Game Design: Fixing Interactive Storytelling
My commute to the day job at Wahoo Studios (NinjaBee) isn't short. I end up spending about an hour and twenty minutes on the road each day - if I dodge the worst of the rush-hour traffic. To help put this otherwise wasted time to good use and to make the time pass more quickly, I've been listening to audio books in the car. About half of the books are non-fiction, ranging from personal wealth-building to Sun Tsu's Art of War. For fiction, I've recently been hooked on Alexander Kent's "Bolitho" novels (good ol' Age of Sail naval war stories), and Lois McMaster Bujold's absolutely outstanding Vorkosigan books.

But this last week I've been listening to Stephen King's "The Shining." I've seen the Jack Nicholson movie, and part of the miniseries that aired a few years back, and I'd read part of the novel in my early teens but had never finished it. I'm about two-thirds of the way through the book now. Though I know all too well how it's going to end, I'm enjoying the story a lot. King is a master storyteller --- there's a reason he gets paid millions just to announce his intention to put pen to paper.

But I'm also struck by how much NOTHING happens through most of the book.

Seriously, the book is largely a character sketch of three people (four, if you include Hallorann), and consists largely of flashbacks into what made them what they are. Then when faced with major decisions, they often decide not to do anything, let things run their course, and hope that things will turn out okay in the end - which, obviously, doesn't happen.

The "point of no return" comes at one point when Wendy and Danny are heading down into town just as the news of the snowstorm is coming over the radio. Wendy asks Danny directly about his visions, and puts the decision in his hands as to whether to stay at the hotel during the winter with his father, or to wait it out at her mother's house until Spring. Danny's fear of leaving his father alone and spending months with his emotionally abusing grandmother outweigh the terror of his half-remembered premonitions.

The reader, invested in the characters, wants Wendy and Danny to flee to safety. Or for everything to come out ... well, looking like this very amusing "trailer" for the "Feel-Good Family Movie" version of the story. The storyteller knows better - for there to be conflict, these characters whom the reader (and, presumably, the storyteller) has come to care about will have to face conflict, be abused, and possibly killed or turned to perform despicable acts. That's where story comes from!

The Shining As A Computer Game?
And so we run into some fundamental problems with "Interactive Storytelling" in computer games and "dice and paper" RPGs. The gamer - even moreso than the reader - makes a horrible storyteller.

The gamer, playing "The Shining: The Video Game," isn't going to be satisfied until Hallorann-As-Yoda has taught Danny to use his powers to bring about world peace, the Overlook Hotel's evil soul has been utterly destroyed in a juicy boss-monster battle, and the whole family comes down from the mountain as a happy, non-disfunctional unit, sure to live happily-ever-after until The Shining II.

A game of romantic comedy would also result in the player making a beeline for the quick resolution, avoiding the stupid mistakes and misunderstandings that make an actual "romcom" story so entertaining in the first place.

But characters in interesting and dramatic stories make irrational decisions. It's the irrational decisions that make them so very dramatic. Without those, Ripley wouldn't bother going after Newt at the end of Aliens. The kids in every single horror movie would flee, never to return, at the first hint that something truly horrible might happen, and if prevented from fleeing they wouldn't choose the flashlight over the gun. Lotteries would be poorly participated in. And the TV show "Deal Or No Deal" would never, ever have worked.

The player, emotionally invested in a character (as they should be), is nevertheless emotionally divorced enough from the story to make rational decisions for that character. He knows it's just a game. He knows the other character's arent' real. While players are capable of extremely irrational decisions, they are more often the result of imperfect communication (like attacking the gazebo!), their own (rather than their avatar's) emotional state, or meta-game knowledge. Lacking that, the player can - and usually will - make the most rational decisions for the character that people won't always make in real life. The ability to reload a saved game gives the players virtual omniscience into the results of their actions, and grants them the potential to optimize their personal decision tree through a story with robotlike precision. And thus creating a boring story.

Just look at the optimization of behaviors in your usual MMORPG for proof of this. Players constantly defy designer expectations (which are in themselves irrational) by choosing the path of least resistance --- and most boring gameplay --- over and over again. Designers set out riskier-but-more-rewarding options before the players, who usually ignore it in favor of the far more predictable grind.

Most game designers - knowing how much investment into the game's story and characters improves the player experience - fall back into conventional, linear storytelling and force calamity upon the player. Sorry, but there's no way to save Aeris. Just like Jack Torrance, she's dead meat from the introduction.

But it works, dang it. Linear storytelling is the antithesis of gameplay, yet the unholy matrimony - disfunctional and annoying as it is - still manages to be successful enough. Enough that many won't even bother beyond the simplest of branches to try to make the story itself more interactive. Why bother, when the player is going to go for the shortest / easiest story path anyway?

Lessons From the Table
Long before people were mistakenly proclaiming Grand Theft Auto as the pioneer of open-ended gameplay, back "mini-computers" were hot news, clocking in at the price of a house and taking up only PART of a room... interactive storytelling was melded into a game via tabletop dice-and-paper roleplaying games. People have been playing RPGs for over thirty years now. So what have we learned?

Not enough. Even with a live referee (Game Master or "GM", as the generic term has evolved) who can creatively change the story to evolve with the player's actions, it's not easy.

Some players will allow themselves, in the name of roleplaying, to subject their characters to greater risk and self-sacrifice in the name of making a more interesting story. They have the heart of a storyteller, and are perhaps the kinds of players people think about when they talk about interactive storytelling. But they are a rare breed, and even they have their limits. So some other tricks have evolved.

