[MUD-Dev] Narrative, quest design, and the solution of in-game problems

[J C Lawrence]

While his cant is significantly different from the recent
discussion, the same points also apply to MUDs and the concepts of
quests, vignettes or other suggested narratives (Skotos alert):

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/designers_notebook/19991229.htm

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Three Problems for Interactive Storytellers By Ernest Adams

Last month's column on adventure games brought such a strong
response, I thought I'd discuss an important related issue while I
still have everyone's attention.

Interactive storytelling has been a subject of hot debate since
computer games were first created. Many of the early game developers
were programmers with no experience at writing fiction, so there was
a real shortage of talent at creating things like character and
pacing and plot. Since then professional writers have entered the
industry, and the quality of our storytelling has improved somewhat.

Despite that, however, there's still a larger philosophical question
looming over the subject: "What does it mean to say that a story is
interactive?" It's a question that remains unanswered. You could
argue that no answer is needed - adventure games tell stories, and
they are interactive; therefore they constitute interactive
storytelling, and no further discussion is required. The problem is
that most adventure games tell rather poor stories. We've never yet
seen an adventure game that was the caliber of works by Dickens or
de Maupassant.

I believe that interactive storytelling suffers from three very
serious problems, and they're clearly visible in adventure games
today.

The Problem of Amnesia

This is the simplest and most obvious of the problems. In a normal,
non-interactive story, the characters belong in the world of which
they're a part.  They understand that world. They know what's in all
the drawers in their apartment and what's in all the shops in their
town. When they first get up in the morning, they don't start their
day by opening up every single closet to see what's in it, nor do
they pick up every object they see and stick it in their pockets in
case it might come in handy later.

But that's not true in adventure games, is it? When you play an
adventure game, you have no idea what is going on. You have
amnesia. Even if start the game in your own home, you have to
explore it. You don't know what's going to happen to you, so for
safety's sake, you pick up everything you see, and you end up
carrying around a collection of objects that make you look like a
demented bag lady. (Consider the original Adventure: a lamp, a
birdcage, a wooden rod, an axe, some gold coins, a bottle of oil...)

A few games have actually been written to incorporate this problem
into the plot. There was a game simply called Amnesia, published by
Electronic Arts; and there was a game based on Roger Zelazny's
series of fantasy novels, The Chronicles of Amber, which started
with a character who had amnesia. But let's face it, this isn't a
major genre of literature.  There are very few novels about
amnesiacs. In most stories, the characters just charge ahead and
have their adventures, and it's up to the author to make sure
they're carrying whatever they need to survive them (if they're
going to survive them).

There are three types of stories in which the characters start
empty-handed and ignorant, and have to figure things out on their
own. One is the rookie-in-a-new-situation story - the new recruit
who's just joined his ship in the Navy, or the gunslinger who's just
been made sheriff of the western town. In these cases it makes sense
that the protagonist has to do a lot of exploring before he can
accomplish anything. The other two are mysteries and heroic quests -
both situations that involve a lot of talking to strangers and
examining unfamiliar objects.

It makes sense, then, that most adventure games are, in fact,
mysteries, heroic quests, or new-kid-in-town scenarios. There's
nothing particularly wrong with that, but it does mean that the
genre is limited by the amnesia problem. We may be able to create
interactive stories, but we can't create any kind of story we want.

The Problem of Internal Consistency

When we judge a work of fiction, we judge it on a number of things:
are the descriptions clear? Is the dialog believable? Does the
writing flow smoothly?  And so on. But we also make a more
fundamental sort of judgment as well. If you walk out of a movie,
having seen it, or if you put down a book, having read it, and you
say to yourself, "I don't think he would have done that" or "I don't
think she would have reacted to that situation in that way," then we
say that the story has a flaw. There's something wrong with it; it
doesn't make sense. Any story must be true to its own inner laws. It
has to be coherent. At any point in the story, the circumstances at
that point have got to be consistent with everything that went
beforehand.

Mysteries are an interesting example of this, because in a mystery,
you have a lot of different possible explanations for the crime, and
right up until the detective gets everybody in the room at the end
and reveals which is the correct one, each explanation has got to
seem plausible. But the rules of the genre require that only one of
them may actually work; the rest must be logically impossible, and
furthermore the author must have shown all the clues to the
reader. It's a very difficult task to create four or five apparently
consistent possible explanations, and introduce them to the reader
in such a way that the clues are all there, but the reader is still
surprised to learn which is really the correct one.

This requirement for internal consistency isn't a matter of pure
logic, of course. I don't mean to suggest that at every point in a
story the circumstances should be rigidly derivable, like a
mathematical proof, from what came before. But if you look back at a
story, it should be consistent. Stories shouldn't be predictable,
but they should make sense in a satisfying manner.

So what does all this have to do with interactivity? The answer is,
nothing.  Interactivity is about freedom. Interactivity is about
giving your player things to do and letting your player do them. The
whole point of interactive media is letting the player do something
on her own. What that means is that a lot of times your player is
going to jump off the rails and go do completely weird,
unanticipated stuff. That doesn't work very well in stories.

