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Graphics and Interactive Storytelling

April 30, 2015 By Mark 3 Comments

In the mid-nineties I became fascinated by the storytelling potential of interactive entertainment. My interest peaked in the early aughts, during what I now think of as the second great wave of interactive storytelling mania. While the potential of interactive storytelling seems obvious to everyone, the mechanisms — the actual techniques — by which interactive stories might be told are complex and at times counterintuitive.

After finding my way into the interactive industry and meeting with some professional success, I was asked in 2000 to write an article for SIGGRAPH’s Computer Graphics magazine about the future of interactive storytelling. While great effort was being put into replicating techniques from passive mediums, including, particularly, film, it seemed to me that such an imitative approach had everything exactly backwards.

Recently, while conducting periodic maintenance on my computer and sprucing up Ditchwalk, I ran across that article, which for some reason I had never gotten around to adding to the Docs page on this site. That omission now stands corrected.

The title of the article is Graphics — the Language of Interactive Storytelling. Coming from someone who primarily made a living with words that may seem odd, but it and the accompanying text goes to the heart of the interactive storytelling problem, and why so little progress has been made. In fact, the only thing that’s changed is that we no longer worry about having enough processing power to do what we want — yet today’s enviably high hardware ceiling is still rarely used to facilitate aspects of interaction that might truly drive emotional involvement.

Fifteen years on, during the fourth great wave of interactive storytelling mania now taking place in the industry, little has changed. Another generation of eager developers is grappling with the same questions, reaching the same inherently limiting conclusions, attempting to once again adapt non-interactive techniques from passive mediums, and confusing the revelation of pre-designed outcomes with choices that determine outcomes.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com, Interactive Tagged With: interactive storytelling

Driving Interactive Interest

August 23, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

Over the past thirty years or so, as computer and video games have become more mainstream, basic assumptions about the design of interactive entertainment have changed. In the early days, when the majority of the market was hardcore, designers aimed for more hours of play per title because longer games were in demand. (They often did so by rigging games with impossible battles and repetitive chores, but the demand for long games was real.)

Fifteen years ago or so the demands of the market began to change. Consumer research showed players in the aggregate preferring shorter and easier games. While hardcore gamers still existed, they now made up a much smaller percentage of a market that included casual gamers and people new to computer-driven entertainment. Presenting these customers with 100+ hours of hardcore (if not also tedious and unfair) gameplay made no sense, and ran the risk of alienating them from the industry.

Like mountaineers determined to cross another peak off their list, hardcore gamers tend to finish games no matter how grueling the experience. It’s a badge of honor and a way to differentiate themselves from the masses. Casual gamers, on the other hand, tend to explore interactive works like tourists, following their whims and interests for a few hours before heading back to the hotel for a nap. And according to a recent article on CNN’s Tech page, this sight-seeing approach is fast becoming the dominant response to interactive entertainment across all demographics:

“Just 10 years ago, I recall some standard that only 20% of gamers ever finish a game,” says John Lee, VP of marketing at Raptr and former executive at Capcom, THQ and Sega.

And it’s not just dull games that go unfinished. Critically acclaimed ones do, too. Take last year’s “Red Dead Redemption.” You might think Rockstar’s gritty Western would be played more than others, given the praise it enjoyed, but you’d be wrong.

Only 10% of avid gamers completed the final mission, according to Raptr, which tracks more than 23 million gaming sessions.

Let that sink in for a minute: Of every 10 people who started playing the consensus “Game of the Year,” only one of them finished it.

Computer and video games are not cheap to produce, and the best of breed — often called triple-A or ‘AAA’ titles — can be more expensive than big-budget films. Sinking previous development resources into a product most consumers will never fully experience might make sense if the expense was recouped through additional sales, but that’s a huge gamble in even the best scenario. Making the odds worse is the ugly fact that consumers are simply hard-pressed to find time to play and enjoy longer works.

  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: 90-9-1, entertainment, IE, interactive entertainment, interactive storytelling, interactivity

The Interactive Difference

November 7, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Whatever you think about interactive entertainment (commonly referred to as video games or computers games), and whatever you think about the long-term potential for interactive storytelling, there is one critical and indisputable difference between interactive works and all other forms of entertainment. Movies, books, television, theater and even live-action sports are all witnessed, while interactive works are participatory.

This may seem like an obvious point, and perhaps even trivial, but it isn’t. It’s not only central to what makes interactive entertainment compelling, it’s a revolutionary change in the relationship between entertainment product and intended audience. Because players/users make choices instead of witnessing other people’s choices, the meaning inherent in an interactive work is heightened and intensified, both personally and culturally.

To see this clearly, imagine any gripping or emotionally-charged scene you’ve ever experienced in a passive form — a great moment in a novel, a thrilling scene in a film. Now translate that experience from one you’re witnessing to one you’re participating in. Instead of reading about the gunfight, you’re shooting. Instead of watching the heroine slip past the mob, you’re doing the sneaking. Instead of witnessing Sophie’s choice, you have to make Sophie’s choice.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: interactive storytelling, point of view, technique

The Oz Project

September 22, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

I first learned of the Oz Project a decade ago, during conversations with some of the original members of the Carnegie-Mellon team. If you’re interested in believable agents and interactive drama you can find a comprehensive overview of the subject here, written by Michael Mateas.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: interactive storytelling

Crisscrossing Chris Crawford

September 12, 2009 By Mark 3 Comments

A couple of days ago I was working my way through a slate of storytelling and publishing links when I found myself on the O’Reilly site. It’s one of those sites chock full of interesting links and notes, so I spent a few minutes just clicking around until I ended up looking at splash screen for Safari Books Online, which included works from Peachpit.

