Lecture 5 CS148/248: Interactive Narrative EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIO UC Santa Cruz School of Engineering www.soe.ucsc.edu/classes/cmps248/Spring2007 [email protected] 24 April 2007
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Transcript Lecture 5 CS148/248: Interactive Narrative EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIO UC Santa Cruz School of Engineering www.soe.ucsc.edu/classes/cmps248/Spring2007 [email protected] 24 April 2007
Lecture 5
CS148/248: Interactive Narrative
EXPRESSIVE INTELLIGENCE STUDIO
UC Santa Cruz
School of Engineering
www.soe.ucsc.edu/classes/cmps248/Spring2007
[email protected]
24 April 2007
Build it to understand it
Building experimental games necessary for
theoretical progress in game studies
Façade as an empirical investigation of the
ludology/narratology debate
Resolving tension between game and story
Authoring story structure (mixable progressions)
The wicked nature of game design
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Game studies and game design
A primary goal of game studies is to understand the form and
structure of games
Usually accomplished by analyzing existing games
However, existing games sparsely sample design space
Commercial games heavily constrained by market concerns
Theories informed by existing games are at best incomplete and at worst
wrong
Theoretically informed construction of experimental games…
Provides a more complete understanding of already sampled regions
Opens up new regions of design space, providing raw material for
theoretical and prescriptive advances
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Case study: the ludology vs. narratology debate
The question: can gameplay and narrative combine (to what
extent do games and narrative overlap)
Status
Fatigue and malaise (including claims that the debate never took
place)
Occasional flare-ups indicate little progress
Our concern is that if pushed, some game scholars would say only
“pure” gameplay can offer high-agency
Fundamental tension: agency vs. narrative progression
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Existing games insufficient
Easy to conclude that narrative is incompatible with
gameplay from existing commercial games
Canned missions and cut-scenes
Fixed or mildly-branching paths
Can’t develop theories regarding intersection of story
and narrative solely from existing points in design space
You can’t make strong statements of what’s impossible without
building things; dangerous to be prescriptive
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Façade
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Game reinforcement and feedback
Game
Position, time, score
“Score” (summary state)
Game state
Player
Run, jump, shoot
Concrete player actions directly manipulate state
Game state is primarily numeric, relatively simple
The score is directly communicated to the player
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Story not amenable to simple numeric state
Plot structure
(global constraints)
Tension/Complexity
Climax
Crisis
Falling action
Rising action
Exposition
Inciting
incident
Time
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Denouement
Characters
(consistency, inner life)
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Personality
Emotion
Self motivation
Change
Social relationships
Consistency
Illusion of life
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Façade as social, dramatic game
Game
Head game scores
Enriched dramatic performance
Abstraction2
Abstraction1
Game state
Player
Praise, bring up topic, flirt
Abstract player actions (discourse acts) manipulate social state
Game state is heterogeneous, multi-leveled, symbolic and numeric
Score is indirectly communicated through dramatic performance
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Façade’s social games
Affinity game
Player must take sides in character disagreements
Hot-button game
Player can push character hot-buttons (e.g. sex, marriage) to provoke
responses
Therapy game
Player can increase characters’ understanding of their problems
Tension
Not a game, but dramatic tension increases over time and is influenced by
player actions (e.g. pushing character hot-buttons can accelerate the
tension)
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Multiple, mixable progressions
Each social game, plus tension, forms a mixable
progression
A progression consists of
Units of procedural content (e.g. beats, beat goals)
A narrative sequencer that manages the progression and
responds to player interaction
Multiple progressions run simultaneously and can
intermix
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The progressions
Beat sequencing
(overall story + tension)
Beat goal sequencing
(affinity game)
Global mixins (hot button game)
Therapy game similar
Handlers + discourse
Beat manager
Handlers (ABL
meta-behaviors) +
discourse
management
Beat library
Mix-in library
Canonical beat goal
sequence
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The atom of performance
Joint dialog behaviors form the atom of performance
Façade consists of ~2500 joint dialog behaviors
Each 1-5 lines of dialog long (5-20 secs)
System sequences these, including transitions between
Most are interruptible
JDBs use ABL’s joint intention framework to coordinate
performance
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Local agency
Players get immediate responses
interruption often possible
context-specific <-> more general <-> deflection
emotional
information revealing
Narrative effects
Which topics discussed, info revealed
Current affinity
Increase in tension
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Global agency
Player’s “score”
Pattern of player’s interaction is monitored over time
Player’s response to key moments
Used to modulate beats when possible
Some influence over beat sequencing
More if we had more beats!
