re: Content

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@3DProgrammer.com>]

> There's not much benefit to making one
> choice at the beginning for which of 20 plotlines to participate
> in, if those plotlines are linear thereafter.

Sure, but why should they be?  Just as you don't force people into "Quick,
save the princess!" as they enter the theme park, at each stage in a
specific plotline you don't force only 1 option on the player.  You give
them several alternatives and they pick for themselves what they want to do.
This is just simple branching.  The point is to offer enough branches that
it is worth the customer's while to make selections and continue on with the
ritual of going through the rides.  It is not sophisticated, and it doesn't
have to be.  The value of the choices presented is in the content itself,
the quality of its authorship, the way in which it engages the player for
whatever accident of culture and personality they happen to respond best to.

No, you aren't going to please everyone.  Someone's going to go into your
theme park and say "That sucked!"  In particular, you have a problem that if
someone starts experiencing something they consider "bad" on the 1st
plotline they try, most people are too impatient to simply go try a
different one.  Massaging people to get them to replay would be a *big*
skill.  In a theme park, I'd pay certain people a lot of money to reassure
people, get them socially re-engaged, end their crankiness, and get them
happy with something more to their liking.  That would be the customer
service angle.  Leave it to the humans to provide that kind of tailoring of
experience, don't expect it out of the ride.  The important thing is for the
customer to leave with a smile on his face, not whether he transcended
storytelling reality.

> A plot web (see below) is better,

Agreed.

> and better still would be to weave
> a plotline around whatever choices the individual makes.

Disagreed.  The player is seriously capable of screwing things up and making
it un-fun.  As authors we should be unafraid to silence the player's voice
and redirect them to something that *is* more fun for them.  You may think
people know best, but they don't, they have no expertise in entertainment.
When I was a kid, I said "No I don't want to go to the beach!"  I'd kick and
fuss and scream.  My parents would drag me to the beach anyways, and when it
was time to go I'd scream "No I don't want to leave!"  Adults are no
different, they just control the verbal expression of their childish impulse
to bitch and complain about everything.  They *love* to bitch and complain
about everything.  If you can devise tactics to loosen them up and actually
accept/enjoy things, you don't need their Peanut Gallery input into exactly
how the show should be run.

Another way to look at it, is you should give people parts that amateurs can
manage.  Don't expect them to be cooking up these elaborate professional
production values, just for having walked into a theme park and hemming and
hawing for 5 minutes.  Professional engagement to artistry takes time,
labor, and compression, things that amateur players are *NOT* there to
provide.  Your job is to mostly provide the compression experiences to them,
not vice versa.

> But I chose them because the first one is pretty much how
> plots in computer games work,

Computer games are very much limited by their budgets.  Even if you
understand how one could put things together with more branches, the
production expense to polish all of those branches is prohibitive.  Thus, I
see the problem of an engine like the Erasmatron is not simply to provide a
lot of automatically generated possibilities.  It must provide automatically
generated *polished* possibilities.  That's a tall order.  IMHO the best
paradigm would be for an engine to provide the combinatorial framework, then
a human author goes in and with maximal efficiency tweaks it to the level of
polish required.  You will not eliminate the necessity for the human touch,
nothing short of strong AI will do it.

> They also change their minds a lot.

Passive entertainment spends enormous gobs of time and collective wisdom on
securing audience buy-in.  They know that the audience's mind will wander if
you let it, so they do their utmost to focus it.  For some bizarre reason,
proponents of interactive entertainment often take the wandering mind of the
player as axiomatically a good thing that should be protected.  It isn't.
It's bad.  What you want, is to get the player to willingly focus himself on
*several* choices.  He's engaged, he's making decisions, but there's a
limited scope to those decisions so that the communication between author
and player is doable.
> But no attempt is made to steer an individual player
> into a given path.

Sure.  Why should you?  The idea that you can mindread the player, by
measuring the number of mouseclicks he's making, the speed at which he's
entering or exiting rooms, the number of buttons he's pushing or words he's
using, is completely bogus.  You can't read the player's mind through a
computer interface.  An expert human conversationalist can't often do it, so
why would you expect a dumb computer to?  All you can do is pester the
player with questions, eliciting his values, *asking* what he thinks about
this and that, and hoping that he's answering in good faith.  And if your
questions would be annoying right now, better not be pinging the player with
them.  Let the player ping you.  Given them the interfaces to tell you what
they want.  That's often as simple as having a branch point.

> Every path competes for the attention of every
> player, on
> the theory that players will choose the path that appeals to
> their style.

Of course, another theory is that players will attempt to exhaust the
available content.  They'll clean out the dungeon levels in order to see all
the nooks and crannies, so that they haven't missed anything.  Thus, you
will get players that are going through certain paths, not because it agrees
with their playing style, but because it's there.  If you can do anything to
control/redirect their crankiness when they inevitably get pissed off,
that's beneficial.

