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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

You Get What You (Don’t) Pay For

September 17, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

In the publishing business writers get paid to write. In Hollywood, writers get paid to write. In the copywriting business, writers get paid. In the theater, playwrights get paid.

In the interactive industry, however, it’s been a very slow process getting the people who make games to see writers as an inherent part of the industry. In fact, ten years ago one of the docs I just added to this site — Storytellers: A Hiring Guide for the Interactive Industry — originally had this title: “Storytellers: Part of the team?”

Well, the good news is that writers are now much more a part of the development process than they were even five years ago. In fact, that’s one of the things that’s changed for the better in the interactive industry: writers are now being thought of as part of the team.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: Erik Wolpaw, game writers, Marc Laidlaw, Valve

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

Summing Up

September 20, 2005 By Mark Leave a Comment

I’ve been working and living outside the walls of the interactive community for a year and a half now (maybe closer to two), and I have a few thoughts about the industry as seen from that distance.

Irony Abounds
Many moons ago the interactive world sneered at anyone who tried to use full motion video or other cinematic techniques to bring actors (and by extension, narratives) to life. That was back in the day when the processor was going to solve every problem, and we were going to be able to tell interactive stories on the fly. Because FMV was non-interactive – and inherently scripted – it was derided as an antiquated solution to a new-age problem.

Flash forward to today, and much of the talk in the IE community is about how GPU’s are spitting out dynamic scenes that look as good as film, and how scripted sequences are conveying the same force and power of the best motion pictures. And this is all being done with a straight face.

The awful truth is that most attempts to create real narrative interactivity have failed, and most of the techniques currently being used to deliver narrative force have been derived from the film industry. Sure, using game-engine graphics for cutscenes and scripted sequences provides cost savings over location shoots, safety during production no matter how crazy the stunts, and continuity with other graphics in the game, but the end product is still a movie.

Think about it. While a lot of the eye candy that helps sell the best shooters requires a processor, much of the narrative does not. Which raises an interesting question. How much of the entertainment value of a given successful title is due to algorithms, and how much due to the non-interactive authorial control being exercised by the designers? Even five years ago adventure game designers were derided for heavily scripting their games, while the case could be made that their craft knowledge is now more applicable and important than it ever was.

Years ago I wrote an article that talked about the need to focus on real interactivity, where choices determine outcomes, as well as the need to improve on magicianship, or the illusion of interactivity. In the intervening years, the one thing the interactive industry has really gotten right is convincing the user that a button click has determined an outcome, when in fact it is only revealing an outcome that has been pre-designed. Predictably, as products have tipped more toward these predetermined effects, the promise of interactivity – where each user would be able to make free determinative choices in a given environment – has waned. And serious commercial attempts to move past the current limitations seem to have waned as well.

Are people still fighting the good fight? Sure, but just as many people are faking the good fight, and there aren’t that many people in the industry who can tell the difference. If the industry continues to excel at magicianship, there may come a day when there is very little interactivity in any product, because it costs money to give the user choices and options.

Business models have firmed up, bureaucracies have calcified, and everyone knows where the sure money is so those are the products that get into production. The goal of providing interactive storytelling has been replaced by the goal of faking interactive storytelling, which probably isn’t a healthy development for an industry whose main selling point is interactivity.

Gatekeepers and Death
I was as interested as anyone in trying to advance the cause of narrative interactivity. But after having endured the disintegration of an incredible opportunity because of the blindness of that team’s leadership, I took a long look at the premise of leaving it up to others in life to determined when I would and would not have the opportunity to create. In the end I decided I’d much rather make my own stuff under my own direction, even if it was in another medium, than wait around to see if the fates would shine on me at the big table. I’ve just seen too many people grinding it out year after year, hoping that their self-absorbed boss or bottom-line company will give them a chance to show what they can do, and I don’t think that’s a healthy way to live if you’re driven by creativity. Unless of course you’re immortal.

Which brings me to my next point. Clearly one of the factors in all this is that I’ve gotten old enough that I think about how much time I have left to be productive, but that’s only part of the story. The main reason I can’t really trust the fates is that I just haven’t run across that many leaders and managers who understand that their job is getting the best out of the people they have, as opposed to getting what they themselves want out of the people they have.