In that instant my current interest in digital and online storytelling suddenly merged with my ongoing interest in interactive storytelling, and I felt as if those divergent worlds had become a single focused image in mind. The cause for this convergence was my work as technical editor on Chris Crawford On Interactive Storytelling, a book written by Chris about his pioneering work in that fascinating and maddening field.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: Interactive, interactive storytelling

Taking Stock

September 9, 2009 By Mark 9 Comments

After three weeks of blogging and Site Seeing I definitely have a better handle on what’s happening out there, but I’ve also come to grips with the fact that I simply can’t keep track of it all. And that’s true even if I avail myself of all the latest tech, tech filters and social networks — which I would also have to spend a great deal of time reading about in order to achieve cutting-edge productivity.

(There’s a reason they call it the ‘cutting’ edge.)

In the end there’s too much to see and digest, let alone comment on, let alone act on. So it’s time to tighten the focus a bit, in anticipation of tightening it more in the future. Although this is an exclusionary process in some respects, I tend to think of it as irising in on something in the distance and pulling it into sharper focus. Simplification as zoom lens. Or sniper scope.

Traditional Publishing
I can’t really say the industry is dead, because it’s not dead. What I can say is that it’s broken, and I think everybody gets that. But I don’t think it’s simply broken relative to some newfangled process or advance (the internet), but rather that it’s inherently broken in ways that the internet is only now revealing.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com Tagged With: blog fiction, interactive storytelling, interactivity, Publishing, self-publishing

Chess Lessons

March 16, 2004 By Mark Leave a Comment

Since my last post I’ve been seized with a desire to mentally and physically box up my life in the games biz and move on. Having jumped the gun on transitions before, however, I know it’s important to follow through on commitments, even if they’re only ones I made to myself. (Perhaps particularly if they’re only ones I made to myself.) Included in my pile of unfinished business are a few articles I’d always intended to get out, and this is one of them.

Mapping Story to Chess
Back in November Greg Costikyan posted a note on his blog about Chess. The main point Greg wanted to make was how valuable and instructive Chess can be to game designers. Here’s the introduction:

From a game designer’s perspective, Chess is an important game for many reasons. First, it is, at least to Westerners, the abstract strategy game par excellence; while the pieces have colorful names, it in no way can be understood as a literal military simulation, nor does Chess strategy have any value outside of the context of Chess itself. It does not rely at all on chance; it is not a solvable game in the sense of Tic-tac-toe; and it offers an amazing level of strategic depth.

Chess is important also because it is a perfect example of some highly important design techniques–and stands in perfect defiance to at least one idee fixe of modern game designers.

I agree with all that. I also think computerized Chess is important because it proves what we can do on the simulation side of the game design equation. Leaving aside metaphysical questions about man/machine dominance, computerized Chess proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that computers can not only host games, they can play games as well. (The implications of that last sentence are worthy of an article in themselves.)

What I want to focus on here begins with the next four words that Greg wrote, which comprised the heading of the first full section of his article:

Chess Has No Story

Now, the age-old problem with a statement like this is that it prompts a question: what does Greg mean by story? It’s a fair question, but in Greg’s defense it’s often asked in the games biz by people who want to parry the issue in order to keep their own impossible dreams alive. In fact, Greg’s next sentence speaks to that motivation directly:

Time and again, particularly when talking with people outside the field trying to understand game design, or with wannabe game developers, they want to begin the process by talking about story or character.

At the narrative level Greg is talking about, he’s right. Chess has no story in the way that most people think about story. Just as importantly, it’s precisely people who know the least about storytelling who inevitably have the grandest schemes about combining stories and games. Trying to educate or pin these people down inevitably leads to a more nebulous definition of story as they desperately seek to find some way to keep their fantasies alive.

Greg himself made a similar point, noting how easily story can obfuscate game:

The impulse is understandable, because in almost every other entertainment medium, story is where you begin. That’s true of film, fiction, and TV; and those who have looked over the shoulder of someone playing a videogame see something that, at first glance, may not look that different from film. Characters are doing things in a visual medium.

And for some game styles — adventures, RPGs, action-adventure hybrids like Deus Ex — story is indeed highly important, and a strong part of the game’s appeal.

You cannot, however, understand how games function if the first thing you reach for is story. You could use almost the same story in an old-fashioned text adventure, an Unreal-powered action adventure game, and a computer RPG–and the experience of playing each of those games would be very different indeed.

This point can’t be emphasized enough. Game design, and particularly the rules set that defines any computer game, comes first in interactive entertainment. And that’s just as true whether you’re creating a game based on a film as it is if you’re creating a work with no overt narrative. If you want to be a game designer, even of games that feature prominent narrative elements, you need to understand game design. It may not be your specialty – indeed it is not mine – but you must understand it and you must put it first.

Greg continued:

Nor is ‘story’ necessary to ‘game.’ Games can incorporate stories; some game styles depend on stories; but a game is not a story. To wrap your head around this idea, you might think about music. Many musical styles depend on story–opera, the musical, the rock-and-roll ballad. But many do not–symphonic music, house, ambient. Music, like stories, and like games, unfold in time, and you can talk about the ‘narrative’ of a symphony, using ‘narrative’ in a rather rarified sense, meaning evolution over time–but that narrative has not a damn thing to do with story.

Again, Greg’s right. Story is in addition to game in interactive entertainment, not integral to game. Just as putting a score to a movie augments the narrative, putting the right narrative elements (including music) to the right game mechanics can augment the player’s experience.

Greg next brought the issue full circle, back to the subject of Chess:

The best way, I’ve found, to make people pause and think again about the importance of story to games is just to say: What is the story of Chess?