Similarly, players will force themselves to go through things they feel
"morally expected" to go through.  They may have adversities to "cheating,"
or not want to appear to be a "wimp."  It takes either a certain maturity or
personality to simply abandon things that frustrate or annoy you.  Some
people will force themselves through it anyway, sometimes out of incredulity
that anything could deliberately try to irritate them that much.

So what I'm saying is, offering the different styles is good, but you still
have to deal with the problem that people aren't going to like what they run
into.  Getting really heavy with all the styles, covering all the possible
styles, increasing the budget ad infinitum, won't solve the problem.  You
also have to deal with redirecting/rechanneling the frustrated player.
Especially in the imagined human theme park, I really think this is where
the customer service is going to make one park better than another.  People
like to be cooed and coddled when they're grumpy.  It's probably an ape
thing.  I do it with my Van Gogh doll, he's always grumpy.

The meta-point is this is all more about what humans need out of each other
than elaborate and as-yet-uninvented technologies.  We shouldn't disdain
butt-simple human solutions as we pursue technologies.  It's the standup
comic that gets people to laugh and he's not using any technology.

> At any time one can leave any path if an alternative starts
> sounding like more fun.

I think that's an excellent principle.  The player should definitely be in
charge of overriding the order of presentation.  And, the presentation
should be amenable to such random access, it shouldn't completely brain fart
when someone jumps to something else.

> Finally, and perhaps most important at all, players are not required
> to make progress and are not punished in any way (such as being unable to
> participate in attractions) for not doing so.

One of these days I'm going to write a game where death is simply another
state of existence and the shocking movements between life and death are
merely a great circle.  It isn't what I actually believe, but it's a way of
getting around the authorial crutch of "death is punishment."

> Yeah, that much can be done now (or ten years ago). No story
> engine, fractal
> narrative, or artificial intelligence required. BUT... it's not
> good enough.

The framework is plenty good enough.  What isn't good enough, is the talent,
budget, and production time allocated to such projects.  We don't have
sufficient amplifying tools to pull these things off.  My current stalling
tactic is to treat my 4X wargame as a serial.  I hope to develop a business
model where people continue to pay me for installments of content I develop
over several years.

> It can only ever appeal to gamers.

That IMHO is not the problem.  The problem is the hardcore gamers are
usually not very good authors and are writing for a hardcore gamer crowd.
Nothing will change this other than authorial willingness.  Let's face it,
I'm going to write a 4X wargame, for people who want to play 4X wargames.
Then I'm going to write The Game Of Immortals, and it's going to deal with
immortality, death, and Existential themes which will likely turn off a mass
market.  These projects will take me into my mid-30's.  When I've gotten
them off my chest, maybe I'll be ready to do something more popular, but
likely not before.

> Its too much about players following
> paths, not enough about the paths responding to the players.

Again, I do not believe "paths must respond to players."  I believe "players
must enjoy what they're doing."  If you sell the player that he enjoys what
he's doing, you've won.  Doesn't matter what technology you're using.

> So, hello AI, hello story engines, hello fractal narrative, hello
> interactive storytelling problem...

It's very much an engineer's way of facing a fundamentally human problem.

> Yes, I agree that that seems to be the consensus, and I share
> your suspicion
> that it is largely perjorative. The analysis that led to that
> consensus seems
> to have considered everything except the possibility that the game might
> actually appeal to people.

Oh, I think the consensus *does* say that the game appeals to people.  But
the appeal is expressed in the pejorative.  "Those stupid people who like
coffee table books!"  "What a bunch of mindless assholes clicking on pretty
pictures!"  The error in such pejoratives is they don't answer why other
Myst-like games with pretty pictures *didn't* sell.  I don't believe it's
for purely marketing reasons.  I believe there are better and worse ways to
visually stimulate people.  I could write a Myst, I imagine someday I will,
in sort of an Impressionist Surrealist style, and that I'll do a good job at
it.  Will it sell?  Who knows, but certainly I know the visual theory I'll
be using.  The important thing to realize is that interactivity does not
take place by the pushing of buttons or clicking of mice.  It takes place in
the player's *MIND*.  Anything that reaches into the player's mind and
engages it, causes it to turn the parts around, that is what's required.
That's how Myst's 1st island box cover art works, and it's how all the good
paintings in the museums work.

> Myst does have some of the classic blunders of the adventure genre, but
> others it avoided -- for example, one can explore much farther without
> solving any puzzles than any other adventure game ever allowed. Its
> competitors and even its own sequel made worse blunders, thus lending
> credence to the unfortunate idea that the original's success was a fluke.

I agree that puzzle bottlenecks are stupid.  I used to be so radical about
this that I used to say that all puzzles have to go.  My views are more
moderate now, but they're still "puzzles are not allowed to be impediments."


Cheers,                         www.3DProgrammer.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.