That’s true in sports, too, where there are two kinds of coaches. The most common kind, by far, is the coach who has a system he or she likes. These coaches teach their system to their team, molding each crop of players into pre-assigned slots in the system, whether or not they’re ideally suited to those slots. The other – and much rarer – kind of coach is the one who looks at what each team member excels at and then builds the team around those skills and abilities. Unfortunately, I’ve been looking for that kind of coach most of my creative life, but I have yet to find one.

Caring About Caring
I remain convinced that the key to real mainstream success for the interactive industry is getting people to care emotionally about the interactive choices they make. That’s true for the illusion of interactivity as well as for real interactivity, but it’s emotional involvement derived from real interactivity that the industry needs to demonstrate. More than anything, users still want to care emotionally (as opposed to rationally) about the in-game choices they make.

If there’s a final irony in this for me, it’s that after watching millions of dollars get flushed down the toilet in the IE industry, watching failed designs get green-lighted due to incompetence, watching craft knowledge get trumped by ego, watching people with power and no talent abuse people with talent and no power, I ended up not caring about the industry. I tried to deny it for a while, but when I’m doing creative work I have to care about what I’m doing in order to do it well, and I didn’t have any reason to care about interactive entertainment any longer.

Next Steps
So, where to from here? As of today I’m about seventy pages into my first novel, and while I don’t know if it’s any good or not, I do know that I’m enjoying myself and feeling good about my work. I care about writing, and about what I’m writing.

I’m also learning the craft of stained glass, and I’m even doing a little drawing and painting, which I haven’t done in years. Chances are none of this will pay off enough to keep my head above water and I’ll probably end up driving a dump truck, but that’s okay, too. Provided the brakes work.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: interactivity, irony

Academic Intent

June 18, 2004 By Mark Leave a Comment

This is the text I submitted to the First Person project, which you can read more about in the post immediately prior to this one.

In college I took a run at academic criticism, including semiotics. I spent time studying films and writing them, studying fiction and writing short stories, and studying theater and writing plays. The most surprising thing I learned in my criticism classes was that most of the people sitting in the chairs beside me had no interest in making anything. They were there to learn how to talk about the medium they loved, not how to better create in the medium they loved.

To be clear, I have no axe to grind with anyone who enjoys debating the merits of any subject, from sports franchises to music to movies, but as a creator those debates do not further my cause. I need to know how to make things, and that means I need practical solutions and reliable techniques to draw from. If that be bias, then I would say it is the bias of the surgeon who needs scalpel and sutures to save the patient.

It’s no secret that academic interest in the interactive industry has exploded over the past few years, but there is a wrench in the works. As an expressive art form interactivity is still in its infancy, and one of the core problems in the medium – interactive storytelling – has yet to be cracked. Over the past decade myriad failed commercial attempts have provided a number of important lessons, one of which is that the core competencies of the interactive entertainment industry are not particularly suited to solving this problem. This necessarily led to a more theoretical analysis of how the problem might be solved, including research efforts at various academic institutions around the world. These academic research projects have in turn piqued the interest of academic critics in the medium, even though it is not yet fully formed.

Another more concrete lesson that can be taken from the failed interactive storytelling attempts in the commercial industry is that some things simply do not work. Many of these failed efforts were in fact valid approaches born of reasoned theory, which in turn helped define and describe the barriers we still face. Unfortunately, reading commentary from the academic world I sometimes get the feeling that these failed attempts are viewed more as serial stupidity than as the experiments I believe them to be. Like the NTSB reassembling and analyzing the scattered remains of a downed experimental aircraft, I believe analysis of failed commercial attempts at interactive storytelling can actually lead us to basic understandings about the theoretical limits of interactive storytelling itself, and I think the academic community is well-situated to begin that work.

I mention all this as preamble to my response to Janet Murray’s essay in a new book entitled First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game. I have read Janet’s essay three times now, and as a creator I must report that I can find nothing in it that is of use to me. This is not a criticism of Janet’s rhetoric or of her essay, but a simple fact. Moreover, as someone who has been wrestling with the issue of interactive storytelling for close to a decade, I can say with certainty that many of the issues Janet raises have already been encountered in the commercial interactive entertainment industry. My concern with Janet’s article is that she does not reference this considerable history in her own discussion.

For example, Janet begins her essay by proposing and defining a new term (game-story), after which she proposes a number of new ways of defining the medium as it exists today, and may exist tomorrow. That we have no common language with which to discuss the craft of interactive design, and in particular interactive storytelling, has been a recurrent problem. Doug Church first attempted to advance the cause years ago by codifying a number of Formal Abstract Design Tools for commercial designers, but in the intervening years we have made little headway. Within the academic research community the problem is exponentially worse.

