This is a continuation from a discussion of the nature of stories as they relate to games, started in this thread here and mostly between stimarco and myself. Given this discussion was swerving off the original topic of the thread but I'm still finding it interesting, I've started up another discussion topic on the issue. The discussion: what is a "story" which respect to games? Open to all debate and discussion. To be honest I'm not sure if this belongs in the design or the writing forum, but given it stemmed from a design forum I think it's best to post it here to begin with. I'm happy for it to be moved if it is deemed best in another forum. Some quote-fu of relevant bits from the other thread (sorry if I've missed anything, and double sorry for the length!)

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Original post by stimarco The question is nonsensical. As well to ask, "Which is better: dying of starvation, or dying of thirst?" All games tell stories. A novel is not a story. A novel is merely a user interface which presents the reader with a linear stream of information which guides the imagination along a single path. It is the result of this process which conveys the story to the reader. Since we only ever travel through time in a linear way, the experience of playing a game is ultimately the same as that of reading a story. You can video someone playing a game and the resulting recording will be a linear progression of events. If the game is a good one, it'll have produced much the same reactions as reading a good novel or movie. The same emotional strings are being pulled. The same challenge-reward sequences take place. (Followers of Joseph Campbell's Jungian analyses of myths and legends merely use different terminology for the same basic concepts.) A game tells stories, but uses a different user interface which allows you to choose one of many possible paths while you play. The granularity -- the number of paths the player is offered -- is defined by the specific user interface the game uses. A point-and-click adventure like "Monkey Island" is far less granular in terms of raw storytelling content than, say, a role-playing game or first-person shooter, while interactive fiction -- the current name for the older text adventures -- are only a little more advanced than the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books of old. (These last are proof that interactivity is not limited to computer and board games.) With a novel, you start with the first word and follow each word in turn until you reach the end of the story. There is interaction with your imagination, which has to fill in a lot of the details, but a novel will only tell a single core story. With a game, you start with the main menu and twiddle with buttons, tap joypads or move the mouse, acting and reacting to each event in turn until you end up with a "Game Over" screen. All that messing about with combo moves and mouse clicks is, at heart, just another way to get you to turn the page. It's just that each page might only contain a single word and you're free to jump to any page you like, within the designer's virtual world. Same music, different DJ. Fundamentally, every single game is a simulation -- a model -- which is presented to the player through a user interface. That user interface defines how the player chooses how he wants his story to unfold. The model defines the limits of the story. What some designers would refer to as a "story space". Games provide a finite story space -- a world, or even a whole virtual universe if you like to think big -- within which stories can take place. A novel is like a package holiday with a tour guide who never leaves you alone. It picks a single path for you to follow and tells you a very specific story. A game takes a step back from this and lets you roam at will over the landscape. It provides the player with the tools to tell his own stories. Those stories can only take place within the bounds of the "story space". This story space is the exact equivalent to the "world-building" phase of a science fiction or fantasy novel. Stories set in the present day in the real world don't often need to do this as much, although good authors will often visit a location if they've never been there before. You cannot separate "Story" and "Gameplay". The former is produced by the latter. It's an emergent effect, not a cause. * A good game designer will only allow the game to provide paths for the player that will result in a good story. Writing branching novels and scripts is one way of doing this, but watch a child playing an abstract puzzle game and you'll soon realise that words alone are not the only storytelling tool available to an expert game designer. You can make someone laugh by telling jokes. But you can also do it by unexpectedly slapping a custard pie in someone's face. Only the former needs a writer.

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Original post by stimarco Quote: Original post by Wai Poker is a game. It has no story at all. It doesn't suck. Oh yes it does. It's just not one written in words. Try watching other players playing it and talk to them about the game after they've finished a session. Remember: stories are what you get when entities interact. A good story is merely a description of interesting interactions. What one person finds interesting is subjective and that is why some people like poker while others prefer football. Joseph Campbell explained this in great detail in his books on mythology. I refer not to his "The Hero With A Thousand Faces" and other derived works, but his original "Masks Of God" series examining and exploring the various myths and legends of the world. This series formed the basis for his later Jungian analyses. (Granted they're very dry and make for heavy reading, but they really are worth the effort.) All games tell stories while they are being played. Games merely provide a "tell your own story" toolset for players. There is a wide spectrum of genres, many of which are defined primarily by how flexible and granular their storymaking toolset is. CRPGs, for example, are closer to the less-granular "Choose Your Own Adventure" end. Simulations are essentially completely open and the more accurate ones often make little or no effort to ensure that the stories the player can make from its elements are interesting. (For straightforward simulations, the reward usually comes from mastery of the interface and model(s) being simulated rather than any form of explicit story structure. The learning process is the fun bit.)

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Original post by Trapper Zoid Quote: Original post by stimarco Oh yes it does. It's just not one written in words. Try watching other players playing it and talk to them about the game after they've finished a session. Remember: stories are what you get when entities interact. A good story is merely a description of interesting interactions. What one person finds interesting is subjective and that is why some people like poker while others prefer football. Quote: Simulations are essentially completely open and the more accurate ones often make little or no effort to ensure that the stories the player can make from its elements are interesting. (For straightforward simulations, the reward usually comes from mastery of the interface and model(s) being simulated rather than any form of explicit story structure. The learning process is the fun bit.) I'm a bit confused as to what you are considering a story. I agree with the second statement I quoted but less so with your first. I think it's not accurate to describe a story as merely "a description of interesting interactions". A listing of moves in a top level chess match, an audio log of a police chase, or a listing of famous events in the 14th century are descriptions of interesting interactions but I wouldn't by default label those as stories. A story however needs structure and pacing to make it evolve from a mere chronicle. It's more about the encoding than the content.

