Quote:

Original post by sunandshadow Is this an RPG? RPGs are just not replayable, there's no point worrying about replayability

How can someone say that? You 've obviously haven't played RPGs like Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, Gothic, KotOR or event the recent one Dragon Age : Origins.

They are all about replayability, if they're implemented in a right way.

Quote:

Original post by Tim Ingham-Dempster The problem is replayability. Part of what makes these moments so compelling is that once you have seen, heard or read what happens, it can never be changed. No matter how often you re-read/re-listen/re-watch the story, the character will always make the same decision. In a game this isn't true. Even if we came up with a convoluted save system that doesn't allow the player to go back to before this moment they could replay the game. Even if we make it so hard to change what happens that the player will never do so, the simple possibility that they could seems to take away some of the power of these moments. Is there any way to overcome this or is it a limit of the medium? Could we create equally powerful stories by showing the consequences of all of a player's possible choices even though we have to sacrifice these powerful moments?

If I understand you and many of the posts you made correctly, you are linking the uniqueness (ie: the fact that you cannot duplicate the story ever again) of a playthrough with the power of the story.

While I could beat the design topic with a stick until the cows come home, I think the logistics topic will allow me to make my point without me running blue in the mouth.

I'm surprised no one has brought up the biggest problem of what you propose by making each playthrough unique: the branching factor of your story. Simply put, if there are five different choices to be made, then there are at most five different story paths that could be followed from there. If then there are another five choices that could be made, then we have at most 25 unique story paths. So on and so forth.

In other words, it's an exploding content nightmare. Even if we pared it down to 3 choices per level of that tree, or pruned branches of that tree so that the branching factor reduces, that is still quite a bit of content to build and more importantly, test and polish. And seeing how the only real feasible way to generate stories is by good old fashioned human elbow grease. . .

So yeah, I'd worry more about coming up with a story that is actually compelling.

Re: Guildwriter

What do you think about Façade (2005)? [ Façade (Interactive story) ]

May I know what got you interested in design and interactive stories?

Quote:

Original post by Erevis Quote: Original post by sunandshadow Is this an RPG? RPGs are just not replayable, there's no point worrying about replayability How can someone say that? You 've obviously haven't played RPGs like Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, Gothic, KotOR or event the recent one Dragon Age : Origins. They are all about replayability, if they're implemented in a right way.

Well I'm a jRPG fan, not a wRPG fan. Usually western RPGs like Fable and most MMOs have such scant story I get bored before completing a first playthrough, so it certainly couldn't hold my attention for a second play. Story-based games are like books - assuming I read/play the whole thing and enjoy it, it will take me 3 or 4 years before I've forgotten it enough to be interesting in seeing the same story again.

Wai, the sim city solution has both good and bad points. The good is that it basically solves the problem. The bad is that you lose control over the story.

Guildwriter, thats not quite what I'm talking about. The issue is that if you give the player a choice then that choice has very little emotional power because the player could repaly the game and choose differently. Therefore the choice has no real consequences and so doesn't matter. This has me slightly worried about the whole concept of interactive narrative, if no choice the player makes has any significance, then how can a narrative (which is essentially about choices) have power if it is interactive? I'm thinking that maybe if every option led to the same place but by different paths it would work, and we would just loose the tool of the difficult choice for the player.

Sim City as an example where control exists
Re: Tim

Control is not "lost" because you the dynamics offered by the game does not allow the city to turn into a battle field. Therefore, the design of Sim City had the content "under control." So the question is how to borrow the techniques used in Sim City in interactive story, and keep the content "under control."


Knowledge Extraction: If playing Sim City is like painting:

In SimCity, the land is a canvas. The player paints on the canvas by assignment development location and upgrades. The game rules determines the growth, much like the how the chemisty and physics determines how paint dries. The most notable result of this activity is a city, therefore, the painting is the city.


Knowledge Transplant: If playing Interactive Story is like painting:

In an interactive story, the plot is the canvas. The player paints by making decisions. The game rules determines the progress and the trend. The result is a course of decisions and events subjected to relations and goals. This painting that we call a story is a painting of a story. It is not a scene, but a temporal panoramic drawing of a story, similar to a comic strip. (I am sorry but I don't know the name of that type of drawing. You would most likely find example of it from murals at public places, where a single mural is used to show the evolution of a town.)