Exacerbating this problem is the fact that turnover in the interactive entertainment world is high, meaning that every few years an almost entirely new group encounters and attempts to address the same craft-language deficit, with little or no success. (Anecdotally, I have seen this happen myself at least three times in the past ten years, and my fear is that the academic community – through essays like Janet’s – is now embarking on a fourth.) Worse, significant problems can arise when new definitions ignore (or are oblivious of) practical lessons that have already been learned.

For example, here’s Janet at the end of her essay, talking about ‘agency’:

But the more useful question is, how do we make a better cyberdrama? One criterion that I have found useful is the concept of dramatic agency. Agency is the term I used to distinguish the pleasure of interactivity, which arises from the two properties of the procedural and the participatory. When the world responds expressively and coherently to our engagement with it, then we experience agency. Agency requires that we script the interactor as well as the world, so that we build up the appropriate expectations.

On the face of it I think I know what Janet is talking about here, but I’m not one hundred percent sure. If I’m just reading her essay to be able to kick a bit of theory around, that’s fine. But as a creator looking for techniques that I can use to deliver interactive storytelling, agency presents two problems. First, there’s the implicit claim that virtual worlds can respond “expressively and coherently” to user inputs in a dramatic context, which as a creator I know to be extremely difficult to achieve, and almost impossible to sustain. Second, there’s the imposed constraint that we must script the interactor, which runs contrary to the freedom of choice that most people view as the main benefit of interactivity.

My point here is that in order to define and promote new terms like agency, we need to be clear about the concepts upon which those new terms are predicated. After a decade one would think that there might now be a universally recognized definition of what interactivity is, but there isn’t. My own, which has held up quite well, states that interactivity is choice which determines outcome, but the very fact that I feel obligated to say ‘my own’ makes it clear that we have not collectively answered one of the most basic questions facing our medium.

Now, it is true in the academic world, and in particular in the realm of academic criticism, that many of these problems are new. For that reason I certainly have no problem with Janet or anyone else attempting to codify the language of interactivity for the sake of analysis. If these efforts in turn lead to a more formal language that the industry itself can adopt, that’s all to the good. And it may in fact be that the academic industry’s inherent stability will provide an opportunity to establish the mature language of discourse that has so far evaded the more transient commercial industry.

What is not clear to me even now is whether that is the specific intent of Janet’s essay, or whether she really does mean to go beyond language to questions of craft and technique. If academics are going to be helpful in solving the interactive storytelling problem, I think it is extremely important for them to be explicit about their intent, exhaustive in their historical analysis and rigorous with their language. The danger in failing to do so is not simply that confusion will arise, but that academia will perpetuate the reinvention of the wheel among the transient student populations in the same way these issues have reappeared a number of times in the transient commercial industry. And from where I sit, as a creator, the last thing any of us needs is another generation of designers thinking they’re getting in on the ground floor of the interactive storytelling problem when they’re not.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: agency, criticism, Cyberdrama, First Person, interactivity, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Pat Harrigan

An Invitation to Rant

June 3, 2004 By Mark Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago I received a note from Noah Wardrip-Fruin, coeditor along with Pat Harrigan of a new book entitled, First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game. Noah asked me if I’d be willing to take a look at the book and respond to the essays in the Cyberdrama section, and I agreed. As the book has now arrived I’d like to point you to a few links on the subject to busy yourself with while I digest the material and prepare a reply.

Your first stop should be at the Electronic Book Review, which is where my reply will eventually be posted. The site is just up but I’m given to understand that additional posts are at this very moment making their way there.

Next you should take a look at Greg Costikyan’s response to the book, or more accurately, to the press release for the book. I have little doubt that Greg will be weighing in with more soon.

Finally, here is a link to GrandTextAuto, a blog on new media which Noah posts to.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: Cyberdrama, First Person, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Pat Harrigan

Tough Love

March 29, 2004 By Mark Leave a Comment

In my last post I observed that the design mechanics of even simple, non-narrative board games induce different degrees of emotional involvement, however subtle such differences might be. From this observation I posited a z-axis of interactive design that we might use in designing interactive entertainment that is more emotionally compelling. Unfortunately, initial returns on that post suggest that instead of prompting a discussion about how we might increase emotional involvement in our games along the z-axis, I seem to have created the design-theory equivalent of a Rorschach test.