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Original post by stimarco Quote: Original post by Trapper Zoid Quote: Original post by stimarco Oh yes it does. It's just not one written in words. Try watching other players playing it and talk to them about the game after they've finished a session. Remember: stories are what you get when entities interact. A good story is merely a description of interesting interactions. What one person finds interesting is subjective and that is why some people like poker while others prefer football. Quote: Simulations are essentially completely open and the more accurate ones often make little or no effort to ensure that the stories the player can make from its elements are interesting. (For straightforward simulations, the reward usually comes from mastery of the interface and model(s) being simulated rather than any form of explicit story structure. The learning process is the fun bit.) I'm a bit confused as to what you are considering a story. I agree with the second statement I quoted but less so with your first. I think it's not accurate to describe a story as merely "a description of interesting interactions". A listing of moves in a top level chess match, an audio log of a police chase, or a listing of famous events in the 14th century are descriptions of interesting interactions but I wouldn't by default label those as stories. A story however needs structure and pacing to make it evolve from a mere chronicle. It's more about the encoding than the content. You have a point in that my reasoning isn't all that clear. (It's late and I rarely proofread my posts when I'm tired; it just makes things worse.) My rationale is derived from a lot of research and 20+ years' experience in the industry rather than lifted out of a book I can point to, so it's... well... tricky to explain in a few short lines. Basically, I consider a story to be defined not by its form, but by its effects on the reader. (Or "player". I tend to use the two words interchangeably in this context.) I also have good reason to believe that the traditional, structuralist view of how stories work -- plot, characterisation, world-building, etc. -- is far from ideal. What people call "Plot" tends to fall out of the interactions between characters and their environments, and there is much empirical evidence to suggest that most readers really don't care all that much about tight plots and the like. I've heard this same viewpoint from a number of published authors, so it's not just Hollywood movies. A lot of "airport blockbuster" novels -- Clive Cussler's ouvré for example, or even Dan Brown -- have shockingly thin plots and are little more than set-pieces joined together with bits of sticky tape and string. A story doesn't need to make sense for it to be a great story. Spike Milligan was famed for his absurdist and surrealist comedy. Similarly, the Pythons showed that a joke doesn't even need to have a beginning, middle and end. We can use implication and semiotic short-cuts to imply punchlines. Legends are often full of contradictions and blatant impossibilities. Mortal females apparently found gods in the form of bulls seriously attractive. Religions have been founded on equally flimsy foundations. It's not what you say, but how you say it. Nowhere is this more true than in storytelling. A story isn't about the plot. It's about the characters. That's all people have ever been interested in. It's why soaps like Coronation Street are among the longest-running TV programmes on Earth. No matter how often the writers recycle the same old "X falls in love with Y who is having an affair with Z who happens to be married to X"-type stories, viewers still persist in watching these soap operas in their millions. Why? Because they don't give a stuff about the why. They're only really interested in the what, how and who with. Similarly, many popular crime series -- "Columbo", for example -- even go so far as to give away the "whodunnit" part right at the beginning. The story comes from the detective's interactions with the suspects and watching how he teases out the truth. Even though the audience already knows the answers, it's the journey -- not the end itself -- which creates the tension. Unlike traditional Agatha Christie mysteries, the enjoyment comes not from solving the logic puzzle yourself, but from watching how the characters discover the pieces and fit them together. Fuck plot. Nobody cares about plot. Hollywood has been getting away with projecting overblown theme park rides onto our silver screens for decades and nobody's noticed. There's a damned good reason why "a rollercoaster ride of a movie" is such a cliché: it's both figuratively and literally true. I could write much more on this subject, but I've got to go to bed. Regards,

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Original post by Trapper Zoid Quote: Original post by stimarcoYou have a point in that my reasoning isn't all that clear. (It's late and I rarely proofread my posts when I'm tired; it just makes things worse.) My rationale is derived from a lot of research and 20+ years' experience in the industry rather than lifted out of a book I can point to, so it's... well... tricky to explain in a few short lines. I fully understand - it's surprisingly hard to define exactly what a story is. I was considering adding the line 'Then define "story"' in my very first post in this thread, but I thought that would make the tone too confrontational for the first reply. I'm rusty on this topic; I spent some time researching methods for automated story techniques a few years back, and found early on that I didn't really understand exactly what a story is. I'm not sure I ever really found out, and these days I'm not as knowledgable about the topic as I used to be - I'll try my best to describe my viewpoint. I tend to get a bit riled up by the "every game experience is a story" theory, mainly from my interest in automated interactive stories in games. Many of the approaches I see to that problem assume that if you provide a player a simulation of an interactive world to play around in, then whatever experience they encounter will be a "story". Frankly I think that's a simplistic view about what makes a story. I suppose I am a structuralist in that I think stories are constructed out of their own set of rules which define their structure - although I don't think these are limited to one particular set and certainly don't have to follow the Hollywood Campbellian monomyth three act plot. I also don't think good stories have to make sense (as you said, there are plenty of examples to the contrary), but they do have there own rhythym and structure that defines them as stories rather than collections of events. For example, if a little girl asked you to tell her a story, you wouldn't regale her with a chronological description of your last poker night. Rather, you might start off with something that begins with "Once upon a time" and ends with "and they all lived happily ever after" - that's the sort of structure a child might expect. Storytelling back before people were literate had to run like this so the storytellers could remember them - they remembered the basics of the plot but they also instictively knew all the rituals and patterns that go into stories to make them interesting. That's why you often get threes of things in fairy-tales; it's a good way to bulk out a story with two occurances of an event that doesn't progress the story followed by a third different variant that does. That's also why I think of stories being more about the "encoding" than the content; stories are an extremely effective way of communicating with people. It's why prophets often used parables to make their points; the encoding into story made the idea stronger and easier for people to grasp. So I don't consider every game to contain a story - it would be like considering any collection of sound to be music. Without the right sort of structure, to me it just doesn't fall into the definition. I could also post a lot more, but I've written too much and am taking this fairly off-topic!