Following Greg’s line of thinking, it’s clear that Chess has no story. Yes, like music we can describe a Chess narrative over time as pieces are moved in turn and one side seeks to defeat the other, but that’s not a work of fiction. I’m a storyteller, and that’s a hat Greg wears as well, and you’ll just have to trust both of us that there are entire structures inherent in creating a story that are completely absent in Chess. While there does seem to be some overlap between a fictional story and the move-by-move narrative of a game of Chess, manifesting any commonalities requires either diluting or mutating the meaning of story (as already noted), or adding some attributes to Chess to make it seem more story-like. For example:

Of course, a fellow I knew once responded by saying, “It’s a game about a war between two brothers…” Which made me pause and think again. Indeed, viewing Chess through that prism is interesting–but certainly most Chess players don’t think about the game that way.

Instead, they view it as an arrangement of pieces; the forces projected by those pieces; potential next-turn arrangments and what they would imply; and so on.

Ultimately the goal of Chess is rational, not emotional. Yes, emotions can come into play during a game, or between players, but emotions are not central to the experience. If they were, computers would never be able to beat humans at the game. Stories on the other hand are inherently emotional, and it’s only by imposing emotional constructs – such as the idea of warring brothers – that we find a way to morph Chess into a quasi-narrative experience.

Greg continued:

Chess is a game about understanding the projection of force, anticipating the moves of others, and working toward subordinate goals — removing opposing pieces — in pursuit of an ultimate goal — checkmate. Nobody is thinking about plot obstacles or character development when they play Chess.

Note that that’s true whether a human being is shoving the pieces around the board or a machine is making the moves. The combination of the board, the pieces and the goal of the game describes a contextual experience, and it is into that context that the player steps when they play. In fact, most of the compelling stories about Chess involve additions to that context, such as a World Championship hanging in the balance, or a history of personal animosity or theoretical disputes being played out over the board.

Greg concluded the section with this:

Some might object that this is true, but not relevant to digital game designers; after all, almost everything that gets published today has some kind of story attached to it, if only as a little backstory to provide some player motivation.

True–but if your understanding of the game is limited to story-as-game, then you will certainly never design Tetris, nor yet Civilization. It’s important to understand that the world of possible games includes whole continents where nary a story is told.

With that pitch-perfect summation Greg moved on to two other sections, talking about the emergent complexity and meta-game of analysis that are inherent in Chess. If you have any interest in game design I urge you to read and understand those sections. On the subject of how game and story do and do not interact, however, I want to draw your attention to an additional paragraph from the section concerning the meta-game of Chess:

By “strategic stability,” I mean that, at least in the early game, players can anticipate similar strategic situations each game, or at least in a high proportion of games. With Chess this is obviously so, since starting positions are identical with each playing. With Go, there is a bit more variability, since players may place stones in any board position they wish–but nonetheless, they start with a blank board, and the first few placements are vital to strategy.

In talking about the relationship between game design and storytelling Greg accurately shows that Chess – the game that has been most successfully implemented in the interactive medium – owes literally nothing to narrative structures. By doing so Greg suggests that the success of any given interactive product, and indeed of the interactive entertainment industry as a whole, hinges on the game and simulation side of the design equation, not on the narrative side. I agree completely.

But the question of bringing emotional involvement to interactivity is not synonymous with or even analogous to adding story to, or deriving story from, Chess. In fact, mapping story to Chess only analyzes the problem in two narrowly-defined dimensions, unnecessarily restricting the debate we need to have and the territory we need to explore. In the narrative x-axis, any individual story is a fixed (non-computable) construct designed to generate emotional involvement in a passive audience, which is clearly not what we’re trying to do. And while Chess is the most successful interactive game implementation in history, in the gaming y-axis the design intent of Chess also has nothing to do with creating emotional involvement from interactivity.

As I’ve written previously (see also my GDC Moderator’s Reports), what we need to learn how to do in our industry is to create emotional involvement from interactivity. Looking at how story and a given fully-realized game relate tells us nothing except about how those two specific constructs do or do not promote emotional involvement. Rather than look at the two-dimensional intersection of game and story in any one instance, what we need is a way to see how the basic building blocks of story and game can be used to create emotional involvement in interactive works, whether or not those works include a full-blown story.

The Z-Axis of Chess and Story
Greg’s mention of the ancient game of Go suggests a way we can analyze Chess relative to story in a third dimension, the z-axis being the degree to which the design elements of a given interactive product promote emotional involvement. Looking at the game/story problem from this perspective will also prevent us from making a mistake, which is to assume that if Chess and story have nothing in common and Go and story have nothing in common, that the degree to which Chess and Go (and other games) create emotional involvement is identical.

To begin, Greg’s definition of Chess above (projection of force, etc.) is a pretty good definition of Go, too, though winning in Go requires capturing more territory than your opponent instead of one particular piece. Still, both games feature a simple set of rules and objectives played out with simple pieces over a simple board. Although complexities abound during play, in no instance does anything remotely resembling a story arise. Despite these similarities, however, the games themselves are not identical, with Go being the far simpler of the two in terms of mechanics:

Go Design Mechanics
Go is played on a simple 19×19-line grid. There are two sides, traditionally black and white. Play involves each side alternately placing small stones of their own color on the grid-line intersections, the goal being to capture the most territory as the board is filled in.

    Terrain types -1 (intersecting lines)
    Unit types – 1 (stones)
    Movement types – 1 (placement on the board)
    Objective – capture territory

Chess Design Mechanics
Chess is played on an 8×8 board of alternately-colored squares, traditionally black and white. There are two sides, each identical except for color (again traditionally black and white), with sixteen different pieces of six different types. Each unit type has its own distinct range and type of movement. The object of the game is to be the first to capture the opponent’s ‘king’.