Having spent the better part of a decade trying to be respectful of diverse views, while at the same time advocating for changes that I think our industry needs to make, I find myself at a point of departure in trying to reconcile those two aims. As recently noted I decided to skip the GDC this year if not pull back from the industry entirely, so on that point alone you should feel free to discount what follows as tainted with spite.

Speaking of the 2004 GDC, I’ve checked several reliable web sites over the past few days to get some sense of what transpired, but I’ve seen little mention of the proceedings overall, and almost nothing in the mainstream media. That is, until last night, when I happened by pure chance to notice the following headline while checking an email account: “Video Game Industry Faces ‘Crisis of Creativity’.”

As someone who believes the interactive industry is facing a crisis of creativity, that headline caught my eye. Linking to the story revealed it to be a Reuters article about the GDC in San Jose. Here are the first two graphs:

SAN JOSE, Calif. (Reuters) – The video game industry is facing a hardening of the creative arteries as aging gamers’ tastes increasingly shift toward sequels and games based on movies, industry participants said this week.

With more and more titles chasing the success of their predecessors and content owners digging deep into their libraries to tap older material for quick fail-proof conversion into games, the industry is faced with a question more serious than rhetorical: What’s new?

As someone who believes the game industry is facing a hardening of the arteries as aging gamers’ tastes increasingly shift toward sequels and games based on movies, that opening paragraph also caught my eye. I also agree that the question at the end of the second paragraph – ‘What’s new?’ – is more serious than rhetorical.

So let’s ask ourselves: What’s new? Which craft subject, of all the subjects related to interactive entertainment, no matter how tangentially, really deserves exploration?

Wait a minute – how about emotional involvement? I know for a fact that almost no serious work has been done on the subject, meaning there should be good avenues of exploration available right off the bat, and perhaps even a few unexpected riches within easy reach. As it stands, the faint acknowledgment the industry gives to the idea that players might want their choices to have emotional as well as rational consequences usually leads to the use of filmic techniques that are antithetical to interactivity. How crazy is that?

Yet we shouldn’t be rash. If the interactive industry hasn’t really taken the subject of emotional involvement seriously, there must be a good reason. Particularly given that there’s no conceivable downside to increasing emotional involvement in a product. I mean, who wouldn’t want to have a more powerful effect on the player than we’re already having? Only a crazy person, that’s who.

After a good deal of thought, here are my top-five prioritized reasons why the interactive industry has yet to embrace emotional involvement as a specific design goal:

5) Paralyzing Groupthink
It’s only natural: you do the same thing again and again and after a while it gets hard to think outside the box. Somebody says ’emotional involvement’ and you think ‘cutscene’. Who doesn’t? I mean besides this guy. (To see a classic example of industry groupthink in action, read the rest of that Reuters article and try to find any hint of a new idea anywhere.)

4) Institutional Gatekeeping
Industries and bureaucracies tend to protect themselves even when they aren’t working efficiently or profitably. In our business there are myriad entrenched interests that support the current design methodologies almost reflexively, while opposing innovation with equally thoughtless ease. Key people preside over key power centers and transaction points, and over time those people act more as gatekeepers than facilitators.

3) Condescending Ignorance
This one’s a little tougher to brush off. Unfortunately, there are some people in the interactive industry who will look right down their nose at you and tell you they see the universe in three dimensions, when in fact they barely see it in two. The problem is that it’s hard to talk to somebody about the z-axis when they live in Flatland. How exactly do you explain to someone what they don’t know when they don’t know what they don’t know?

2) Bald Ego
If it seems impossible that the interactive industry could be in trouble when it employs so many talented people, consider this example from another industry full of bright lights. One day several key players were called into a meeting room to discuss a problem with potentially life-threatening consequences. After going around the table there was unanimous agreement – albeit some of it due to timidity – that there was absolutely nothing to worry about. The work product of that meeting was a space shuttle disintegrating over Texas.

1) Economic Cowardice
If you’re a gambler – and anyone who predicates a business on creative content is a gambler – you want to hedge your bets. If you don’t have bankable stars like the movie industry or the recording industry you look for other identifiable means of assuring a return on investment. In the interactive industry that means sequels and licenses. If you have an original idea, remember this: Will Wright had to go through hell to get The Sims made. And if the money people don’t believe Will Wright is worth the risk, they won’t believe anyone is worth the risk.