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Original post by stimarco Quote: Original post by Trapper Zoid Quote: Original post by stimarcoYou have a point in that my reasoning isn't all that clear. (It's late and I rarely proofread my posts when I'm tired; it just makes things worse.) My rationale is derived from a lot of research and 20+ years' experience in the industry rather than lifted out of a book I can point to, so it's... well... tricky to explain in a few short lines. I fully understand - it's surprisingly hard to define exactly what a story is. I was considering adding the line 'Then define "story"' in my very first post in this thread, but I thought that would make the tone too confrontational for the first reply. This is where I disagree with pretty much the entire planet: People seem to view Play and Story as two separate and distinct concepts. I don't. I consider Story a subset of Play. Story is what you get if you sucked all the interactivity of out Play. If I were a mathematician, I'd probably phrase it as "Story is Play minus the dimension of interactivity." I.e. if Play is a two-dimensional concept, then Story is a one-dimensional subset 1D. Admittedly, this still leaves the question: "Define 'Play'". One thing I am reasonably certain of is that there are good anthropological and archeological cues which suggest that playing is as important to many species -- including our own -- as breathing. My sources are, again, varied, but I should perhaps mention Joseph Campbell's original "Masks of God" books again. These provide some very strong supporting evidence to back up my hypothesis. (I should point out that the archeological discussions in these books are the most relevant to my hypothesis, so reading only the first book -- "Primitive Mythology" -- should be enough to give you an idea of the roles of storytelling, myths and play in our past.) Jeff Hawkins' book "On Intelligence" also adds support from the neurobiological side, while there has long been support for play's role in the human learning processes in the education sector too. Many of my relatives are teachers and I've worked in the sector myself for a few years, so I have personally witnessed the role of play -- usually in the form of role-play games, but also in other, more subtle forms -- to reinforce learning. (The games industry is far from the only industry I've worked in.) Play is, I suspect, an emergent effect of how our memories work, so its definition is, I think, likely to be very simple. It's undeniable that Play, with a capital 'P', plays a huge role in our formative years. We learn almost everything about the basics of living through play and experimentation. Raph Koster's "Theory of Fun" book -- and I no longer make any apologies for my glowing review -- is essentially a restatement of educational knowledge: that if it's fun, it means we're learning something. We might be learning about tank rushes in an old RTS, or (for our very, very young readers), we might be learning that cake is much tastier than dirt from the garden. For us to have evolved in the way we have, learning has to be pleasurable. It has to be fun at a basic level. (It's precisely because our education systems explicitly try and suck all the fun out of learning in the mistaken Puritanical / Victorian belief that something pleasurable cannot possibly be good for you that has caused so many problems.) I contend that interactivity is the only difference between "game" and "story". ("Game" is synonymous with "Play" in this context.) You can have minimal interactivity and end up with something that is undeniably a game we "play", but it would be a game that is mostly story and the gameplay is relegated to the level of replacing the traditional UI of a book. Instead of turning a page, we have to jump through some hoop -- twitch the joystick left to see Dirk The Daring jump to his death; twitch it right and you get a bit more story played at you. (I.e. "Story as Reward." A design technique I despise, but which is all too common in most computer-based RPGs. And quite a few other genres too.) Eliminate the interactivity entirely and you get a movie. Add more interactivity and you get more play. You open up more choices to the player. Active Play against Passive Story. Even so, Stories are never wholly passive. You cannot enjoy a story if you are unwilling to project yourself into it and commit to it. Every listener, moviegoer or reader places some of himself into his entertainment, no matter what medium it comes in. You have to suspend disbelief -- a real cliché if ever there was one -- but not only that: your imagination will invariably fill in all the missing details the medium cannot provide. When you watch a movie, your brain is filling in the missing parts of the sets; it's extremely rare for a moviegoer to be aware that he's watching an illusion, not a documentary. There is a camera crew behind that camera. Even in documentaries, we might see some explorer climb, agonisingly slowly, to the top of a mountain peak, but oddly, we never ask ourselves how the camera crew were already at the summit filming his arrival. * Interactivity at all costs is not an inherently Good Thing. How much interactivity you want isn't the same as how much interactivity you need. I have always had a game design precept which I refer to as "bangs per click". (This is where my company name, "banbangclick" came from.) I believe that if an interaction adds nothing of value to the gamer's experience, it can be safely removed. This is perhaps best illustrated by the fad for artificial behaviour in games. There is, in my opinion, absolutely no point in writing a vastly complicated AI module if you can get exactly the same effect (from the players' perspective) using simple scripting. (And, of course, it cuts down on costs!) Quote: I tend to get a bit riled up by the "every game experience is a story" theory, mainly from my interest in automated interactive stories in games. Many of the approaches I see to that problem assume that if you provide a player a simulation of an interactive world to play around in, then whatever experience they encounter will be a "story". Frankly I think that's a simplistic view about what makes a story. I disagree. Just because something tells a story, it doesn't follow that it necessarily tells a good story. (Where "good" means "enjoyable" or "fun".) I think this is where so many of these automated "storymaker" concepts fall down. You really do have to learn what makes a good story first. My view is that the game designer's role is to ensure the player is given all the tools necessary to create lots of good stories. The hard part isn't the adding of new elements. It's working out which ones to remove, so that the player doesn't have to wade through loads of dull, plodding, boring bits of story to get to the nuggets of fun. Thus characterisation, pacing, immersion and the like are all extremely important, but not necessarily in the traditional sense. Quote: I suppose I am a structuralist in that I think stories are constructed out of their own set of rules which define their structure - although I don't think these are limited to one particular set and certainly don't have to follow the Hollywood Campbellian monomyth three act plot. I also don't think good stories have to make sense (as you said, there are plenty of examples to the contrary), but they do have there own rhythym and structure that defines them as stories rather than collections of events. Again, I think you're talking about story quality here. What someone will find fun is subjective and depends on that someone's tastes and background, but there are common elements that can be found in all successful stories. This is why I find people who dismiss the Campbellian monomyth are often missing the point. Campbell never, ever intended his analyses to be used in this way. He was merely describing the common elements that appear in all (or at least the vast majority) of the entire world's myths and legends. There is nothing prescriptive about his analyses. They provide a metric at best, but they are not, and should never be, a "formula". Chris Vogler has arguably done more harm than good in his attempts to 'dumb down' Campbell's original writings on the subject. Quote: For example, if a little girl asked you to tell her a story, you wouldn't regale her with a chronological description of your last poker night. Rather, you might start off with something that begins with "Once upon a time" and ends with "and they all lived happily ever after" - that's the sort of structure a child might expect. Storytelling back before people were literate had to run like this so the storytellers could remember them - they remembered the basics of the plot but they also instictively knew all the rituals and patterns that go into stories to make them interesting. That's why you often get threes of things in fairy-tales; it's a good way to bulk out a story with two occurances of an event that doesn't progress the story followed by a third different variant that does. I would advise not confusing modern Western fairy tale structures -- all the most famous ones we know of today are actually heavily 'sanitised'. They were basically rewritten as morality tales during the 17th and 18th centuries -- with their originals. "Rumpelstiltskin", for example, was _far_ more explicit in its original form. It was a coming-of-age story which starred an anthropomorphic penis as its titular character. As for the similar structures, it's also worth bearing in mind that many of the tales we know today come from a few relatively recent collections. Mostly by the Brothers Grimm, but Dr. Bowdler also rewrote quite a few. (His name is the origin of the term "Bowdlerised".) The reason the stories follow such similar formulae is because they were rewritten by the same small number of authors using the writing conventions of their day. Historically, stories were told -- sometimes even sung -- orally by storytellers who would freely modify them in reaction to audience feedback. Thus many older stories have an almost sing-song, rhythmic quality to them. This is why I don't hold with the notion interaction in stories is something new. (Even today, the best musicians and singers inevitably react to their audiences while performing. Actors do likewise today, but were even more 'interactive' during Shakespeare's time.) There was far less distinction between prose, poetry and song in the past, but far more emphasis on performance over production. The tradition of the Celtic Harper, which was still going strong until the Victorians clamped down on it, is a good example of the oral tradition, but again, Campbell's research throws up myriad examples of these performers. The shamans of many older cultures often took on this role. Quote: So I don't consider every game to contain a story - it would be like considering any collection of sound to be music. Without the right sort of structure, to me it just doesn't fall into the definition. Music really is ordered sound. It is surprisingly mathematical in nature, although I've tried to avoid going into the theory side too heavily; I'm not mathematically inclined. (I've been playing music and composing since long before I even knew what a computer was.) But you're right, this is a massive digression. I'll stop typing now as my fingers are hurting.