    Terrain types – 2 (black and white squares)
    Unit types – 6 (pawn, rook, bishop, knight, queen, king)
    Movement types – 8 (six basic moves; two special moves: castling and en passant)
    Objective – capture the other player’s ‘king’

While both games are relatively simple and have nothing to do with story or storytelling, they are clearly different in terms of design mechanics and design complexity. Upon closer inspection, although neither Chess nor Go contains a story, it turns out these games are also not the same in terms of their narrative elements.

While Chess is an abstraction of warfare, its abstraction pales compared to that of Go. Where Chess has named pieces, Go simply has stones. Where Chess uses two different types of terrain, multiple unit types and movement rules, Go offers only one of each. In fact, except for some faint possible suggestion in both games that the traditional use of white & black is symbolic of good & evil – which I discount completely – Go is entirely abstract, right down to its play mechanic and victory condition.

In Go, the idea of a land-grab between foes has been abstracted into an over-the-board battle for points of territory defined by two intersecting perpendicular lines. While the game does allow for the capture of the other side’s units, captures are simply another mechanism by which territory is gained. Now contrast this with Chess, where the point of the game is not only capturing a particular unit, but one that is personified as a king.

As Greg noted in passing:

….while the pieces have colorful names, [Chess] in no way can be understood as a literal military simulation….

It’s clear that the names of the Chess pieces do not relate to the game’s mechanics. What they do relate to, however, is Chess’s narrative context, and that is a key difference between Go and Chess. In Go you place stones on a board, and the only things those stone are suggestive of are stones. They don’t seem representative of armies or soldiers when you play, and they don’t have names that make you think of them as anything other than what they are: playing pieces in a strategy game. Chess on the other hand not only has personified pieces playing a variety of pseudo-narrative roles, but in sum those pieces evoke a medieval time period, suggestive also of a narrative setting.

Which raises an interesting point. If Chess has no story or narrative aspirations, why are critical pieces in the game – indeed both the most powerful and most important pieces – named after monarchs? For some reason the level of abstraction of the game mechanics has not been matched by the level of abstraction of the pieces names, as it easily could be. Instead of a king and queen evoking the 15th century when Chess migrated from the Middle-east to Europe, by now the game could easily feature pieces with abstracted names. The king could be called the ’eminence,’ for example, retaining the importance of the piece to the game’s design mechanics, but abstracting it away from the title of a monarch.

The point here is that changing the piece names in Chess wouldn’t impact the game one whit. Which again prompts a question: why does Chess include names of monarchs in a medieval setting? While it’s a stretch to say that Chess is about killing a king, or murder, or anything suggestive of a plot, the fact remains that the names of Chess pieces have a narrative connectedness to us that the stones in Go do not. It’s also a fact that these names are not integral to the game, which means we’ve kept them all these years for some other reason – something that doesn’t relate to or support the mechanics of the game.

One possibility is that it’s simply tradition, but if the mechanics of Chess could evolve despite tradition, why not the piece names? While documenting the causality of Chess’s evolution as a game is best left to the legions of academics looking to hang their hats in our new industry, I think there’s no denying that the piece-name ‘king’ adds something to the game of Chess that would otherwise be missing. It’s not a game mechanic and it’s not a story, but on some level it is emotionally resonant to us as human beings, which is why we’ve retained it all these years.

Think back to the response that was given to Greg, when he asked an acquaintance to explain the story of Chess:

It’s a game about a war between two brothers…

Now ask yourself if that answer would have arisen if the game in question had been Go. I would say it would not have, because there is nothing even remotely suggestive of a character in Go. It is both the king’s critical role in Chess as a game and the king’s piece-name that motivated an imaginative leap to the idea of the narrative of Chess being a war between two brothers. (Note also that even if you wouldn’t have made that leap yourself, and even if you think the leap is ridiculous on its face, you still do understand the leap.)

In the two-dimensional analysis Greg engaged in it’s correct to ignore this kind of suggested narrative. The proposition that Chess is a war between two brothers requires bringing other elements to the game that don’t exist in the rules, most notably the idea of a familial relationship between the pieces. Still, it’s not too hard to see other suggestive narrative features in the game, such as checkmate being equivalent to killing the king, which then becomes murder in a narrative context. By extension, if Chess does involve kings trying to murder each other, in a narrative context it makes perfect sense to ask what relationship they might have that could prompt such antipathy. Sibling rivalry is not only a logical answer, but also a popular one for plotting purposes.

As already noted, though, the point here is not to try to ascribe a story to Chess. The point is to look at how narrative elements differ between Chess and Go, and in this particular case the difference is stark. Not only does Chess have character-like units, but it turns out those character-like units allow us, with a little imagination, to ascribe plot and motive to individual pieces, if not to the game itself. While that’s of limited utility in Chess, it’s definitive of one way in which we might intentionally design other games that increase emotional involvement.

The idea that unit names in a game can be suggestive of characters in a narrative context is indicative of the fact that human beings want narrative elements in their games, even if they don’t relate directly to a game’s mechanics. To a game design purist this is crazy talk about unnecessary details, but I’m not a game design purist: I’m trying to figure out how to increase the likelihood that players will care emotionally about the choices they make in an interactive work. If choosing the right name for a unit in a game raises the player’s emotional involvement with that game even one iota, I want to know about it.

Because there is a demonstrable difference between the degree to which Go and Chess promote emotional involvement, despite the fact that both games are non-narrative, we can assume that Go marks one point on the design continuum of emotional involvement and that Chess marks another. From those two distinct points we can establish a line, and that line is the z-axis we’ve been looking for. Individually the two games have nothing to do with emotional involvement in a narrative context, but together they point the way. Adding more emotional involvement to a game design requires designing beyond Chess on the z-axis, adding narrative elements that do not detract from or impact the game mechanics, but which satisfy our inherent human desire to care not only rationally but also emotionally.