As I look back on my time in the interactive industry, what’s fascinating is that despite the fact that all passive entertainment mediums derive great economic benefit from involving their audiences emotionally, our industry still believes that getting people to care emotionally about the interactive choices they make should be an afterthought. To the extent that people think about it at all they tend to confuse the issue of aspiring to emotional involvement with aspiring to interactive storytelling as if they’re the same thing. They aren’t.

Labels aside, our industry needs to craft experiences – memorable emotional interactive experiences – and we’re not doing it. Worse, we don’t seem to recognize that that’s a problem, or care enough to take the time to figure out how to solve that problem.

The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one, and I admit it.

Do you?

Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: computer games, ego, emotional involvement, gatekeeping

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

Bread Crumbs

February 10, 2004 By Mark Leave a Comment

A few months back I got my annual e-mail announcing the upcoming GDC this spring. I opened it, looked at it, closed it, then deleted it.

A few weeks after that came an e-mail from a really great group of people that I’ve had the pleasure to dine with at the GDC for the past few years, announcing this year’s dinner location and menu. I opened the message, read it, closed it and never replied.

A few weeks later the renewal notice for my subscription to Computer Gaming World came in the mail. I’ve had a subscription to CGW for almost a decade, but I threw the notice in the trash, unopened.

A few weeks later I received some materials in the mail about the upcoming GDC. They went in the trash, unopened.

A few weeks later I talked with a good friend who’d just heard that his company was sending him from Europe to the GDC this year, all expenses paid. We’d shared a room in prior years to defray costs, and I knew I’d miss seeing him again, but I felt no pang of loss at not attending myself. Even the location, which I knew so well, seemed an echo in my mind’s eye. (Except for the little drive-up/take-out Mexican place a couple of blocks down from the conference center that I’d become enamored with.)

Somewhere along the line I began to think about these individual moments in sum, and I wondered what they really meant. Was I truly sick of the games biz, or was this just an emotional low after the letdowns I’d had the previous year? What did it all mean?

Honestly, I didn’t really know until by chance I happened to look at the Mission Statement here on my site, which reminded me why I used to like working in the games biz more than I like working in it now. I don’t know if I’ve reached any real conclusions about where all this is leading me, but I do know there’s a trail of breadcrumbs here, and I don’t think they lead back to interactive entertainment the way the business is right now.

As an antidote to this malaise, I involved myself in an entirely new enterprise over the past six months, during which time I was able to rise through the ranks in fairly short order and materially participate in one of the most amazing and important reversals of fortune that I’ve ever seen. I may write about the specifics later, although probably not, but two points about the experience stand out. First, it reminded me that I have been most successful and helpful when I trust my own judgment, rather than following someone else’s lead. Second, any time money becomes important to me, it probably means I’m not enjoying my work.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: computer games, Interactive

Credit Where Credit Is Due

November 29, 2003 By Mark Leave a Comment

One of the recent credits I posted was for Aquanox 2: Revelation, the most recent game set in the undersea post-apocalyptic waterworld of Aqua. Here’s how I described the work I did on that project:

Revised and edited original translations. Rewrote several key characters late in revision process to meet localization needs for US/UK publisher.

The game was recently released in the US and reviewed in the December, 2003 issue of Computer Gaming World (p.144), where it received one star out of five. Among a host of other complaints about the game, there was this:

The writing jumps from overwrought exposition to hackneyed convention, including the jive black man and the coy Asian girl.

Well, guess what? That’s entirely accurate. That’s the way the text was originally written, and having worked on the previous titles I knew that’s what the developer wanted. They were going for a camp style, as they had in the past, and whether the reviewer didn’t get it, or we all failed to execute, that’s exactly what they intended.

Thinking now about the game and how it turned out I’m not really sure what I could have done to prevent the above sentence from appearing in that review. I know I did a lot to improve the humor and the general flow of the texts, which always suffer in translation, but given the original intent, the structure of the dialogues, and the game itself, I just don’t know if there was a higher goal to aspire to.

You can’t work in a creative business without laying an egg once in a while, of course, and in isolation this experience would simply be par for the course. My concern, as noted previously, is that the industry itself seems more and more determined to exist within constraints in which there is little to aspire to.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: localization, writing

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