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Original post by stimarco This is where I disagree with pretty much the entire planet: People seem to view Play and Story as two separate and distinct concepts. I don't. I consider Story a subset of Play. Story is what you get if you sucked all the interactivity of out Play.

That's a very interesting viewpoint, and on reflection I think I agree. If "Play" is defined as pleasurable activity with an emphasis on learning, then "Story" is indeed a subset of "Play". It's interesting to consider it like that; that correlation hadn't occured to me.

However I disagree that stories are incompatible with interactivity, as I fail to see why that need to be mutually exclusive. There are a few well-known examples outside the computer world: "Dungeon Masters" in pen and paper role playing games are able to dynamically alter their stories based on the actions of the other players. There's also the "choose your own adventure" books, or for or more interactive variant there's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", which in its original form was a made-up story by Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) while boating with Alice Liddell and her sisters; I'm fairly sure the interjections of the girls shaped the path the story eventually took. There's also several forms of improvisational theatre that incorporate reactions from the audience into the performance.

(I also agree with the opinion that the lack of fun in learning as part of the modern view of education is extremely detrimental to the system, but that's another topic [smile])

(Also: I haven't read Campbell's "Masks of God", only the more well known "Hero of 1000 Faces". I'll make a note to read them if I get more heavily involved in the theory of stories again, although Campbell's writing style isn't exactly the most approachable around).