Articulated Concept: Invariant Choices

A prominent feature of Sim City, is that most of the decisions that the player could make could be made any time in the game (i.e. placing a residential area). These choices are invariant throughout the game. Sim City also has variant choices, such as the occassional opportunities to build amusement parks, but since we are familiar with those choices because most interactive stories only have these event-driven variant choices. To do an interactive story like Sim City, it takes invariant choices.


Examples of invariant choices

For each aspect in an interactive story, you could get the invariant choices. There are many aspects, conversation is just one of them. A conversation may be started by the player or by the game as an event. The player makes decisions on how to response. The following are some of the invariant choices that can exist in conversations:

o Choose to listen or to talk
o Listen: Choose to understand or to pretend to be listening
o Talk: Choose to talk about yourself or the other person

This list can expand pretty deep. These are the invariant choices similar to those in Sim City. In Sim City, you pick to start a residential area, much similar to pick to listen. Then you pick where to place the residential area, much like picking how the character listens. Interpersonal dynamics determine the results and creates the responses of the conversation. If our goal is more like Sim City, we would be content with character-building (where the player tries to establish the main character in some way.) However, since we are interested in story, you at least need to keep a log and constantly remind the player that the product of the interaction is the progress of development, not the developed character. The objective is to draw the Mural, not a Scene.


Simulation as an elegant implementation

In this paradigm, while the overall structure of choices can be analyzed as a tree that grows exponentially as a function of the number of invariant choices and the number of decision points (i.e. #Endings = #InvariantChoices ^ #DecisionPoints ), such analysis does not capture the elegance in the design. A bitmap of 640x480 pixels that accepts 8-bit colors can have almost infintely many pictures. But we as developers are not asked to know all of the possible pictures, but to create the application to allow the user to draw. This task does not take a multiple life-times to complete.


Articulated Concept: Content Control

The control of content lies in the elementary choices and the dynamics specified by the game. In Sim City, if you place a residential block in the middle of your industrial section, it is not going to develop very well. The game allows the player to have place the block, which is in alignment with the implementation of invariant choices. However, the effect, which is determined by the game, is not invariant. Imagine a bitmap application that disallows any adjacent pixel to have to have a contrast larger than 10%. By having this rule, no matter what the player tries to draw, the image will be smooth. This is an example of content control. It is done by designing the rules.

In an interactive story, you could set rules to control the effects. Ineffective choices costs the player character resource, most likely time or opportunity. In Sim City, the cost of ill-decision is easy to observe, since the placement for each development block costs money, and wastes time where the block could be developing better at another location. A typical variable in an interactive story is trust or cooperation.

For each story that you want to control, you create the rules to control it for you. It takes time to analyze the dynamics, but once you have analyzed it, the dynamics are transferable. Sim City did not remake all the rules from scratch in each version, the rules are reused and improved.


Do you have a story you want to implement using simulation?
It is better to talk about content control with examples.

I more-or-less take the opposite view - that choices are good, and enhance meaning, in life and in games. However, to implement a game this way requires you not design your game by thinking "how do others implement games", because most games are lame. In fact, most are painful pavlovian exercises, where the player lowers himself below the level of human (with human-level volition/choice) to mere animal seeking results from a machine. To "win" most games you must give up your individuality, your human level of consciousness, your volition... and seek to deduce and conform to the whims of the game designer.

You most certainly can design games to embrace choice. In fact, even if conventional games of the type I described (and complained about), I prefer to introduce random variations every time the game is played so certain kinds of choices and decisions do have real, relevant consequences to how the game plays out. I mean really, even if you are climbing a mountain (in reality), which is an entirely fixed and definite goal, the temperature, humidity, lighting and condition of the rock varies from day to day, as does your mood, health, vision, strength, endurance, etc. Thus even in utterly fixed scenarios, the need for different choices to effectively compensate for the current conditions of the environment and actor/player are appropriate, if not necessary.

To design a game that embraces choices AND is more meaningful and rewarding requires you "keep score" and "track player actions and decisions" in more abstract terms. Which means your game must perform more abstract "calculations" to decide what to present the player with next. Such a game is massively more enjoyable AND more meaningful.