The Z-Axis and Salvation
While it would be fun (but ultimately fruitless) to streak off along the z-axis in search of a holodeck, I want to stick with Chess as the frontier outpost on the z-axis continuum. For those who remain unconvinced that the names ‘king’ and ‘queen’ in Chess hint at a narrative connection to the idea of character in story, consider this. While the modern traditional Chess set is relatively abstract, omitting faces and such, there is a long and powerful tradition in Chess of making imaginative custom sets. Usually thematic, these sets run the gamut from the wildly abstract to the representational, from comic to dramatic, from historical to fantastic.

The point here is that I’m not the only one who thinks Chess pieces are suggestive of character: everybody thinks they’re suggestive of character, including the people who play Chess the most. The less obvious but more important point is that within the mechanics of Chess there is a design constant called the unit, which – almost paradoxically – can be physically represented in infinite variations along the z-axis without negatively impacting the game’s design. From the point of view of the z-axis of Chess, any given Chess unit is actually a variable that can be changed or augmented without upsetting the piece’s utility or the game’s underlying design, provided the unit itself can still be identified.

In fact, this plasticity extends beyond the mere look of a piece. In 1992 a computer game called Battle Chess appeared, which featured units as animated characters. These characters walked or traveled across the board when ordered to move by the player, and attacked each other when a piece was taken (undoubtedly inspired by a similar game in Star Wars). By the same token it’s not hard to imagine units being given their own sounds or lines of dialogue or musical scores in a given game, and the same being added for any combination of attack animations. In fact, today that’s actually a good description of even the most pedestrian real-time strategy game.

But does any of that really create emotional involvement, let alone tell a story? Probably not, but it’s easy to see how such narrative connections could be strengthened. Portray the pawns in a Chess set as Little Red Riding Hood, say, and the knights as the Big Bad Wolf, add a few piercing screams and maybe you’ve raised the stakes. If you want more juice, maybe change the pawns to realistic-looking children and…well, you get the idea.

From seeing how Chess pieces relate to the z-axis it should be clear that the board relates to the z-axis in much the same way. Instead of black and white squares, the board could feature grass and sand, or squares that make sounds when you put a piece on them, or light up, or play music. Extending the concept reveals the squares of a Chess board to be no different on the z-axis than the levels in a shooter: they’re simply the spaces units occupy when the game is being played. As long as the depiction of the spaces doesn’t interfere with the game’s mechanics, it doesn’t really matter what the spaces look like or how many emotions they provoke. From that it follows that game designers who want to increase emotional involvement through setting and place should exploit this kind of plasticity for all it’s worth.

While some of these advances have already taken place, the problem from a game design perspective is that they’re not happening as a result of intentional design along the z-axis, which allows emotional involvement to be crafted in harmony with design mechanics. Instead, the narrative elements currently being used to induce emotional involvement are simply the surviving artifacts of countless failed attempts to nail full-blown stories onto games. Because this approach doesn’t focus on the proper goal of creating emotional involvement in the context of interactivity, but instead continues to emphasize story structure as the arbiter of emotional involvement, it not only continues to fail, but the appearance of any new advance will similarly be left to chance.

Evidence that this malpractice continues is available in abundance in the latest crop of shooters, many of which rely heavily on linearity that would have been openly derided only a few years ago. (See also here.) Because our industry now assumes a priori that getting the player to care about choices emotionally can only be done through the creation of a full-blown story, and because consumers are demanding more and more narrative context with their interactivity, the trend in single-player designs in particular is to offer little more than a series of narrowly constrained, puzzle-oriented missions in the context of a short film. While that does increase emotional involvement, it does so at the expense of the one feature that distinguishes our medium from any other: interactivity. Even more problematic is the fact that these conflicted designs represent the zenith of this design approach, suggesting that it may have reached an evolutionary dead end.

Designing for emotional involvement from the point of view of the z-axis, on the other hand, does not mean cutscenes can’t be used, or that shooters can’t have a mission-based structure. What it means is that instead of designing a game and a story in parallel – two distinctly different forms of entertainment that are mutually exclusive in their effects – we replace the idea of a story with the goal of emotional involvement.

Designing from the z-axis puts the design emphasis back where it belongs, on the game or simulation that is the core of the player’s interactive experience. At the same time it retains the end goal of story (emotional involvement) without saddling the design process with the limitations of narrative structure. Industry-wide, the importance of adopting the design point of view of the z-axis is that it forces us to put more effort into understanding the ways in which simulations and game design mechanics can make players care emotionally about the interactive choices they make. That, in turn, emphasizes and leverages the unique strength and attraction of the interactive medium when compared to any other form of electronic entertainment.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: emotional involvement, game, greg costikyan, interactive storytelling, story

The Producers

October 9, 2003 By Mark 1 Comment

At some point while reading the following you’re going to think that what I’m really trying to do here is expand the market for my services. For the record, I’m not currently looking for work.

This essay is going to be a bit of a departure for me because I’ll be referencing (albeit anonymously) some people I’ve been contacted by or worked with. For most of you that won’t mean much, but there may be some readers who can connect the dots, so I want to make a few things clear. I have no reason to believe that the people I’m referencing are anything but decent, and they have never treated me less than professionally. If they owed me money they paid me, and they always took my calls. As a rule I don’t talk about my relationships with clients, but I need to make a craft point that springs directly from the business context of my work, so I’m going to bend that rule just a bit.