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You can have minimal interactivity and end up with something that is undeniably a game we "play", but it would be a game that is mostly story and the gameplay is relegated to the level of replacing the traditional UI of a book. Instead of turning a page, we have to jump through some hoop -- twitch the joystick left to see Dirk The Daring jump to his death; twitch it right and you get a bit more story played at you. (I.e. "Story as Reward." A design technique I despise, but which is all too common in most computer-based RPGs. And quite a few other genres too.)

I agree that the "Dragon's Lair" level of (non-)interactivity relegates those kinds of interactive experiences into something that is borderline about whether it qualifies as a "game". I'm a bit more ambivalent about the "story as reward" technique - I don't mind it as a hook, as long as it isn't the only hook (i.e. the game mechanics are well developed).

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Even so, Stories are never wholly passive. You cannot enjoy a story if you are unwilling to project yourself into it and commit to it. Every listener, moviegoer or reader places some of himself into his entertainment, no matter what medium it comes in. You have to suspend disbelief -- a real cliché if ever there was one -- but not only that: your imagination will invariably fill in all the missing details the medium cannot provide. When you watch a movie, your brain is filling in the missing parts of the sets; it's extremely rare for a moviegoer to be aware that he's watching an illusion, not a documentary. There is a camera crew behind that camera.

I think this is part of the power of stories; if you can get the audience (or player in the sense of a game) to suspend their disbelief then they are going to be more immersed in the experience and not care too much about liberties taken with logical errors in the world; as long as the illusion is maintained, of course.

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Quote: I tend to get a bit riled up by the "every game experience is a story" theory, mainly from my interest in automated interactive stories in games. Many of the approaches I see to that problem assume that if you provide a player a simulation of an interactive world to play around in, then whatever experience they encounter will be a "story". Frankly I think that's a simplistic view about what makes a story. I disagree. Just because something tells a story, it doesn't follow that it necessarily tells a good story. (Where "good" means "enjoyable" or "fun".) I think this is where so many of these automated "storymaker" concepts fall down. You really do have to learn what makes a good story first.

But is there a limit to how bad a story can be before it stops being a story?

I don't consider a pure simulation to tell a story by default, unless possibly it managed to hit upon the right combination of events by pure chance. I consider that for a story to reliably be told there needs to be a storyteller involved in the process. That could be the author, the listener/reader/audience/player (I need to find a good single term for all of those [smile]), the clever interaction of a series of well-crafted rules as part of an A.I system, or a mixture of all of these.

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My view is that the game designer's role is to ensure the player is given all the tools necessary to create lots of good stories. The hard part isn't the adding of new elements. It's working out which ones to remove, so that the player doesn't have to wade through loads of dull, plodding, boring bits of story to get to the nuggets of fun.

I partly agree that it's all amount presenting the right bits of story potential to the player to get to the good stuff. However I'm wary about putting too much of the burden of making a good story on the player - that's the author's job; or in the case of a game, the designer's. This could be done by a linear storyline (robbing the game of a large part of its interactive potential), an A.I. system, or a very well-designed set of rules or experiences.

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Quote: I suppose I am a structuralist in that I think stories are constructed out of their own set of rules which define their structure - although I don't think these are limited to one particular set and certainly don't have to follow the Hollywood Campbellian monomyth three act plot. I also don't think good stories have to make sense (as you said, there are plenty of examples to the contrary), but they do have there own rhythym and structure that defines them as stories rather than collections of events. Again, I think you're talking about story quality here.

Maybe a bit, but I do think there is a certain amount of structure that defines "storiness". I wouldn't be able to define exactly what it is, or whether it's a fixed quantity for all stories across all cultures, but my intuition is there's some basic property that defines what makes a story over what is not.

I suppose from another perspective, it's possible that anything that doesn't have this quality is simply a very bad story, but I can't see under that perspective how anything could not be a story. I hold that there must be a cut-off somewhere where things can be divided into the set of experiences that are a story and those that are not.

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This is why I find people who dismiss the Campbellian monomyth are often missing the point. Campbell never, ever intended his analyses to be used in this way. He was merely describing the common elements that appear in all (or at least the vast majority) of the entire world's myths and legends. There is nothing prescriptive about his analyses. They provide a metric at best, but they are not, and should never be, a "formula". Chris Vogler has arguably done more harm than good in his attempts to 'dumb down' Campbell's original writings on the subject.

I agree with this, especially that Vogler is more to blame with the formula approach to the monomyth. Although it does come in handy if you are interested in automating storytelling [grin].

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I would advise not confusing modern Western fairy tale structures -- all the most famous ones we know of today are actually heavily 'sanitised'. They were basically rewritten as morality tales during the 17th and 18th centuries -- with their originals. "Rumpelstiltskin", for example, was _far_ more explicit in its original form. It was a coming-of-age story which starred an anthropomorphic penis as its titular character.

I only picked the classic fairy tale structure as I thought it would be the most recognised on the forum, as well as it's the one that immediately sprung to mind (plus it's the only story telling ritual I can remember the words to [smile]). However it is very common across all cultures to have ritualised beginning and endings to oral storytelling in order to facilitate the audience's suspension of disbelief - travelling to the world of stories and returning to the real world.

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The reason the stories follow such similar formulae is because they were rewritten by the same small number of authors using the writing conventions of their day.

Partly, but it was true in the times of oral storytelling as well. I'm not that well versed in the details, but I remember reading about this in a book called "The Singer of Tales" by Albert Lord. From what I remember, apprentice story singers would learn their craft by listening to other singers, and as such intuitively pick up all the patterns and formulae that go into making such performances. A story singer would never sing exactly the same song twice, but could still sing the same story elements by improvising with their internal set of rules.