The trick is, finding a way to implement this without needing to prepare infinite artwork and resources. Many ways to accomplish this exist, the most obvious being "limit the player to a limited environment with limited objects to manipulate". For example, the game could take place in a building, in a valley with high cliffs that cannot be scaled, on an island in the middle of the ocean, or figure out your own scheme. But you can also limit the game resources you need in other ways: by making variety limited or irrelevant in your game, by making a limited number of objects but making them re-configurable to provide variety, and so forth.

Another approach, and the one I take, is to design my game engine to support (and prefer) "procedurally generated content". This is the best approach, but you'll not implement this in a weekend - unless you're vastly more productive than I am! Here again, the game and/or game-engine needs to make decisions on a more abstract basis. Some are almost trivial (like creating endless deserts, valleys, mountain ranges, lakes, boulders, trees and other natural objects "on the fly"), others are moderately difficult (endless varieties of vehicles, buildings, floorplans, creatures, aliens, aircraft, spacecraft), and others are extremely difficult (complex devices and machines, relevant display screens, personalities [specific to different synthesized cultures], etc).

You can look at this another way. In some scenarios, decisions generate a huge variety of consequences and outcomes. In other scenarios, decisions generate a variety of consequences and outcomes, but due to the nature of the "world" your game presents, these branches strongly tend to merge back together - into a fairly limited number of combinations (or at least the variety of resources are limited, which is what matters most).

I hope this stimulates some thought, and convinces you to drop the idea that the game-designer is as trapped in a choiceless universe as the players of most video games.

Quote:

Original post by Tim Ingham-Dempster The issue is that if you give the player a choice then that choice has very little emotional power because the player could replay the game and choose differently.

This statement really puzzles me. To me, the choice has emotional power _because_ you could have chosen differently. You commit yourself to playing the rest of the game as shaped by the choice you made. Yes you could save before the choice and try it each way, but even then you have to pick one to stick with, I doubt many people would want to play multiple saves of a game in parallel. The possibility of changing the story through choice is what gives interactive fiction its power because it makes each play through the story a different life.

Quote:

Original post by Wai Re: Guildwriter What do you think about Façade (2005)? [ Façade (Interactive story) ] May I know what got you interested in design and interactive stories?

I find myself very uninterested in Facade. While the technology and the results from the project are interesting to a degree, Facade is not a game and is not aspiring to be a game. What Facade is trying to accomplish has more in common with the Holodeck then with a game. Even if the technology were somehow spliced into a traditional game, in my mind it would still be window dressing until some kind of meaningful and magical dynamic content creation program existed to make the variety of dynamic choices that the player could make actually matter. That's my problem with things like Facade or Storytron , they aren't trying to be games, and their methods of interaction I find are not compelling enough to really drive the medium in a new direction.

As far as design and interactive stories, I've been reading and playing games for as long as I can remember. I used to write extensively and won awards before college, where I delved into coding and economics. For awhile though, I've been extremely frustrated with the general approach to gaming in general. I just don't care anymore when I play. Any kind of game I play fails to make me adequately care about the world I'm interacting with. So I'm looking for ways to make people care about the places they play games in.

My interest falls less into empowering the player with more interactive meaningful choices and giving less authorial control to the designer. Rather, I'm interested in finding a way to create a crafted framework that gives the player meaningful latitude within it's bounds. (This last bit is nebulous, but I dislike writing walls of text)

The relation between permanentness and emotional impact
Re: Sunandshadow

I think Tim was address the component of permanentness in invoking emotion. The perspective is that if you are asked to make a life changing choice, a majority of the emotion you get comes from the fact that you can't go back and try the other path.

Like marriage. Why is it stressful? It is because you can't easily change your partner and undo the choice.

Tim was referring to designs that approach this level of strong emotions. The easier it is to undo the choice (either by re-loading, or by corrective actions), the more likely that the choice itself lacks that special component that makes it emotional.

Think about grocery shopping. You choose between getting apples or oranges. It is a trivial choice. Suppose you got oranges and you don't like it, you could always get apples next time. Big deal.

However, permanentness is not the only factor that invokes emotion. Therefore a story with choices can still be emotional (for a different reason). So I was suggesting Tim at first to just concentrate on making the emotions strong (for other reasons). But I think he could also "fix it" by making the environment permanent.