In January of this year I was asked to participate in high-level design meetings on a fascinating R&D project. Given the parameters of the project and my interest in emotional involvement it seemed a dream assignment, and I readily agreed to participate. The meetings were held in NYC, and were led by two people – one a biz-side producer, the other a design-side creative director. Although the premise was flawed, all the pieces were in place to do something truly exciting, and I had every reason to believe that we might truly raise the bar of emotional involvement in interactive works.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: emotional involvement, interactive storytelling, interactivity, narrative design

Universal Design Basics

August 10, 2003 By Mark Leave a Comment

This may end up reading like a savage game review, but that’s not my intent. My intent is to point out that there are basic design rules and responsibilities that all of us should be embracing at this stage in the development of the interactive medium. If there are compelling reasons, these basic rules can and should be ignored in exchange for achieving specific effects, but I expect few such occasions to arise in mainstream interactive works, just as few mainstream novels need to break the basic rules of point of view to tell an entertaining story. For the purposes of this discussion, I am going to ignore such artistic or theoretical exceptions on the compelling grounds that most interactive designers who drop the ball do so not because they are trying to make rarified craft choices, but because they don’t actually know what they’re doing. (See also Failing the Artistic License Test.)

Dishonorable Discharge
The game that prompted this post was Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (MoH:AA), which is a first-person shooter set in WWII Europe. To be sure, I did have my share of fun playing the game, and there’s plenty the team got right. The problem is that much of what they got right was built on a faulty foundation that needlessly detracted from my play experience. While there has been plenty written about these design mistakes in game reviews, there has been little notice given to their root cause, or to how craft knowledge can help detect such basic mistakes at the design stage.

The first major flaw I encountered in MoH:AA was that enemy units could stand, kneel or lie prone, while my player-character could stand and kneel but not lie prone. This single aspect of the design not only destroyed my suspension of disbelief in the WWII setting, but it made me feel like I was actively being cheated by the designers. Getting caught in the open by a prone enemy sniper, or getting into a firefight with an enemy soldier who then went prone, was infuriating because that option had been denied me.

The second major flaw was the decision not to include a map with each scenario, even if the map only gave topographical or ‘last-known’ information. While a compass was shown at the top of the main screen, it’s function was completely superfluous because compass directions were almost never referenced in any meaningful context. Instead, the outer ring of the compass included a combination pointer/range finder that constantly indicated where I should go next, further revealing the compass to be the window dressing that it was. The design decision to omit maps that would have given me an objective sense of my surroundings, and thus would have made the compass necessary for gameplay, meant that I never took real ownership of any of the navigational objectives (Find X!) given in the mission briefings. Instead, by assuming complete responsibility for player-character navigation through a ‘Go Here!’ pointer, the designers crippled any imaginative involvement I might have developed with the player-character, with the setting, and with the mission objectives.

The third major flaw was the relentless emphasis on linearity, even when there was no need for it from a design perspective. While linearity in a shooter can help designers make sure players don’t become lost or bored, and can make it easier to anticipate where triggers should be placed for scripted events, linearity also negatively impacts interactivity (which is a synonym for player choice). Designers must be constantly aware of this tradeoff, and constantly work to keep the player from noticing when and how freedom of movement has been limited. Unfortunately, linearity informs almost every design decision in MoH:AA, right down to whether or not you can squeeze by a rock at the edge of the map, or slink behind a building next to, but not abutting, a perimeter wall. In almost every instance where the designers could have opened the map up on a micro or macro level, allowing me to explore or use even simple objects for cover, the choice was made to deliberately and needlessly force me into a gauntlet.

Universal Design Rule #2
Rule #1 in the design of commercial entertainment in any medium is simply this: Entertain. If you don’t provide the customer with fun (enjoyment), then no matter how complex or cutting edge your product is, it’s not going to sell. The interactive version of this rule is that if you don’t provide the player with something fun to do, then no matter how complex, cutting edge or interactive it is, it’s not going to sell.

All rules after Rule #1 deal with how entertaining products are created, and no rule is more important than Rule #2: Be consistent. The commercial success of storytellers in all passive mediums is predicated on consistency, and the need for consistency is constant whether a fictional world parallels our own or is wildly fantastic. Since it goes without saying that consistency is also critical in all rules-based processes, including simulations that run on computers, it should be fairly obvious that products that attempt to integrate storytelling and simulation will need to be consistent throughout.

Consistency is important because from the first moment an audience encounters a work of entertainment they begin building a mental model of the rules that define that work. For example, audiences watching a movie learn what the point of view is going to be, what the tone is (how humor and drama will be handled), what the internal logic of each introduced character is, and whether there are any fantastic ideas at play, such as aliens visiting earth, or human beings gaining super-heroic powers. Interactive users learn the same things about the fictional elements of the games they play, but their mental model also includes how the controls interface with the game world, what the game objectives are, and how the modeled (simulated) processes in the game actually function.

The main objective in creating a consistent mental model is to help the player embrace a world that does not actually exist, or to experience something virtually that would be too dangerous or expensive to experience in reality. The more consistent we are, the greater the likelihood that the actual techniques we use to communicate the experience will quickly become transparent, allowing the player to fully immerse themselves. By the same token, inconsistencies shatter the player’s suspension of disbelief, terminating any involvement save rational thought – usually along the lines of, “What the…?”

While the decision to break consistency may, in exceedingly rare instances (which you will in all likelihood never encounter even if you live to be five thousand years old) be a valid artistic choice, the decision to strive for consistency as a basic design goal is not an artistic choice. In any medium, consistency is essential to the crafting of commercial entertainment.

Consistency as Design Test
Let’s now imagine that the MoH:AA design team had had consistency in mind from the beginning, from their earliest speculative thoughts about what their game would become. How would that conscious awareness have affected the inconsistencies I mentioned above?

The moment the MoH:AA design team noticed that they were talking about having enemy units that could lie prone, while the player wouldn’t be able to adopt the same point of view, the options should have been obvious. Either they could have allowed the enemy units to only stand or kneel, making them like the player, or they could allowed the player to lie prone like the enemy units. (In a moment it will be clear why the game’s setting demanded that the latter choice be selected.)