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This is why I don't hold with the notion interaction in stories is something new. (Even today, the best musicians and singers inevitably react to their audiences while performing. Actors do likewise today, but were even more 'interactive' during Shakespeare's time.) There was far less distinction between prose, poetry and song in the past, but far more emphasis on performance over production.

Fully agree that interaction in stories is as ancient as stories themselves, but it's something that needs to be relearnt, sadly. It's strange something as important to education as literacy ended up killing an art form by nailing stories to the written page.

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Quote: So I don't consider every game to contain a story - it would be like considering any collection of sound to be music. Without the right sort of structure, to me it just doesn't fall into the definition. Music really is ordered sound. It is surprisingly mathematical in nature, although I've tried to avoid going into the theory side too heavily; I'm not mathematically inclined. (I've been playing music and composing since long before I even knew what a computer was.)

I know the analogy breaks down a bit, but I believe there is a complex grammar behind stories that makes them somewhat comparable.

Well you've heard my opinion before, but I'll restate it for the purposes of the thread. Stories must make sense, causally and teleologically (aka morally). They must have a complete plot structure including a satisfying ending. If they don't they are not technically stories.

I'll add that storytelling does not have to be all verbal, it can be partially visual (pink panther cartoons are a superb example) or done through gameplay. However I would argue that a story must not only present a sequence of events, but also state a judgment of that sequence of events, and this latter is very difficult to do non-verbally.


(Kinda sorta tangentially related: the absolutewrite boards just added a literary theory board today, I was all excited and actually got my how-to-write book-in-progress out and was working on editing it. [smile] )

Re: The discussion: what is a "story" with respect to games? Open to all debate and discussion.

I think many terms do not have axiomatic definitions. People often define a term in order to facilitate a discussion, not for the sake of promoting or redefining the meaning of a term. I think it is a matter of labeling concepts with new or old terms. Basically, if being a hammer is your profession, you want to call everything nails.

At this point, I think the dicussion is a matter of preference. For instance, I would define story as something narrower in order to focus on dismantling it into gameplay. Because my purpose is to dismantle the concept of 'story' as I knew it, I don't choose to expand its meaning. This doesn't mean that I disagree with the concepts related to re-presentation of the 'story' through gameplay. I just don't label the result the same way. If I were to call the result 'a story', I would have to pick a different label to describe what I dismantled.

On the other hand, if you really like the term story, you would argue to keep the label for the result. This is what is happening as I see it.

PS: What I meant is I agree with what you guys said. I just don't use the same terms to describe what is said.

[Edited by - Wai on January 9, 2007 11:57:50 PM]

Let me try my hand at a definition of story. A story could be quite abstractly considered to be the memory (real or imagined) of a set of fairly self contained related processes or events. Self contained in that the telling of an event is complete with respect to its chain of events. Any object which can contain memories, that is, able to hold information, could be considered to be capable of containing stories - e.g. computer, tape, disc, book, brain, the list goes on. Since stories are memories of process and thusly interactions, actors are required in any story.

Certainly poker can create stories in the brains of the players but so also by the definition stated earlier can any set of interactions. Be it with two humans playing a game or one human using a toilet.

Consider this game - The object of this game is to think of nothing for as long as you can. The moment you think of anything you lose. It can only be played by one person. Such a game can itself have no story. One may tell that they played this game for n minutes and failed but they are not really telling a story of the game as it is what they did.

So here, I attempt to draw a line between tetris and Baldur's Gate. I consider any game which contains information or a memory of a series of connected events (real or imagined) embedded within itself to contain a story. A book embeds a story to be interpreted within its bits. Some games do. Tetris does not, tetris contains no memories stored within its bits. Baldur's Gate however, does contain memories of the exploration of imagined worlds of the author. I have to step out one level of interaction to 'me and the game' to generate a memory within my brain that I might tell a story of my interactions with Tetris. In Baldur's gate however, there are actors which have already interacted with imagined locals in imagined locales that I may learn of. Same as a book. That there are extra dimensions in how I obtain this information in Baldur's Gate than say "A Game of Thrones" is irrelevant to the notion of story as a specially meaningful embedded memory.

Following what I have stated it comes as a corollary that every save file is a story (albeit without a proper notion of an ending) and any game which can create save files can generate [incomplete] stories. The more complex and interesting stories however, contain strong levels of interaction between the actors and their environment. Any game which will create interesting stories must have more complex objects. A game which retains states and the more interesting ways it and its object can react to this state will generate more interesting stories. If one imagines a game capable of such but with no story whatsoever, the question becomes can it have a story? Playing such a game would not necessarily make it have a story. Certainly whenever you save, it might be considered to have generated a partial story in the form of a set of recorded events stored digitally but unless during play, stories were generated orthogonally and as a function both, of play, it would not contain any stories. And even then, the stories would only be substories within a general chaos, with no true connections and no need to end one might not expect a story to spontaneously emerge. Indeed if you ever tell a story of your gameplay in the proper form, it would almost always be the case that you end up tying up loose ends and filling in details, showing that gameplay is no superset of story.

