Dialogue

[Dan Lyke <danlyke@flutterby.com>]

Kenneth Lu writes:
> Hi, all.  I'm new here.  Is this list still active?

Perhaps we can bring it back from the dead. I recently did a little
mail adminning so I'm actually getting all the error messages, and
realized that the archiver is busted, so the one or two later messages
didn't make it in. I'm downloading and installing the latest version
of MHonArch as I type.

> Anyway, I recently posted an article to Kuro5hin.org, a discussion 
> site (about "technology and culture"):
> 
> http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/1/27/02011/9684

Morbus Iff, of disobey.com and gamegrene.com fame, posted it at least
to me, and I think here too.

I started to respond to the article on Kuro5hin, then stopped because
I thought I sounded like a broken record, but what the heck:

You begin with two questions:

   (1) What makes gaming a unique medium for storytelling (and how
   to exploit it in new ways), and (2) what makes games actually
   playable and enjoyable (which needs to be kept in mind or no one
   will play your game, no matter how inventive).

I'd argue that both of those paths have actually been pursued pretty
thoroughly, they've lead to the current state of gaming, and we're not
going to make progress until we ask a different set of questions,
starting with:

   How can interaction make a story more compelling?

This is not an easy question. The largest markets for storytelling,
television and, to a lesser extent, movies, are not interactive, and
in several ways they're effective _because_ they're not.

We don't have many good models for interactive story. Sure, every
major city and most minor ones have an improv group, but my experience
has been that for the most part they're more fun for the participants
than the audience. As the audience grows a little we get theatre and
storytelling, in which the actors and storytellers work within a
structure while tailoring their drama to a given audience. Seeing a
person or troupe perform a work to a few different crowds shows that
there really is a feedback loop there.

But as both of these get more popular they get larger audiences, and
at some point you hit critical mass such that the performers _know_
how the audience is going to respond.


And we have to ask "how can we make _story_ more compelling" because
hoping that story is somehow magically going to appear out of
simulation is utter hogwash and a pipe dream. Heck, how often does
story appear out of life? How close to reality do "based on a true
story" movies ever come? Not very, because life, like simulation,
mostly just isn't all that interesting.

How many times have you sat in a bar listening to some drunk recount
every single gawdawful boring detail of some event? Or a four-year-old
doing the same? Is that story? Perhaps, but I'd argue that when you're
willing to chew your arm off to escape it's just reality. A
storyteller is someone who can cull that same chain of events down to
the two or three turns that resolve the conflict, telling you only
what you need to know, the good ones will tell you even a little less
than that.

> I'm guessing natural language would be far too difficult, but maybe
> if some sort of simplified mechanic for speech were used...

Several simulation type games have used facial expressions and body
behaviors to communicate mood, non-verbal communication is probably
the place to start, especially since so much research has been done on
creating and synthesizing it.

Dan