Interactive storytelling and me; and a challenge

[Benja Fallenstein <benja.fallenstein@gmail.com>]

Hi all.

I cannot answer Dan's question about interactive storytelling in the
abstract; I will have to tell my own story to explain my current
opinion on the subject (and to explain why I'm late to this party,
too).

I have recently been the person that Chris, in his e-mail, explains he
is not: I have dabbled in interactive storytelling every now and then,
for a week or two every couple of months, without achieving anything
at all. This has been the case, in fact, since the last Phrontisterion
I attended, three years ago in 2002. Preceding that, I had been
working intensely on an interactive storytelling design for a couple
of months; I wanted to prepare a demo for Phrontisterion, and failed.

Come Phrontisterion, unable to illustrate with a demo, I decided to
talk about a general point about interactive storytelling that I felt
was important and that was yet missing from the designs of others I
had seen. I would talk about my design in the abstract, and draw
examples from it to illustrate my point.

I failed.

I was told, politely, that my explanation had been less than clear;
and that worse, my examples had obstructed more than they helped, and
had not managed to make the idea concrete. "Not enough details," said
Chris. Another attendee told me they had understood the general point
better than the examples I gave.

After that, I was demotivated. Not because I had failed to make my
point to the Phrontisterion audience, but because I had, after months
of work, no implementation to show, *and* I had failed to make my
point to the Phrontisterion audience.

(As a side note, the point I had been trying to make was, in brief,
this. We had always been saying that the task was to proceduralize the
workings of drama, that the dramatic meaning must come from the
author, but entered in some procedural form; and many had argued that
combinatorial complexity could allow many different story instances to
be created. The goal, then, must in my eyes be to achieve
combinatorial complexity of *dramatic* elements:  not to create
myriads of tellings of the same story, or the same couple of stories,
but to create myriads of slightly different meanings by creating
myriads of combinations of *meaningful* elements. I imagine such 'plot
elements' to take roughly the form of a template with several open
slots, like a class in OOP if you will; for example, something along
the lines of, "[Character 1] is spying on [character 2], because they
know that [character 2] did [what?], which makes them suspect that
they have contact to [character 3]." Now, it would increase the number
of combinations much -- and thus give the player a much more
interesting range of things to do -- if these templates took as slots
not only atomic values (i.e. individual entities created by the
author, such as characters), but also instances of other templates. As
an obvious example, "[Character 1] threatens [character 2] that they
will reveal [which secret] if [character 2] does not [do what?]."
There would then be several templates for different "kinds" of secrets
("[character 1] stole the crown jewels", "[character 1] killed
[character 2]", and so on), and different templates that refer to
these secrets. I call these guys "higher-order plot elements" and
believe that they are important. End of brief aside.)

This had not been the first time I had attempted an interactive
storytelling project. I first thought about interactive storytelling
some ten years ago or so; it is hard to tell. I believe I gave the
problem some passing thought, but I don't think I can say I had
seriously attempted anything before my first contact with Chris'
ideas, which was through an interview with a German computer games
magazine. In the interview, Chris mentioned his work on the
Erasmatron; he was so short on details, that I in fact thought the
whole erasmabusiness rather crackpottish, but his vigorous arguing for
interactive storytelling at least made me consider the whole matter
more seriously, I believe.

I was, at the time, greatly interested in game design; I expected
being an author and designing games to be what I would want to do with
my life. I have to admit that, shamefully, I have much of the same
track record with game design and interactive storytelling; I never
got anything interesting and substantial implemented in either medium.
In a strange way this gives me some hope: as games do get implemented,
the fault there must be with me rather than with what I'm trying to
do; so if I just get better at what I'm doing, shouldn't I be able to
realize an interactive storytelling work, too? (Then again, my lack of
success with game design may be partially due with the *kinds* of
games I wanted to design.)

Thus, after reading the abovementioned interview (I think), I spent
the better part of a year, from Summer 1997 to Spring 1998, on writing
a book and designing a game that had interactive storytelling
elements, and was interwoven with the book (the plan was to have
alternating episodes of interactive game and linear story). The book
got written (although the story didn't get finished); the game didn't.
-- When I say I spend the better part of a year on this, I need to
qualify this by saying that I worked on this in my free time; it
wasn't a full-time thing.

It must have been around Spring 1998 that I found my way to Chris'
website (perhaps it was mentioned in the interview, I don't remember),
and started absorbing his writings as well as learning about the
Erasmatron. Though of course I have nobody to compare me to, I think
I'm probably one of the most avid readers of the collection; I've
probably read every article that was online at the time more than
once, and some many times. (Although I don't always agree with him,
Chris certainly has had a great influence on what I've later went on
to do, also outside interactive storytelling.)