Failure to act in this case was not a design choice, it was a design error. Not only did it destroy suspension of disbelief, make the player feel like they were being cheated, and generate negative comments in reviews, but in large part it forced commentary on those points. What is perhaps not apparent, however, is that acting to correct inconsistencies doesn’t just prevent problems or bring the design up to a minimum spec, it also confers positive benefits. In this case, allowing the user to go prone would have increased the tactical complexity of the game, encouraged the player to be bolder, and given the player an option besides instant death and reloading when they triggered a scripted ambush.

The moment the MoH:AA design team noticed they were talking about omitting maps, and only providing a compass as visual cover for a navigation beacon, the inconsistency between the period setting and the proposed navigation system should have been resolved. Yes, the argument can be made that MoH:AA was meant to be fun, not realistic, but that argument fails given the attention to detail in the rest of the game. Simply put, the proposed navigation system – an arrow constantly telling the player which way to go – was inconsistent with the level of detail and realism present in the simulation and narrative context.

Whatever the motivation(s) for the nav decision, it was a design failure. Providing the player with basic topographical maps would have aided navigation, added to suspense (“Wow, I have to get way over there…?), and added to suspension of disbelief by supporting the setting, as opposed to detracting from it. More importantly, an opportunity was lost to actually teach players how to use a simple topographical map to locate streams, mountains, ridges, etc. – putting the player not only in the situational point of view of a WWII soldier, but also in the soldier’s psychological head space. (Players who did not enjoy that aspect of the game could have been giving the option of enabling on-map icons and direction arrows.)

The moment the MoH:AA design team noticed that they were talking about making relentlessly linear levels for a first-person shooter, the inconsistency between the tactical combat simulation the engine clearly supported, and the linearity of the levels, should have been resolved. At the very least, the design team should have recognized that linearity in any form is a direct threat to interactivity, particularly if that interactivity is reasonably expected by the player. First-person shooters, by their very mechanics, allow for tactical freedom in virtual spaces, which means the edges of those virtual spaces need to be made as transparent (invisible) as possible. While the linear metaphor of a hallway makes sense in a building, relentlessly linear pathways through succeeding buildings, yards, fields and towns fail the transparency test.

Ideally the design team should have recognized that providing more open spaces (choices) for the player to explore (interact) did not have to increase the likelihood that the player would become bored or lost. It also did not mean that the design team couldn’t use scripted events, triggered events, or linear sequences: they simply had to work a little harder to control the access points to such sequences within the overall space. Consistency with genre expectations and with the inherent interactivity of the game engine clearly demanded less linearity in the level design, but not necessarily fewer scripted events. Making the levels almost exclusively linear in MoH:AA made it easier for the designers to script interesting moments, but it did nothing to make the game more fun for the player.

The Seduction of the Cinematic Moment
[Note: MoH:AA was developed by 2015, Inc. The first add-on to MoH:AA, Spearhead, was developed by what appears to be an in-house EA development team called EALA.]

After playing through MoH:AA I felt like I’d played another first-person shooter that could have been so much more than it ended up being. However, after playing through the Spearhead add-on (during which I actually flashed on both the coin-op game Galaga and an old monochrome Sierra adventure game) I have revised that opinion. Whereas I used to explain design flaws in narrative shooters on the basis of insufficient craft knowledge (as I did above), I now think that no longer fully explains the end products we’re seeing. Rather, I now believe that interactive designers are also being seduced away from the strengths of our medium by a mistaken notion of how cinematic moments can and should be created for the player.

I first coined the term ‘cinematic moment’ to describe something I witnessed while working as the mission designer on Fighter Squadron: Screamin’ Demons over Europe, a WWII flight sim. (I also mention that experience here, in a series of e-mails I exchanged with Chris Crawford on the subject of interactive storytelling.) What I experienced was an emergent cinematic moment that sprang not from a canned cinematic or scripted encounter, but from the combination of setting and simulation that defined the product. Specifically, while trying to shoot down an enemy fighter, an AI-controlled ally slashed between me and the plane I was chasing, firing his guns at a target out of my field of view. The power of that in-the-moment visual was literally chilling, and I recognized immediately that my obligation as a mission designer was not to script such moments, but to increase as much as possible the potential for such moments to occur on the fly.

What was interesting about MoH:AA, and particularly about the heavily scripted Spearhead, was that I found the less-scripted parts of the game much more fun than the pre-designed moments. Put me in a forest with a few enemy units throwing grenades at me, firing from behind objects, and chasing me if I tried to fall back, and I had a great time. Put me on rails and force me through elaborately-scripted sequences and I was honestly bored most of the time. (I’m not joking when I say that playing Spearhead often felt more like playing Dragon’s Lair: Battle for Berlin than a first-person shooter.)

As a designer with a heavy writing background who knows how easy it is to prepare an exciting, dramatic or humorous moment, I tend not to think too much about specific scenes that I would like to create in an interactive work. To me, that’s bass-ackwards, because I know no matter how compelling I make the moment in an interactive context, I can make if five or ten times more compelling in a movie or novel. It occurs to me, however, that many game designers – including the teams working on Spearhead, and, to a lesser extent, MoH:AA – don’t know this. Instead, designers of first-person shooters seem to be increasingly drawn to the excitement of authorially-controlled moments without regard for the damage they’re doing to the player’s experience.

It’s easy to see how this could happen, because it happens in all narrative mediums. People sit around, talking about a new project, and inevitably somebody says, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if….?!” Although most of these ‘What if…?’ ideas die an early death, some of them are actually cool as authorially-controlled moments, which means they’re probably also going to be cool to make, and cool to see when they’re done, at which time the critics and the fans might even describe them as cutting-edge cool, or >gasp!< groundbreaking cool. Add in the fact that the hardworking members of an interactive design team are often looking for fun and rewarding things to do while enduring two or three years of development, and there’s very little incentive not to go down the authorially-controlled road.

