Re: Interactive storytelling and me; and a challenge

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

Hi Brandon --

sorry that it took me a while to reply to your mail. I'll reply out of order.

On 5/25/05, Brandon J. Van Every <vanevery@indiegamedesign.com> wrote:
> Benja Fallenstein wrote:
...
> >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?

This is an interesting point, but I have no solution for this problem;
I'll ignore it and merely say that I'm interested in reading about and
discussing what others are doing, and the problems they're trying to
cope with, even if they are working on a different style of
interactive storytelling, or something related like interactive
fiction / hypertext fiction / etc.

> >I ask those of us who are actively working on an interactive
> >storytelling project to keep a public diary of their design notes.
...
> >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. 

But whenever we have been discussing something here, I've drawn my
examples out of thin air, because examples from the projects I've been
working on would have taken too much explanation. If I had the
explanation already online in the form of a blog, I could just
reference it. I don't think that you would have more patience for me
posting my design notes here than posting them on a blog...

Actually, I *am* going to do this, even though nobody has indicated
that they're interested; I'll just start talking to myself and if
anybody else is interested they can come look.

> >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." 

I am working on interactive storytelling. I have a "metastory" in mind
that I want to "tell." Others want to express themselves in different
ways; fair enough. Me, personally, when I want to tell a linear story,
I write a plain old text, and that makes me happy.

When I'm talking about interactive storytelling, it's not limited to
what you call "metastory generation," but it doesn't include text
adventures (say). Rather, it's a form where a player makes choices
that determine what happens in the story; each time the player makes a
choice, the story can potentially go into different directions.

The simple branching tree is one way to implement this, although it
won't work for works longer than short-short-stories. So interactive
storytelling doesn't necessarily imply any new technology development.

Interactive storytelling is what I'm interested in doing myself, for
artistic reasons (i.e., for the pleasure of working on the story, and
hopefully eventually for the pleasure of others playing it), not for
technical reasons (i.e., being fascinated by the algorithms etc.) nor
for business reasons.

When I am talking about the difficulties of creating compelling
interactive storytelling, I'm talking about *interactive
storytelling*, not about the other artforms you can do with computers.

> What you want to plunge into, is a personal decision.  It's clear where Chris
> stands, for himself. 

Sure. I think it's also clear where I stand, for myself; perhaps the
above has explained it.

> 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. 

In that taxonomy, I am an artist, I believe.

> 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.

Ah. So because I'm not interested in artform X, I'm not an artist? I
guess I was wrong, above. I'm a technologist, because I'm interested
in exploring artform Y.

Artists don't need that musical instrument stuff. They'd go sing a
song rather than tinker with the sounds a piece of metal makes when
you mount it on a wooden box.

> 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.

Interesting; that's really far from the problems I'm trying to grapple
with. But this is also a point in case for what I meant: Without
having details on the problems you're working with, I don't have any
relevant discussion to offer.

> 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.

That sounds useful. I'll try to keep this in mind when this hits me again.

> >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 just found that, expanding the most simple skeletal
> form of a stream of high-minded ideas can be quite exhausting.

True. And more than that, it is *hard* to come up with compelling
choices. But I still believe it is *possible* to write such a story,
and that it would be worthwhille doing, despite being such a large
amount of work, because I think this has the potential to be an
artistically quite powerful medium.

> 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. 

You mean because you don't know how long the user will sit before each
choice point, pondering it?

From my experience with reading that kind of work (and Erasmatronic
storyworlds, too), I believe that the answer is simple: A reader with
at least a bit of experience in the medium will take a very short time
for each choice point, choosing what seems right at the moment
practically instantly after having read the main text (or skimmed over
it).

> 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.

I think I agree completely, here, although I wouldn't emphasize the
*inability* of the player, but the *disinterest*: When reading a
story, it's the author's job to make it interesting, and it's much the
same in the interactive forms I want to explore.

> >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.

I think that's a crapload of nonsense, but I don't think there's any
point in discussing it. :-) Let's just agree to disagree here,
discussing this won't move interactive whatever forward.

> 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. 

Mhm, true.

> [Understanding = Perceivability, Interesting option = High Concept,
> Viable option = Well, dunno,  Not same = Perceivability, High Concept,
> Dramatic difference = Perceivability, High Concept.]

So you're saying that my taxonomy of "five things a choice point must
get right" can be reduced to the two ideas of what you call
perceivability (things must happen for discernable reasons) and high
concept (make it interesting and new).

I don't think I agree. Of course you can trivially reduce it further,
in the sense that you can reduce the whole endeavor to the single
rule: "Make it a *good* choice point, dammit!" But I feel, for myself,
that the above list is more helpful in pointing out *what exactly* is
wrong with a "bad" choice point, perhaps giving you an idea in which
direction to search for a better one.

Your concepts are considerably wider than mine, as they apply to
stories in general; my points *only* apply to choice points, as I felt
that this is a problem where we have very little understanding, as
opposed to stories and plots in general, for which there are a lot of
well-known rules of thumb about blunders to avoid.

Regarding the one where you said "Well, dunno":

> >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,

Hmm, I think you might be taking this in the opposite way than it was
meant: to mean that the author should implement any option the player
may reasonably want to take; that's something Chris might say, I don't
think I agree.

What I meant was a rule to *rule out* some options that the author
might otherwise implement: namely those that nobody would want to
choose. The most important reason for this is to prevent the author
from creating a list of options of which only one is reasonable, thus
not giving the player a choice at all. Hm, it's not so harmful if
there are at least two reasonable choices; I still think it's stupid
to also include options the player wouldn't want to take, but it
doesn't destroy the choice point.

> 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.

I think what you disagree here is Chris' notion that the perfect
storyworld/game offers the player all reasonable options, not my
notion that a good choice point doesn't offer the player unreasonable
options.

> 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!

That's an interesting question. When attempting "interactive short
stories", I've often found that I would put in successive variations
of the *same* choice -- you might think that once the player has
picked one kind of option, they would pick the same kind of option
when offered a similar choice (e.g., arguing about something vs.
giving in, or some such). On the other hand, I think this can be used
to explore a choice from different sides; perhaps you're more likely
to stand up to the small bully, but more likely to run away from the
big bully, to pick a stupid and simplistic example.

A propos stupid and simplistic example: This is again something that
would be nicer to discuss when looking at the story someone is
actually writing, rather than in the abstract...

Cheers,
- Benja