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Re: Interactive storytelling and me; and a challenge

Benja Fallenstein wrote:

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.


Well, let's be clear on a difference of goals here. People in rec.arts.int-fiction ship new works of IF, some with innovation and compelling artistic merit, quite regularly. There's a big difference beween "shipping IF" and "shipping IF metastory generation." What you want to plunge into, is a personal decision. It's clear where Chris stands, for himself. Chris's stand for himself is about as correct as my willingness to gather signatures rather than be a paid programmer right now. Well, who knows, I might bend readily if a decent job was in front of me, but I haven't run into that decent job yet, and I have little patience for the game of looking. The language tools I'm learning about are unpopular and so that makes the job hunting quite painful.

I think the question might be as simple as, are you an artist or a technologist? People decidedly on the artistic side of the spectrum do not care about technologies. They don't need this meta-story stuff. They'd go write some piece of IF and ship it. So you might want to decide if you're that kind of artist.

Similarly, people who are decidedly on the technological side of the spectrum don't care about art. The game industry is full of people like this, and it's reflected in most of the products.

It's people who are in the middle, who are both artists and technologists, who have all the headaches. It can be very difficult to get anything done as they struggle for paradigms that will bridge these worlds to their satisfaction.

Increasingly, I do see the world of computerdom in terms of deployed and usable tools, rather than languages or lofty programming paradigms. I just don't think the high ideals count when you can't get anything basic done. I've looked at a lot of High Level Languages over the past 2 years. I still don't have a production programming environment on Windows to show for this yet, and it's only pretty recently that I'm getting closer to one. One thing I've had to sacrifice along the way, is any pretense that I'm going to convince other developers to follow in my footsteps. The tools I'm trying to use are too research / bleeding edge / broken to have any influence on game industry proclivities at all. That's hard for me to swallow, as I was trying to figure out a way to make money on such things. It seems my only recourse is to ship an actual game and make money on that. I can't sell my tools knowledge to the game industry, as my approaches would be wholly unprofitable to them. In fact, to date they've been wholly unprofitable to me. I just have a cumulative faith in my endeavors.

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.


Could be, but one needs common, enabling tools to have such a discussion. To ground it in tangibles. This is often a chicken-and-egg problem. How do you get critical mass behind a particular style of authoring?

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?

That's pretty much the raison d'etre of a blog. I have a problem with blogs: they go on and on and on about somebody else. My patience for that is limited, as is most people's. I personally think that discussing / debating these issues is more valuable to people. When multiple people contribute to a discussion, multiple people are mentally engaged. Now, I can't force people to talk. I've seen many a list where people just didn't want to talk. I don't know that such people would produce blogs anyways! But for those who do talk, I think "the Socratic method" is best for delivering the knowledge. One simply has to focus on the relevant subject. As you said: artistic problems.

My 'artistic' problem is that my programming tools are terrible and get in my way. So I'm still slogging at that basic problem. I don't have any artistic problems with pencil and paper. Well, I do, but they're not the things holding me back. I can work through conceptual issues just fine.

A common artistic problem, is the issue of faith when no tangible progress is being made. Like sustaining one's own morale. I have many things to say about that. To say something brief, I just acknowledge that in this trade, I'm going to get lost. That's going to be depressing. So when I get lost, I try to realize that I'm lost, and then start concentrating on 'getting found' again. I accept that I'll be lost. I only try to get better at the damage control. I actually expect 'downtime' of a month or so when I am lost. I don't want these sporadic months to rattle me in the long term, because I know (from historical evidence) that they will happen. I want to keep in mind the ultimate pattern of artistic development, rather than the current depressing one.

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.


A few months ago, some Italian guys wanted to test / debug a hypertext thingy they had cooked up. So I tried to blow out a framework for a story, premeditating almost nothing. I had some thematic ideas in mind, based on other more serious story projects I've pursued, but really my only goal was to write off-the-cuff to test the authoring capabilities of the hypertext tool. I'm surprised how quickly I got bored with all the branches. It's exhausting, and I wasn't even trying to write "stupid" branches like what happens when you pick a cup up. I don't care about that. I just found that, expanding the most simple skeletal form of a stream of high-minded ideas can be quite exhausting. One benefit of a more linear story construction workflow, is it entails a psychological committment to specifics. So if you know the goal(s) of your story, what your Plot Points and Acts are going to be and such, you have a way of measuring how far along in the endeavor you are. It's much, much more difficult to keep track of an ever-expanding series of story possibilities. It's a navigation problem; it's easy to get lost.