I believed, at the time, that I could write a storyworld with the
Erasmatron (although I also did realize some of the limitations that
later made me decide to abandon it for my work). I downloaded the free
version, limited to 200 verbs, as soon as a Windows version became
available (I later bought a Mac to be able to use the Erasmatron in
its original environment), and later became one of the few paying
customers of Erasmatron 1. (Chris in fact cautioned me first, saying
that he believed 200 verbs to be enough for a small storyworld --
expecting it to be around 1000 for a large one -- but I felt that it
wasn't enough for what I wanted to do with it. He has since changed
his opinion, I believe, saying that thousands of verbs are needed for
interactive storytelling.) I spend the next year on trying to create a
storyworld with the Erasmatron, but, again, failed in this. I reached
what Laura considered a relatively large verb count (concentrating,
however, mostly on verbs and linkages, i.e. the structure of the
interaction, rather than tinkertoy text and decision scripts), but I
couldn't see any end, or playable subset/demo even, on the horizon.

Over the next three years I didn't continuously work on interactive
storytelling, but came back to it regularly, working on projects for
longer periods of time; over the course of one year, 2001, I even
taught an interactive storytelling course at my school, hoping to
learn something in the process (and I did, but not enough).

When, in Spring 2002, I set out to work on the storyworld I wanted to
demonstrate at the Phrontisterion that summer (and at the hypertext
conference the same summer), I expected to be able to finish a simple
demo of one scene quickly, on the order of days or weeks at most, and,
by summer, have a fuller demonstration of a sizeable part of the
story. As the weeks wore on, I changed my goal to having at least a
demonstration of one scene ready; as I said, I failed in that, too,
and even in explaining my approach in the abstract.

At some point after that, then, I resolved not to talk about
interactive storytelling until I had something to show for it. It
seemed to me that I was deceiving myself and others if I pretended I
was doing any sort of real work on interactive storytelling, as long
as nothing playable came out of it. Nor did I have real faith in the
work that others were doing, because I have not read or played
anything so far that has come close to true engaging interactive
storytelling. On my pessimistic days I think that interactive
storytelling is as unsurmountable an artistic problem as artificial
intelligence is a technical one -- while in artificial intelligence it
seems so possible to enter enough facts about the world to make the
computer understand things, or alternatively to create a program that
will learn to understand by finding patterns in text, in interactive
storytelling it seems so possible to model drama in the computer and
find dramatically meaningful ways for the user to interact with it --;
and my pessimistic days increased in number. I worked on my other
projects, and only returned to dabble in interactive storytelling now
and then, in increasingly longer intervals.

Chris spurred my interest again this year, when he sent out the
invitation to Phrontisterion VI, in January. (It seems like he finally
managed to put me on his mailing list properly.) Yet, I kept with my
earlier resolve: I decided to have another stab at interactive
storytelling, and, if I came up with anything playable by the time of
Chris' deadline, I would see whether I could somehow find the money to
go to Phrontisterion. I had the same reaction to Dan's mail; thus my
failure to reply to it.

Needless to say (as I did not start this e-mail with a "look here"
link), I failed at this, again. (On a slightly positive note, I made a
little theoretical progress, though; more on that below.)  At times
like this I wonder if I shouldn't just give it up for good, seeing as
I seem to be too dumb or lazy to accomplish anything here.

And yet, again I gather some hope from a source that could as well be
taken as a source of discouragement, namely, Chris' pessimistic mail.
If Chris can plunge on for years, even at a point where he isn't sure
any longer that he is going to accomplish anything with it, cannot I?
And I remind myself of the advice that the only way of learning to
write well is to write at all, even if that means writing badly;
perhaps the only way for me to finish a piece of interactive
storytelling is to work on it at all, even if it means not finishing
stuff along the way.

At the same time, I have started to feel that my other projects (which
are off-topic here; Google will inform you if you are interested) do
not fulfill me; I need something for the heart as well as for the
mind.

However, keeping silent about what I'm doing doesn't seem to pan out
well, as I seem to end up only dabbling in interactive storytelling,
and less and less at that. So I wonder if it isn't time to try the
opposite approach.

Of all the essays on Chris' site, the ones that have been most helpful
in practical work on interactive storytelling have, I think, been
those in which he talks specifically about the work on one particular
piece of interactive storytelling; exemplarily, as in the "Theme and
Interactivity" essay for Lilan--

http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/Lilan/theme.html

-- or with respect to an actual storyworld, as in the Le Morte
D'Arthur design diaries --

http://www.erasmatazz.com/library/Le_Morte_DArthur/Index.html

There are much too few of these writings, in fact; not to diminish the
value of your other work, Chris, but these are truly closest to being
helpful in the actual creation of a storyworld. I find them very
educational, too, in what they leave out; I can imagine that
discussion about essays like these would be even more helpful than the
essays themselves (though I will leave the exercise for another day).

I have long felt that the artistic issues in interactive storytelling
did not get enough attention in our discussions. At the Phrontisteria,
I quickly grew weary of discussing the markets for products that I
unsuccessfully struggled to create. On the lists, we discussed theory,
but from a high-level point of view, with contrived examples, and not
at all close, I too often felt, to the problems I felt in actually
creating interactive storytelling. Perhaps exposing what we are
actually doing, and what problems we are struggling with, as Chris has
done in the LMD design diaries, and discussing that, would provide
discussion that is actually useful.