And who’s really going to complain? Most players like a good scripted sequence in an interactive product just as much as they like a good explosion in a movie. They don’t have the craft knowledge to discern how scripted events could be made less intrusive, more compelling, and derive more power through magicianship (faux interactivity), so they don’t perceive what they’re missing or giving up. Game mags love this kind of stuff because it looks great in the screenshots and it plays to the hardcore gamer who wants to test his high-end hardware. The marketing people love it because it’s something they can sell to the players and gaming mags, even if the game itself is no more interactive than a side-scrolling arcade game circa 1985.

Quiet on the Set!
The problem with all this is that we’re not talking about making interactive entertainment any more. What we’re talking about is machinima, which has nothing to do with player choice. In fact, from the perspective of interactivity, the difference between something like the half-track sequence in Spearhead, in which your job is to shoot everything that moves while your half-track careens across the countryside on rails, and the old 2D Space Invaders game, is practically zero. Yeah, you get to do it in 3D, but the thing you’re doing – shooting objects that are shooting you – is little different.

Ironically, we’re currently making games at at time when there is horsepower to burn, but we still seem to be spending too much time on eye candy. We’ve got graphics capabilities and CPU power and memory capacities that developers even two years ago would have cut off the pizza-delivery-person’s arm for, but that doesn’t seem to have encouraged designers to increase the complexity of the sims that underlie their games. Rather, what it seems to have done is encourage first-person-shooter designers to become directors, living out their machinima fantasies at the expense of gameplay.

And if game designers are becoming more like directors, the influx of writing talent that I always believed was necessary in order for our industry to become a truly mature medium might now only make this problem worse. Why? Because all writers are trained to exercise 100% authorial control in the pursuit of the effects they want to achieve, and an emphasis on machinima and scripting plays to that tendency. I’ve always said that writers coming to our medium need to understand the medium first, but what if the medium stops asking them to? What if designers are no longer saying, “Look, we need to figure out some way to put compelling narrative context around our interactivity,” and instead they’re saying, “We’re doing a scene where an iceberg sinks the player’s ship, so write a few sequences we can choose from.”

Writers who understand both storytelling and interactivity can help developers first and foremost by stressing that the goal is not one of simple drama, but one of integration. The player’s experience is the one that counts, and narrative efforts to improve that experience must not come at the expense of interactivity, no matter how cool a sequence might be when it’s triggered.

Deus Ex Machinima
Ultimately, as with all other mainstream forms of entertainment, our objective as creators is to get the player to experience interactive works in their head, not simply to watch them on a screen. While audience/player willingness to suspend disbelief can easily be exploited in pure passive and interactive forms, the integration of narrative elements with an interactive process presents a new set of technical challenges. Originally these challenges were met with an easily digestible mission/cutscene/mission structure, allowing the player a little downtime between frantic periods of button-clicking interactivity. Now, however, scripted moments are coming in the middle of periods of user control, often destroying the player’s imaginative involvement with both aspects of the medium.

The origin of this damage is that interactive designers are routinely putting the well-known narrative techniques of the film industry ahead of the simulations which underlie our products. This switching of priorities is not in the best long-term interest of either our medium or our customers, and we’re clearly not going to raise the bar in the interactive industry if we rely on the film industry’s bag of tricks in order to entertain. Jerking the controls away from the player and showing them a bit of machinima isn’t going to make up for failing to provide compelling interactivity, no matter how pretty the pictures are.

When Half-life came out it was groundbreaking, but it was also only half right. Half-life 2 is around the corner now, and I’m hopeful that the correct lessons have been taken from the original. The developers of Max Payne 2, a relentlessly linear third-person shooter, are also saying all the right things about using simulated processes (instead of scripting) to increase emotional involvement for the player, but given the nature of the original product it’s not clear how far they’re actually going to go, even assuming they have the skills to get there.

As an industry we have a complete monopoly on interactivity as a unique means of creating fun, and we need to remember how amazing that opportunity is. We need to continue to develop specific techniques that will allow us to integrate narrative context into our simulations, but we need to keep our emphasis on the interactive experience from the first stages of design through the end stages of production. Narrative context is simply one way of adding value to interactive simulations, regardless of how useful that context may be in attracting an audience or selling product.

Apology
In closing, a sincere apology to the MoH:AA team. Their work is better than most, and that I chose their game as fodder for the bulk of this note was due only to the fact that their game was actually worth playing. Clearly, sequences such as the first part of the Omaha Beach mission were inspired, and provided a sense of place that validated the use of scripted events.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: game design, game writers, interactive storytelling, interactivity, suspension of disbelief

Making Do With Design

June 5, 2002 By Mark Leave a Comment

From the beginnings of the computer game revolution, way back when some Ph.D. geek first decided this amazing new technology just had to be turned to the lofty pursuit of tic-tac-toe, there has been an implicit assumption that technology can and will solve any problems that come our way. Indeed, back then natural language processing was thought to be right around the corner, and the development of sentient AI seemed easily within reach. It was only a matter of time before humanoid robots became our confidants and contemporaries.

In the harsh reality of the following decades all attempts to build AI that can handle believable language interaction have failed. On the interactive fiction and storytelling front, the most agile programs remain unable to sustain suspension of disbelief for more than a moment or two. Even comparatively simple pursuits such as pathfinding and NPC behavior often destroy suspension of disbelief, forcing developers to turn to scripting and predetermination in order to keep players imaginatively involved in their games.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: interactive storytelling