One might imagine the levels at which a story could be divided. There is the level of the experiencer generating the tale, the tale in its recorded level and the consumption of the tale, either by reading, watching or playing through. All games by virtue of being interactions may create metastories - stories in the mind of player by simply played through them. A game could reasonably be expected to dynamically generate substories but the question of a story (with the notion of closure being paramount) is many orders of magnitude more difficult. A game that is capable of dynamically generating a story from the set of random substories by finding some common and meaningful connection and creating some endgoal to be achieved that results in a satisfactory conclusion, well that would be a great feat, the achievement of which I am sure, would be quite a story itself.

It is quite easy to separate gameplay from story - gameplay might be what you experience when playing a game but a story is what is packaged, recorded and retold, these two may not always necessarily tell the same tale. Gameplay is no more indistinguishable from story than life is from memories.

I know that I have ran on at times and not always been particularly clear, this is not quite what I wished to state but I am tired and you will have to forgive me.

Re: Daerax

There is the problem of intention. Suppose I played Tetris ten-years ago, it was such a great experience that I want to retell my experience of playing it. So I write Tetris2 as a way to retell my experience.

Am I justisfied to say that my Tetris2 is telling a story? And that it _contains_ a story (i.e. memories) that is presented in a stochastic fashion.

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Original post by Wai Re: Daerax There is the problem of intention. Suppose I played Tetris ten-years ago, it was such a great experience that I want to retell my experience of playing it. So I write Tetris2 as a way to retell my experience. Am I justisfied to say that my Tetris2 is telling a story? And that it _contains_ a story (i.e. memories) that is presented in a stochastic fashion.

So long as I can consume your story while playing tetris 2, I see no reason why not. Otherwise you are not telling me a story. However, I doubt it is possible to tell a story with closure or even any form of cohesion at all stochastically. Plus if I understand you correctly, the information and relevance of story is stored only in your head and not in the actual bits of the game itself. As presented, the notion of memory is a measurable quantity and not some ephemeral concept.

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Original post by sunandshadow Well you've heard my opinion before, but I'll restate it for the purposes of the thread. Stories must make sense, causally and teleologically (aka morally). They must have a complete plot structure including a satisfying ending. If they don't they are not technically stories.

The History Channel will be very sad to hear that. So will The Discovery Channel, come to think of it. I generally consume far more non-fiction than fiction, but the former rarely has a traditional story structure.

As one author famously put it: writing fiction is much harder than real life. Real life doesn't have to make sense.

My history teacher put me off the subject for years by sucking all the fun out the Hundred Years War; to her, history was mostly a recounting of names and dates. Even the Old Testament contains a large chunk of "X begats Y" that goes on seemingly forever. But the Bible is, nevertheless, a story.

History itself has no point or plot as such. It's basically a series of connected events in time. A "Complete And Utter History of the British Isles" would undeniably be a story, but it would be one which consisted mainly of lumps of land drifting about and bumping into each other over millions of years, until we humans came along right at the end and the very short, but far more interesting (if you're not a hardcore geologist), bit began.

The US' love for the archaic "Morality Play" forms is well-known, but less known is that such stories are far less popular in most Old World nations. Good vs. Evil -- or "God vs. Devil" if you prefer -- is a primitive form of mythologising dating back to an older, more innocent, childlike two-tone view of the world. The US' history explains its existence, but it's surprising how long it has survived. Old World cultures are rarely as comfortable with such black and white views of the world. Ambiguity is far more common.

Interest, fun, "satisfying endings" -- these are all purely subjective. I hate soap operas, but I'm clearly not in the majority and I do not believe a theory of story which panders only to my own tastes can be valid.

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[...] However I would argue that a story must not only present a sequence of events, but also state a judgment of that sequence of events, and this latter is very difficult to do non-verbally.

I disagree vehemently. Any "Grand Unified Theory of Story" must explain all the different types of story. Any definition that excludes many non-fiction story forms fails.

Karen Traviss writes militaristic novels that don't even have immediately obvious "good" and "bad" guys. People are people. They make mistakes. Shit happens and sometimes you fuck up. The world is not full of sword-wielding barbarians riding in to rescue damsels in distress. It never was. Even the much-hyped Code of Chivalry in the age of knights is highly selective in who knights were expected to be chivalrous to. If you were a common peasant, good luck getting any chivalry from a passing knight.

A good illustration is the usual arguments vegetarians trot out. These usually harp on about the cruelty to animals, but they never, EVER mention that a flower is the reproductive organ of a plant, or that fruit is its seed. How would _you_ like it if aliens came along and cut your genitalia off, just so they could display them in a vase? How would _you_ feel if aliens came along and plucked foetuses out of pregnant women because they taste so sweet and juicy?

Is it okay to eat plants just because we can't hear their screams? (And yes, they do scream. All plants will react to damage. They feel pain and many even emit sounds, albeit sounds beyond our range of hearing.)


My theory of story is not concerned subjective notions of pacing and characterisation. These come under form -- they define the type of story -- but do not define the fundamental structure of a story. They can be used to determine whether a story fits into a certain genre or is well-written, but a picture of a pipe is not the same thing as the pipe itself, no matter how well it is rendered.

*

After some hard thinking, I think a good illustration of my hypothesis is as follows:

Take a book. Cut out each and every word on its own and hang each from the ceiling of a vast room or hall in a long, orderly row. That is a story. The reader can make no decisions about how the story progresses himself; his only interaction is his interpretation of the words into images in his mind's eye. He sees the story as it is: a long, continuous chain of events, placed one after the other.

Now go back to the book and write a new ending to it. Put up these new words in the same room as the original story, such that the player can now choose, at the appropriate point, to go down the alternate path to follow the new ending. This is the traditional "branching story" structure at its most basic, minimal extent. A proto-"Choose Your Own Adventure" book.