Ending beat chosen by calculus and evaluation
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Lessons for game studies
Narrative and agency can be reconciled through intermixable,
dynamic progressions
Progressions provide narrative structure at multiple levels
Progression management provides responsiveness to interaction
The narrative is potential – interaction evokes a specific narrative
progression
Generative narrative does not require an AI-complete “author in
a box”
Combine human authorship and autonomous generation
The “gun-toting Gandhi” problem is a red herring
Constrained action spaces still create agency (just like in games)
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Useful residue of the L. vs. N. debate so far
“Interactive narrative” should mean something
Not enough just to declare all games “narrative” by fiat
For a specific game-story, designers must clarify what they mean by
“story”
Pushes on procedurality and agency as the essence of games
Any attempt to combine games and narratives should respect this
But for a design field (like games), theoretical arguments (based,
e.g. on theoretical definitions of “narrative” and “game”), will
never be sufficient
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Wicked problems
Introduced by Rittel and Weber in context of public policy
(1973).
Problem
Solution
Lack definitive problem statement
The problem is only understood through looking for a solution
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The wicked nature of game design
No definitive statement of problem
“Create a game in which you roll a sticky ball around and pick up stuff” does
not define a fixed problem statement
No stopping rule
Resource management determines when you stop
Solutions are not correct/incorrect
Games are only judged relative to each other and in a social and economic
context
No immediate nor ultimate test of solution
Every game design changes the design space (some subtly, some dramatically)
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Interactive story as a wicked problem
“Integrate narrative and gameplay” is not a well-defined
problem
Need to build something to even figure out what the problem is
(e.g. “create progressions with both local and global agency”)
Formal definitions of narrative (e.g. structuralist) don’t provide
a stopping criteria
Determining whether you’ve built a “high-agency interactive
story” is fundamentally audience-centric
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Design and architecture
Author
Player
Game
An architecture is a machine to think with
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Interactive story: architectural and design problem
Concepts such as “progression”, “global agency”, “cumulative
history”, “discourse acts” are inextricably technical
Relationship between two semiotic systems: the code machine and the
rhetorical machine
You must iterate architecture and content to explore new regions
of design space
No design-only solution
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Conclusions
Building games is a necessary part of game studies
Need to explicitly sample the design space
Game design is wicked
A priori theorizing or empirical investigation of existing games are
insufficient to fully understand the design space
Construction of experimental games can shed light on thorny
game studies questions
Example: The ludology vs. narratology debate
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Game Design as Narrative Architecture
Jenkins argues for a middle path in the games/stories debate
Not all games tell stories – for those games, such as Tetris, for which there is no
strong narrative component, we need non-narrative terms and concepts
Many games do have narrative aspirations – games explicit tap the narrative residue
of previous story experiences (e.g. the Star Wars games tap your memories of the
Star Wars story)
Narrative analysis doesn’t need to be prescriptive – he’s not arguing that games
must be narrative, but just that (some) games can contain narrative elements
The experience of playing games can’t be reduced to the experience of a story
Games will not tell stories in the same way as other media – “Stories are not
empty content that can be ported from one media pipeline to another.”
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Evocative spaces
“The most compelling amusement park attractions build upon stories or
genre traditions already well-known to visitors, allowing them to enter
physically into spaces they have visited many times before in their
fantasies.”
“Arguing against games as stories, Jesper Juul suggests that, "you clearly
can't deduct the story of Star Wars from Star Wars the game," whereas a
film version of a novel will give you at least the broad outlines of the plot
(Juul 1998). This is a pretty old-fashioned model of the process of
adaptation. Increasingly, we inhabit a world of transmedia storytelling, one
that depends less on each individual work being self-sufficient than on each
work contributing to a larger narrative economy.”