Are your readers going to weight your branches as you do? Are they going to dwell on things to the same degree you do? In linear media, particularly film, you have control over the pacing. When using open-ended technologies, pacing is much tougher. I don't buy the idea that "the user should be in charge" of the pacing, as really the user doesn't know jack about it and will probably bore himself. Any more than the user knows how to act. I think, IF has to be a collaboration between user and author where the author is taking the role of Director. The user cannot be trusted to just come up with all this good stuff himself. If he could, he really wouldn't need you as a storyteller. Well, some people actually have this philosophy, that their only job is to provide the user some tools and then they play with them. I don't hold with it though. I want to impose my own authorial voice, as mediated by the user.

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.


Again, the linear story entails psychological committments that help its production. Trying to create an IF metastory generator might be the ultimate 'Perceiver' trap, in terms of Myers Briggs Type Indicators. http://www.personalitypage.com . In such open ended work, where is the committment to goals?

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.


I disagree. I'd say, rather, nobody has a financial committment to the quality of the undertaking. Why *should* you put your best work on the web for free? I sure as hell won't.

Also, the story processes may be quite fine for *them*, the authors. I've done collaborative writing "jazz" before. It's a lousy read for someone looking at it later, who wasn't participating, but it may serve the needs of the authors just fine. They were psychologically committed to what they were doing. They understood what they were providing *to themselves*. If they're very sophisticated, they may have even understood what they were providing *to each other*, as committed writers. But yes, knowing what to provide *to a general audience* is the hardest problem of all.

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.


Yes; I have expressed this differently as "Perceivability." It's not enough for things to happen in a game world. Things have to happen for discernable reasons. Players have to be able to make logical connections between stuff other people did, how those actions affect them, and why. It's rather much like the difference between "shock" and "suspense" in film. "Shock" is a bomb going off. "Suspense" is seeing the bomb ticking under the table. A game that is mostly composed of shocks appears random. It doesn't matter if I as a Gamemaster know why things are occurring; *the players* have to know why things are occurring. I have to provide them enough facts and events about what happened, so that they mostly experience suspense rather than shock.

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.


I've expressed this as "High Concept." Sitting in a theater is, by default, a waste of time. How are you going to avoid wasting the audience's time? Well, one way is to pursue a storyline that is damn interesting, and / or that people haven't seen before. It should be High Concept. Don't waste time on mundane stuff that everyone has seen a bazillion times. Moving cups around in a room is irrelevant. Dispense with all cups in order to pursue High Concept, even (especially!) if that means your world is not at all realistic. Screw realism! Walking out your front door is realistic; it's boring, and not at all High Concept.

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.


Well, I dunno. I think this is all a question of what you have patience / desire to implement. What the author wants vs. what the player wants, and how the two are going to communicate about it, is a never-ending dance. There are no easy answers here; I think it is the fundamental work of authoring. Like saying "don't write a bad story," when "bad" is of course defined by a demographic. I don't believe in chasing all demographics. I'm not interested in what the main character or player "might" want to do. I'm interested in the High Concept of what I want him to do, and getting the player to swallow 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.


Perceivability, High Concept.

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?"


Perceivability, High Concept.

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).


Filmmakers, and other kinds of writers, talk about differentiating your characters. They shouldn't all be / seem / feel like the same character, they should be quite distinct. Otherwise why bother? (Barring some story about how damn similar 2 people are.) I think this approach is well observed about making IF choices. Again, High Concept. Why am I wasting time answering these sentences, filling in these verbs? Are you going to get me to something compelling, right away? Can you keep moving me to something compelling for every moment of the game? What's the IF equivalent of an "action sequence," where the audience is swept along from one damn thing to another? Can your choices remain that exciting, or are you get stuck in chains where having selected A, then B, C, D, and E are going to pedantically follow. Bor-ring!


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

"The pioneer is the one with the arrows in his back."
                         - anonymous entrepreneur