Often players are called upon at the table to avoid acting upon "out-of-character (OOC) knowledge," information that the player possesses that the character does not. So just because as a player you might recognize the warning signs that the charming lady you just met might be a vampire, but the game referee (or "game master", GM) is asking you NOT to take a sudden interest in wearing garlic necklaces to bed because your character would have no reason to suspect her. Since this is in a "thou shalt not" category, the referee is capable of enforcing it. But many players are notorious for weaseling out of GM-imposed "ooc knowledge" restrictions. So where a stick might not suffice, you might have to employe a carrot.

The most common trick is to reward roleplaying (or more ideally, increasing the drama and fun for all other players, including the GM --- nobody likes a spotlight-hogging drama queen). With greater risk comes greater reward, and making irrational (but believable) decisions that increase the dramatic tension is a Good Thing. Authors get that feedback in the form of stories that sell. Players get the feedback in RPGs through increased loot and experience points. Other videogames already use this as a mechanism to encourage exploration. You can get a nice health pack or the megawatt laser a couple of levels early if you spend some time hunting the level.

Another trick has been to lessen the impact of dramatic failure, or the "dying well" bonus. If the character's death is due to a dramatic, roleplaying, or self-sacrificing decision, the player can get a leg up with his next character (or, in a game with resurrection, the bonus may apply immediately). The reward ends up transcending the single avatar, and is applied to the player instead. Unfortunately, in the tabletop RPG experience, this effectively translates to all players receiving this reward all the time, as anything else will be considered unfair.

In many more modern dice-and-paper RPGs, the rules systems have actually given the players some additional tools beyond the limitation of their characters to influence the game. For example, the players may be given "action points" or "willpower points" to counteract either the actions of the game master (thus giving themselves limited GM power), or to counteract the randomness of the dice (re-rolling a failure, for example).

Metagame Rewards For Making A Better Story
All of the above tricks from the "dice and paper" RPG world really come down to dealing with the "metagame"... the mechanics "above" or surrounding the actual content and context of the story. While the story may be its own reward, that's something that is usually only appreciated in retrospect. Just like real life, we tend to only appreciate struggles and challenges for what they were after-the-fact. While in the midst of them, they are nothing but a pain in the neck.

In a game, the player is going to need some other feedback structure to prevent the plain ol' path-of-least-resistance navigation through the storyline. Otherwise, your best attempts at interactive storytelling are doomed. Just like the "wasted" failure-path missions in the original Wing Commander. Purists might argue that the presence of these metagame elements acts as yet another barrier between the player and the story itself, and they'd not be wrong. But I believe that the game player's natural motivations are fundamentally at odds with good storytelling. The gambler wants to win, even if the psychological attraction (and even addiction) to gambling comes from the risk of loss.

I've seen this much more frequently in more abstract games (like certain storytelling card games), but not so often in modern videogames.

The Killer Game
One game idea I had many years ago (but will never have the nerve to build) was a concept called "The Killer Game." Basically, it was a multiplayer simulation of the slasher-horror flick genre. One player would be chosen randomly (and secretly) to be the psychotic, possibly supernatural killer, and the rest of the players would be victims.

Amongst the victims, the winner wasn't the person who survived to the end of the game. Rather, each player would accumulate points by doing stupid things common in horror movies (and spoofed in "Scary Movie"), like hiding in front of an open window. For both the killer and his/her victims, points weren't simply scored by destroying the predator / prey, but for HOW you did it. Shooting the killer with an assault rifle? No points, but it ends the game. Dropping a victim into a bubbling vat of chili? Lots of points, for both killer and victim.

Bonus points could be accrued by being the first or second victim to die (to offset the natural penalty of having less opportunity to score points for doing stupid killer-inviting stuff), and for merely driving off the killer or scaring a victim. The winner (who would get awarded a "B-Movie Best Actor Award" at the end) would be the player with the most points. Then the game would provide players an edited playback of the game, showing the point-scoring moves by the players with brief scenes of the killer's stalking - a silly "movie" to keep of the game.

Application In Other Games
Would it work? I don't know --- I'll never make this game (if you do, just list me somewhere in the credits please). And I still don't know how you could translate "The Shining" into the primarily visual and active medium of the computer game (without resorting to lots of metaphorical action sequences for what's happening in the character's minds, or going the text-based route).

But it's an interesting thought-exercise to me, and reminds me of additional tools I could have at my disposal in designing a CRPG.

As I mentioned in "Ye Olde Saved Game Debate," a designer could encourage the player to stick with what might seem a less-optimal performance or decision by rewarding the player with "drama points" or some other mechanic that provides a bonus to future performace, or even unlock the use of spell-like "metagame" effects that influence the game and computer-controlled characters.

As another example, in a "real-world" first-person shooter, maybe enough drama points could give you access to a "good luck" effect which slows down the enemy's reaction to your appearance, simulating getting the drop on your opponents. Sure, it's a metagame effect, but it could be presented in such a way that it's more believable and better at preserving the setting than the semi-magical "health packs" which instantly cure multiple bullet-wounds. Deliberately removed from the game's context, it can be interactively awarded based upon the player's actual actions and situation, rather than the designer's guesstimate of how the game will be played (like providing piles of ammunition and health-packs right before a boss encounter).

The whole point of interactivity - specifically interactive storytelling - is that it goes both ways. It shouldn't just be the player reacting to what the game throws at him or her. The game should react and respond as well, and provide the player with both the motivation and the tools to share in the roll of storyteller, as more than just a single character's brain.

(Vaguely) related stuff I made up:
* RPG Design: Why Can't I Get Past The Stupid Door?
* Are Graphics Really Killing Gameplay?
* Innovation in RPGs
* What Makes a Good "Casual" RPG?
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Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:00 AM (Permalink)