Re: Interactive storytelling and me; and a challenge

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

Hi!

On 6/2/05, Brandon J. Van Every <vanevery@indiegamedesign.com> wrote:
> Benja Fallenstein wrote:
> I don't know about 'nonsensical'.  The first attempts had to make sense
> for people to keep doing them, after all.  Rather, when you break the
> rules about expected navigational cues, you have a lot of extra
> responsibility for leading the audience.  If you're unaware of this
> extra layer of responsibility, your work will likely fail to keep the
> audience's attention.  If you are aware, you can pull very different
> things off.  For instance, look at Pulp Fiction.

Mhm.

[snip]

I think our opposing opinions on audience engineering can be
summarized based on this:

> I think it is very dangerous to regard "audience engineering" as
> something separate from the writing process.  It runs the risk of being
> nothing more than a self-indulgent personal conversation.

And I think it's dangerous to regard it as a central part of the
writing process, because the result runs the risk of being the product
of wrong stereotypical assumptions about an audience rather than a
product of passion.

I worry about how the audience's experience of my work whenever I work
on it, but I assume that the audience is going to be "someone
essentially like me." I may find out later that people have problems
with interaction patterns that seem obvious to me, and if I can do
something about it at that point, I probably will; but I'm not going
to hazard wild guesses now and try to make a work that not even I
like.

(Of course that's an extreme statement. I'm casting my opinion in
strong words to explain my reasons; I actually expect the truth to be
between the extreme I formulated and the one you did.)

> >>You seriously don't understand the issue that money tracks talent?
> >
> >I understand that a lot of great art gets made without artists being
> >paid for it.
> >
> What about great engineering, or great production companies?  I see a
> helluva lot less of that!

Open source has a lot of great engineering in my opinion, if you
consider programming to be "engineering." If not, and regarding
production companies, I believe the issue is less that money tracks
talent and more that in our society, you need a lot of money to do
what a production company does or to build the products an engineer
designs.

I'm not disputing, btw, that money tracks talent in the sense that a
company paying more money has better chances in attracting talented
people to work for them, other things being equivalent. I'm disputing
that making something great and posting it on the Internet is
something that only a few mavericks would ever do.

In fact, I think that in any field where you can a) make something
without requiring expensive resources or a large number of people
taking directions from someone else, b) post the result on the
internet, and c) have somebody who downloads it enjoy/make use of it
without requiring expensive resources, the portion of people doing so
will be statistically significant.

> >>I don't think you've defined who's in charge of the "main character."
> >
> >No, but I was assuming the style where the reader "plays" the main
> >character, i.e. makes choices for them.
> >
> I should have spoken more precisely.  Who will *take authorial
> responsibility* for the main character?  The author, or the player?  Or
> even, a technology?  There's a spectrum of possibilities here.  They
> result in very different stories and technologies.  Your job as an
> author becomes very different.  That's why I said "dunno," because it's
> all within the realm of your authorial intent.  It's not a good guiding
> principle for how to construct choice points.

As I said in my e-mail, what the rule is trying to prevent is that all
but one of the options offered are options that the player will
presumably not want to take, because that means that the player does,
in fact, have no choice at all. Perhaps I'm missing the point, but
nothing you said in the paragraph above seems to be related to that?

> Whereas "make sure the player knows what's going on" (Perceivability)
> and "make sure it's interesting enough to bother to write" (High
> Concept) are good guiding principles.

For you :-)

> >Most people seem to feel that the main character shouldn't have a
> >character other than what the player gives them;
> >
> Most people are self-centered morons with no writing skills. 

I was talking about most people in this community (for example, in
recent discussions on this list, or Chris in his book). I don't think
that there's anything wrong with that style of interactive
storytelling, either. It's just different from what I'm aiming for.

> Obeying
> the above principle to the limit, you give the kiddies a pot, a spoon,
> and a cardboard box to bang upon. 

The principle that the main character shouldn't have a character other
than what the player gives them? What's the relationship to pots,
spoons, and boxes?

The assumption of that line of thinking is that the other characters
are still played by the computer, and that there is a drama manager
whose job it is to make the whole story satisfying, and that the
player doesn't intentionally try to obstruct the story if they want it
to be entertaining as a story.

Cheers,
- Benja