Therefore, here is at long last the challenge alluded to in the title:
I ask those of us who are actively working on an interactive
storytelling project to keep a public diary of their design notes.
This seems easy enough to do myself; I have always written notes for
myself, I merely need to give up on their privacy and write them with
slightly more polish so that they are understandable by others. Is
there any interest in this at all? Would someone else want to read
such a diary? If anybody tells me they are interested, I shall keep a
public diary of my further interactive storytelling efforts; I will
pick up again work on Wild Heart, the storyworld I left three years
ago. (Perhaps I shall be able to provide the details this way that
were missing from my talk at Phrontisterion IV.) Will anybody join me
in keeping such a diary?

The one rule I shall set for myself is that at least 50% of my posts
will deal with the work on this particular storyworld, rather than
generic theory. I will not commit to finish this project or not to
abandon it; I have broken such promises to myself and sometimes others
too often for that to make any sense. I will simply try and see what
happens.


As for the slight theoretical discovery I made this spring. The full
reasons are beyond the scope of this mail, but I believe that the
interface that gives the player a limited list of choices to react to
a situation, as in Erasmatron 1, is important; suffice to say, here,
that it provides us with a way to allow and force the player into
making a dramatic choice. I believe, in fact, that it is entirely
possible to write an interactive short story by the simple decision
tree method: yes, it would be a lot of work to write 63 choice points
and 127 pieces of text to give the player six choices, but it would
also be entirely possible and would allow for telling a compelling
short short story.

The fact that I have never seen a single such story which was engaging
and compelling is merely another of these things I draw twisted hope
from; since this is, apparently, a surmountable artistic problem, one
can hope that the creation of longer interactive storytelling is, too.

In any case, there are some places around where such stories are
created by readers adding "chapters" to loose ends of the story they
are reading; writing.com is such a place. The results are absymally
bad. That, of course, is unsurprising; any story that people would add
to independently, without any overall concept to guide them and
without any regard for quality, *in an artform nobody really
understands yet*, would probably be absymally bad, interactive or not.

Yet I wondered whether there was something to be learned by looking at
others' mistakes. There's a large amount of knowledge around about
mistakes that lots of beginners make when writing linear prose, and
that knowledge has been gained by reading that work. So I set out to
analyze some of those absymally bad but existing stories, expecting to
come up with a big category of blunders you'd want to avoid. I looked
at the choices offered at the end of each "chapter" and nothing else,
and recorded why they were dumb.

To my surprise, after a short while, I found that I could come up not
with a big catalog, but a small one: with only five criteria, I was
able to weed out all the stupid choice points, and find the precious
few that actually had some promise, and I was able to formulate these
five criteria positively, as a list of things that a good choice point
should be. Here they are. I am assuming, as I said, that a fixed list
of options (more than one) is given to the player.

1. "Understanding": For each option, we must have an idea of what its
dramatic effect is; a rule-of-thumb test is whether we are able to
imagine some of the things that could plausibly happen after each
option is picked. This weeds out our beloved "Do you take the left
path or the right path"-type choice points.

2. "Interesting option": The result we can imagine of each option must
be interesting somehow ("interesting" as in "you might wanna read
it"). This weeds out "The treasure is behind the hill, but the hill is
steep; do you want to climb it anyway and get the treasure, or  would
you rather sit around here and wait?"-type choice points. It also
weeds out choice points where *all* choices are boring.

3. "Viable option": Each of the options must be something that the
main character *might* possibly want to do. This weeds out all the
suicidal options that people seem to be fond of.

(Yes, all of them. They aren't fond of suicidal options that would
have some sort of dramatic meaning, if you were thinking of that.)

4. "Not same": The dramatic impact of each option, as the player is
able to understand it without actually trying out the option, must be
different. This conveniently weeds out, amongst others, the type of
choice point where you die if you don't pick the "right" option, but
you are given no freaking clues what the "right" option might be.

5. "Dramatic difference": The difference between the dramatic impacts
of the different options must be a dramatic one, itself. This weeds
out choice points that are all well and good, except that the options
have nothing to do with each other. "Do you want to go to slay the
dragon or would you rather solve the mystery of the missing priest?"

Here's an example of an actual choice point from writing.com that
passed these criteria, and in my opinion actually has some promise as
a choice point, structurally: You're lost somewhere in the wilderness.
A car with a young couple has stopped, but since you have a bloddy
forehead and muddy clothes for some reason, they suspect a fugitive on
the run. (While you are not, you are actually somewhat psychotic.)
Now: "You see the pity in the woman's eyes along with the knowledge
that her boyfriend will not be so caring. The man gets out of the car.
He does a decent job at hiding the knife, but somehow you know it's
there." Your choice:

        You're stronger than the man. Take him out, steal his car, 
        and find a place (sic)
 
        There is no choice. You must charm the woman into helping you. 
        She is your onl (sic)

Source: http://www.writing.com/main/interact/item_id/917768/action/view/chapter_map/11111121

Whatever you may think of the story or the writing, this is an actual
choice, with dramatic tension between the two options, and we can
imagine something about how the story would go on in each case. So
it's possible to pass my criteria (though I don't particular care for
this particular instance of passing it, but anyway).

So long, and thank you for the fish. --
- Benja