, if I understand what the overall shape of a piece of fiction should be like I can plan ahead and troubleshoot if things go wrong. Many writers prefer to write from their subconscious, without any theorizing or logical analysis, and that's fine if it works for them, but it doesn't work for me because I like to know 'the lay of the land' and how writing works. There are many other writers who find that they can't just 'make it up as they go along' and thus many how-to-write books containing various theories have been written - if the concept shocks you, you should take a look at that section of a bookstore next time you are in one, any Borders or Barnes and Noble has at least 3 shelves of how-to-write books, and there are thousands listed on Amazon.

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.

Okay, so sunandshadow if I understand your post you are saying that plot is a sequence of conflicts and resolutions (events) in which the conflicts are derived from previous or future events.

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.

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.