The more decision points you add, the more options the player has to interact, but we're not actually getting a feedback loop here yet: the player is choosing a path to walk down, but the story elements -- "Storels" -- down each of these paths remain fixed and invariant. Interactivity existed before computer games, but feedback is harder to do without a computer. The closest equivalent is the Dungeon Master of traditional RPGs, but computers make this process much easier. Rapid, seamless, consistent feedback is the secret sauce computers add to play.

At its 'purest', the computer game is a straightforward simulation.

A full simulation is interactive and reacts to feedback. This time, the Storels are no longer fixed and invariant: if the player chooses to go down a path, the Storels further down the branch may sprout new branches. Each decision the player makes adds new Storels, prunes old Storels, and so on, until the player reaches a point where he runs out of Storels. (Or not, as the user desires: In some MMOGs, the game is open-ended. There is no "Happily Ever After". In the worse ones, the player is simply expected to get bored and start again with a new avatar.)

In a simulation, your hall of words is constantly changing. You choose to move to the next word and suddenly new words drop down from above, while you can see other words changing, or even disappearing entirely. Each step you take changes the whole. You are the whole.

And that, I contend, is the essence of Play.

Now imagine playing in this hall of Play. As you make each decision, you move to a new word. Write that word down! Move onto the next. Write that word down too. Keep going until you've finished playing.

Now look at what you've written down. It's a linear series of words.

It's a Story.

Now, if the game we were running around in and writing down each element of is intended to be fun, the metric we can use to determine if the game was fun is to read the resulting Stories that players create by their decisions.

If you had a fun time playing, it'll be a fun Story.

If your purpose as a game designer is to make engaging games, your duty is to ensure that as many Stories as possible will be engaging for the player.

And that's where our knowledge and understanding of plot, pacing, characterisation and so forth comes in. And it's why storytelling has a huge role to play in game design. It's just not applied directly in the obvious sense. The game's simulation must be designed such that the pacing, plots, characters, etc. that it provides through its Storels are engaging.

The purpose of Play is Story. Play is the process. Story is the result.

*

Now, I've described Storels in terms of words and used traditional fiction writing terms, but this is purely for the sake of illustration. A Storel could be a musical note, a sound, an image, anything else you need to build your playground.

I hope this explains my view more clearly.

Regards,

The notion of memory is somewhat ephemeral, because it depends on whether you have the right decoder. If I show two people the same painting, a person may only see a painting, while the other may see a story as the painting was intented to tell. It depends on whether the viewer share the language.

If I give you a book written by aliens, you can't emperically tell whether the book contains a story unless you know the language. In the example of Tetris2, it becomes a matter of whether you have learned/experienced enough interaction-ese to recognize that a story is being told.

Being stochastic doesn't mean formlessness. Take Tetris for example, although the pieces and the user's interactions are not deterministic, the game rules allows the game to build up tension toward a climax.

Tetris seen as a story has a property that normal stories don't have. Which is climax discrimination. Tetris can give you a climax as high as you can handle. This is unlike a normal story where the level of the climax is fixed.

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I started talking about Tetris as a story just for the sake of discussion. At heart I would just call that an interaction. I would put games under the catagory of interactions. I would put story-telling under interaction also. But stories are not interactions. Stores are more like data, not a process, while an interaction is a process (just as story-telling is a process). This is basically the same as what you said.

Climax is property of interactions. An interaction does not need to have a climax, but climax is word that is applicable when describing interactions. Similarly, other terms that originated from describing story-telling, such as engagement and immersion, are also properties of interactions.

So it is not that games are stories, but that gaming and story-telling are both under interactions.

There are some other differences between the term "game" and "story". The way I see it, a 'game' is the label for an interaction, where as a 'story' is the label for the concepts to deliver during an interaction (during story-telling). They are not the same type of nouns. A 'game' is more closely related to the literary work that presents a story than the story itself.

Suppose you are writing a horror story and you want to scare the reader. The literary devices that you use to create the horror, and the story are two things. Using different literary devices can gives you two works that tells the same story, but with different effectiveness in delivering horror. (And the story itself has its own horror content. When you combine the two properly you get a synergetic effect.)

I think that in game design, we have our breeds of literary devices called the 'gameplay'. Suppose I want to make a horror game, choosing different gameplay would give me different effects. In this way of describing things, I can choose to have a story, or not to have a story. A story is a component that I can include to add horror content. It is optional, although favorable in many cases. But I don't end up calling a game or gameplay a story. The experience that I want to deliver is horror. I don't end up calling it the story.

Back to the Tetris example, I would have said that I wrote Tetris2 in order to deliver/share an experience, not a story.

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However I disagree that stories are incompatible with interactivity, as I fail to see why that need to be mutually exclusive. There are a few well-known examples outside the computer world: "Dungeon Masters" in pen and paper role playing games are able to dynamically alter their stories based on the actions of the other players. There's also the "choose your own adventure" books, or for or more interactive variant there's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", which in its original form was a made-up story by Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) while boating with Alice Liddell and her sisters; I'm fairly sure the interjections of the girls shaped the path the story eventually took. There's also several forms of improvisational theatre that incorporate reactions from the audience into the performance.

D&D simply allows players to 'create their own story' while interacting. They are interacting to the game to create a story - which in this case they remain mutually exclusive.


just my opinion.

p/s: stimarco's theories makes very good reading. You can actually write a book about it :)