“In such a system, what games do best will almost certainly center around
their ability to give concrete shape to our memories and imaginings of the
storyworld, creating an immersive environment we can wander through
and interact with.”
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Enacting stories
“Spatial stories, on the other hand, are often dismissed as episodic -- that is, each episode (or
set piece) can become compelling on its own terms without contributing significantly to the
plot development, and often the episodes could be reordered without significantly impacting
our experience as a whole.”
“Spatial stories are held together by broadly defined goals and conflicts and pushed forward
by the character's movement across the map. Their resolution often hinges on the player
reaching his or her final destination…”
“The organization of the plot becomes a matter of designing the geography of imaginary
worlds, so that obstacles thwart and affordances facilitate the protagonist's forward
movement towards resolution.”
“Just as some memorable moments in games depend on sensations (the sense of speed in a
racing game) or perceptions (the sudden expanse of sky in a snowboarding game) as well as
narrative hooks, Eisenstein used the word "attractions" broadly to describe any element
within a work that produces a profound emotional impact, and theorized that the themes of
the work could be communicated across and through these discrete elements.”
Micronarratives
“We might describe musicals, action films, or slapstick comedies as having accordion-like
structures. Certain plot points are fixed, whereas other moments can be expanded or
contracted in response to audience feedback without serious consequences to the overall
plot.”
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Embedded narratives
The distinction between story and discourse exists in games as well
The story is recovered through the active work of recovering information distributed
across the game space
“Read in this light, a story is less a temporal structure than a body of information.
The author of a film or a book has a high degree of control over when and if we
receive specific bits of information, but a game designer can somewhat control the
narrational process by distributing the information across the game space.”
“Within an open-ended and exploratory narrative structure like a game, essential
narrative information must be presented redundantly across a range of spaces and
artifacts, because one cannot assume the player will necessarily locate or recognize
the significance of any given element. Game designers have developed a variety of
kludges that allow them to prompt players or steer them towards narratively
salient spaces.Yet, this is no different from the ways that redundancy is built into a
television soap opera, …”
“Game designers might study melodrama for a better understanding of how
artifacts or spaces can contain affective potential or communicate significant
narrative information. Melodrama depends on the external projection of internal
states, often through costume design, art direction, or lighting choices.”
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Emergent narratives
“Emergent narratives are not prestructured or preprogrammed, taking
shape through the game play, yet they are not as unstructured, chaotic, and
frustrating as life itself. Game worlds, ultimately, are not real worlds,…”
“Characters [in The Sims] are given desires, urges, and needs, which can
come into conflict with each other, and thus produce dramatically
compelling encounters. Characters respond emotionally to events in their
environment, as when characters mourn the loss of a loved one. Our
choices have consequences, as when we spend all of our money and have
nothing left to buy them food.”
What does this have to do with space?
“Urban designers exert even less control than game designers over how
people use the spaces they create or what kinds of scenes they stage
there.Yet, some kinds of space lend themselves more readily to narratively
memorable or emotionally meaningful experiences than others.”
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Beyond Myth and Metaphor – Ryan
Starts by exposing two myths of interactive narrative
The myth of the Aleph
The myth of the Holodeck
She then moves onto an analysis of the different types of
interactivity possible in interactive narrative as a way to clarify
the possibilities and move beyond the myths
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The myth of the Aleph
Early hypertext theory enthused over the infinite narrative possibilities of
hypertext
A hypertext is infinitely (or at least vastly) productive of different stories
“The term comes from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which the
scrutiny of a cabbalistic symbol enables the experiencer to contemplate the
whole of history and of reality, down to its most minute details.”
But most of the many different orderings in a hypertext don’t constitute
different stories, but different discourses (different edits of the same film)
And many possible orderings won’t make sense
“Textual fragments are like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle; some fit easily
together, and some others do not because of their intrinsic shape, or narrative
content. It is simply not possible to construct a coherent story out of every
permutation of a set of textual fragments, …”
“What we have, instead, is something much closer to the narrative equivalent
of a jig-saw puzzle: the reader tries to construct a narrative image from
fragments that come to her in a more or less random order, by fitting each
lexia into a global pattern that slowly takes shape in the mind.”
