RE: Interactive Drama: Why I've lost interest

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

Kenneth Lu wrote:
>
> There's been some work in gimmicky poetry generation and the
> like.  My
> favorite is this:
> http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/
> (reload to get a new randomly generated post-modernist essay every
> time!)

Now that's funny!  Holy academic economies Batman, with a few tweaks we
could all be tenured professors...

> And my idea is that we can apply some of those research principles to
> generating dialogue that's more exciting than repeated "Welcome to
> Corneria!": http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=010412

That also is funny!  I've passed it on to gamedesign-l.

> I guess you've caught me in that I am definitely biased
> toward simulations, and I'm actually rather interested in using story
> to serve simulation, in addition to vice versa.

J'accuse!

> > People escape to dramatic human interaction for a reason, to
> > relieve the tedium of their daily lives.  A dramatist
> > doesn't want an
> > open ended system, he wants some kinds of human interactions and not
> > others.  He wants the interactions to be related in a way that's
> > psychologically fulfilling.
>
> Point taken.  We don't have to simulate truly basic human life... we
> can simulate extreme human life...

A technology that got rid of the basic and humdrum, leaving only the
fascinating and extraordinary, would indeed be quite impressive.  I have
my doubts as to whether it's possible, but it's a good conceptual
framework.  Screenwriting can often be seen as "the art of eliminating
the dull."

> Oh, so there's a good example: Imagine if the Sims could
> communication
> in a richer vocabulary than just symbols.

That's like imagining your dialogue can be anything.  Including all the
boring stuff that most people utter.  Good dialogue is a skill.  The
Sims is better for *avoiding* dialogue, since it can't hope to do it
justice.  Instead it lets players project their own impressions on the
pictoral icons and babble sounds.

> I did actually write a hypertext story once, for a class.  It was a
multiple-perspective time travel story, but I controlled the branching
by making it closed-loop time travel.  The thing about all these
hypertext things is that I don't consider them "non-linear" at all.
They're no different, fundamentally, than Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.
They are extremely linear, just linear along several branches.  I
prefer to think of them as "branched linear".  Truly non-linear
storytelling would require game mechanics to generate story
dynamically, not just statically.

The value of the term "non-linear" is highly overrated.  People usually
construe it to mean "fundamentally more exciting and open-ended than
linear."  It would be better to think of it in the sense of "non-linear
video editing."  You can do everything out of order, but at the end of
the day, you still end up with a linear video.  Out-of-order execution
is better for solving adventure game problems than presenting stories.
If you get stuck on some puzzle, you can try something else, you don't
have to stop playing the game.  For stories, it adds a lot of extra work
for uncertain benefit.

"Non-linear" can be interesting if the elements of the story have
different meaning if they're arranged in a different order.  This is
implicit in the process of making a film: one is always trying to find
the order of events that best advances the story.  If one were truly
brilliant at non-linear authorship, one would be able to jumble the
scenes in any order and a different + good story would be told every
time.  But given the size of the search space, such brilliance is not
realistically achievable.  n story elements would have n! orderings.
You could devise various ways to keep n small, but even 5! = 120.

> So in case you're interested, my story is here:
http://narrative.mit.edu/~kenlu/ci/

I'm lacking time right now, but I did read the first bits.  I find the
technique of changing perspectives between 2 characters interesting.
The same scene "instant replayed" from 2 vantage points.

> My point is, the ridiculous effort required for branched-linear
stories
is precisely why I'm interested instead in having authors spend more
time on dynamic generation.  I totally agree with you that
branched-linear is never really going to go anywhere truly different.

Well, I don't quite agree with that.  It's just that to do all the
branches well, you're at least talking about writing at the length of a
fat novel.  I don't know if that much writing would prove satisfying,
compared to traditional books.  Non-linear stories do have the problem
that a lot of your content can be skipped, resulting in a seemingly
shorter work.  However, if the reader has an incentive to re-enter the
work, they may get a few readings out of it before moving on to bigger
and better things.  Clawing at the last 20% of unseen content is a
problem; probably most people ain't gonna bother.  Given these
difficulties, one could devise a reader that indicates the paths towards
unread pages, however.


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

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

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