How does the myth of the aleph relate to emergent narrative systems?
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The myth of the holodeck
The focus on first-person experience will disallow certain types of stories
“If we derive aesthetic pleasure from the tragic fate of literary characters
such as Anna Karenina, Hamlet or Madame Bovary, if we cry for them and
fully enjoy our tears, it is because our participation in the plot is a
compromise between the first-person and the third-person perspective.
We simulate mentally the inner life of these characters, we transport
ourselves in imagination into their mind, but we remain at the same time
conscious of being external observers.”
“Interactors would have to be out of their mind-literally and
metaphorically--to want to submit themselves to the fate of a heroine who
commits suicide as the result of a love affair turned bad, like Emma Bovary
or Anna Karenina. Any attempt to turn empathy, which relies on mental
simulation, into first-person, genuinely felt emotion would in the vast
majority of cases trespass the fragile boundary that separates pleasure
from pain.”
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External vs. internal interaction
In internal mode, the user projects themselves into the
storyworld
Identification with an avatar or first-person experience
In external mode, the user situates herself outside of the
world
God-like interaction or navigation of a database
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Exploratory vs. ontological interaction
In exploratory mode the user can navigate the discourse, but
not the story (can’t effect the plot)
In ontological mode the user’s actions effect the possible
world (influence the story)
Internal/external distinction is analog – relates to the distance
from the world
Exploratory/ontological distinction is digital – the user either
does or doesn’t have influence over the real plot
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External/exploratory
Classical hypertext
Choose routes through textual space, but not influence the story
Classical hypertexts are too densely interconnected for the author to control
the sequence – therefore the sequence of nodes visited is almost random
The only way to maintain narrative coherence is to view the text as a puzzle
to be put back together (reconstruct the story)
“Moreover, just as the jig-saw puzzle subordinates the image to the
construction process, external/exploratory interactivity de-emphasizes the
narrative itself in favor of the game of its discovery. The
external/exploratory mode is therefore better suited for self-referential
fiction than for narrative worlds that hold us under their spell for the sake
of what happens in them. It promotes a metafictional stance, at the
expense of immersion in the fictional world.”
Choose-your-own-adventure hypertexts are not external/exploratory –
they are an implementation, in the technology of hypertext (material
medium), of external/ontological interaction
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Internal/exploratory
The user has a body in the storyworld (first or third person),
but can’t influence the plot, only reconstruct it
Myst
Many of Jenkin’s strategies for spatial narrative are applicable
for constructing internal/exploratory narratives
“The user exercises her agency by moving around the fictional
world, picking up objets and looking at them, viewing the
action from different points of view, investigating a case, and
trying to reconstitute events that have taken place a long time
ago.”
Doesn’t have to be events that happened a long time ago – the user’s
interaction can move the story along (trigger story moments, etc.)
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External/ontological
User sits above the world, but can have a real impact on the story (rather
than only on the discourse)
Providing external/ontological activity, without the help of a generative
system, requires simplifying/reducing the interaction points
“Once the user has made a choice, the narrative should be able to roll by itself
for an extended period of time; otherwise, the system would lead to a
combinatory explosion-or fall back into randomness, the deathbed of narrative
coherence.”
Choose-your-own-adventure is an example of external/ontological
The Act – Cecropia Studios
Simulation games provide a generative system that can be productive of
narrative experience
Without simulation of “the laws of narrative”, how much of the narrative
resides in the head of the user?
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Internal/ontological
The holodeck dream – your in the world and have a real influence on the story
“In the meantime, the category will have to be represented by computer games of
the action and adventure type. Here the user is cast as a character who determines
his own fate by acting within the time and space of a fictional world. In this type of
system interactivity must be intense, since we live our lives by constantly engaging
with the world that surrounds us.”
But how much do you really get to choose your own fate?
“The narrativity of action games functions as what Kendall Walton would call a
"prop in a game of make-believe." It may not be the raison d‘etre of games, but it
plays such an important role as a stimulant for the imagination that many recent
games use lengthy film clips, which interrupt the game, to immerse the player in the
game world.”
This sounds like internal/exploratory to me
In action/adventure games, there is ontological interaction with respect to the
development (or death) of your player character
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