      Consider Superman. Superman is a character
      who is congenitally incapable of ignoring a
      baby who's crying in a burning building. He
      never says, "You know, I'm gonna let
      somebody else deal with this for once." But
      what if our player is being Superman in a
      computer game? Here's the burning building.
      Do he run in and save the baby? Well, he has
      to if he's Superman, and if he doesn't do it,
      then he has violated Superman's basic nature.
      There's this conflict that arises between the
      player's desire to do as he chooses, and your
      desire to impose a plot and characterization on
      him. It's a tough one. How can you be sure that
      the player is going to do something that is
      coherent, that goes along with your story? 

The Problem of Narrative Flow

As we all learned in junior high school English class, every story
is supposed to have an introduction, rising action, a climax,
falling action, and a conclusion. It's the business of the story's
author to structure it in such a way that it builds to a dramatic
climax - an action, confrontation, or other event which resolves the
story's inner tension. One of the problems an author faces is making
sure that all the characters involved are ready - psychologically
and physically ready - for the dramatic climax to take place. If he
doesn't, then we read the story and say, "Wait a minute - where'd
that knife come from?" or "How did he know the villain would be
hiding in the hall closet?"

With ordinary fiction, this is a challenge, but at least you as the
author are fully in charge. The characters have to go where you tell
them, to know what you want them to know, because they're all part
of your picture. You set up the pieces, interlock them like parts of
a jigsaw, and when the puzzle is complete the picture is formed; the
dramatic climax takes place.

You can't do this in interactive stories. There's one character
who's outside your control as an author, and that's the player. The
player is doing whatever he wants, and taking as long or as little
time about it as he likes. How do you make sure that when the
dramatic climax takes place in your interactive story, your player
is there and ready for it? This is the Problem of Narrative Flow.

There are three traditional solutions to this problem in adventure
games. One very simple one is to limit the interactivity. You either
cut down the interactivity so that the player can't get away from
the plot, or you give them a lot of interactivity but you make it
all meaningless - the interactivity doesn't really affect anything.

I don't think this one is an acceptable option. Reduced to the
minimal case, the game turns into "Hit ENTER to see next screen."
Limiting interactivity is not what we're supposed to be about
here. A few games have actually done this, but they were universally
acknowledged to be bad games - certainly not the ideal example of
interactive storytelling.

The second traditional solution is that you say, "Too bad. If the
player's not ready for the dramatic climax, that's tough." In this
case, you can create a world that's alive, that goes on around the
player, regardless of what he's doing. This makes for some really
interesting adventure games. Night falls, and people come out of
their shops and go home, and the muggers come out, and so on. It's
interesting to watch things take place around you in one of these
kinds of games. The difficulty with them is that you tend to lose
the game a lot. You end up having to start over all the time,
because you weren't ready for the dramatic climax when it
occurred. But that's no way to present a work of fiction! Nobody
reads a book by reading page one; then starting over and reading
page one and page two; then starting over again and reading page
one, page two, and page three, and so on. It would drive you crazy.

There is of course a workaround to that problem, and it's called
"save game."  But saving the game utterly destroys my suspension of
disbelief. If I'm fighting off the evil trees in the enchanted
forest with my magic sword, I don't want to stop every five minutes
and have a little interaction with my hard disk drive. Saving the
game makes it unnecessary to restart over and over, but at the
expense of taking me out of the world I'm trying to belong to. I
don't think that's a satisfactory answer either.

The third traditional solution to the Problem of Narrative Flow is
the classic adventure game solution, and that is to make the plot
advance along with the player's advances. This absolutely guarantees
that the player will have everything he needs when he gets to the
dramatic climax. If he needs the magic sword, then he'll have the
magic sword, and if he doesn't have the magic sword, there's no way
he can get to the dramatic climax; the plot simply doesn't go
anywhere. It's easy. You just link up the player's actions to the
advancement of the plot.

The difficulty with this solution is that it's mechanistic. It turns
the game into a series of puzzles to be solved, and once you've
played two or three of these games, you can really see it. If
nothing seems to be happening, you must be doing something
wrong. When you do something right, then interesting things
happen. The flow is jerky, stop-start. You as the player can do what
you like, but you don't have the sense of being carried along by the
story; in fact it's quite clear that you're not in the story, the
story is an external mechanical object that only progresses when you
do the right things. It's rather like trying to
operate a VCR with unlabeled buttons.

Conclusion

You might think at this point that I'm going to offer some solutions
to these problems. But I don't have any solutions, and I'm not
certain that there are any solutions. I won't go so far as to say
that interactivity and storytelling are mutually exclusive, but I do
believe that they exist in an inverse relationship to one
another. The more you have of one, the less you're going to have of
the other.

In its richest form, storytelling - narrative - means the reader's
surrender to the author. The author takes the reader by the hand and
leads him into the world of her imagination. The reader still has a
role to play, but it's a fairly passive role: to pay attention, to
understand, perhaps to think... but not to act. A good story hangs
together the way a good jigsaw puzzle hangs together when you pick
it up, every piece locked tightly in place next to its neighbor. But
it ill tolerates any fiddling. Remove a few pieces, and it's likely
to fall apart.

Interactivity is not like this. Interactivity is about freedom,
power, self-expression. It's about entering a world and changing
that world by your presence. In most games the world is static and
dead until the player arrives; the player is the only thing that
makes it move. Interactivity is almost the opposite of narrative;
narrative flows under the direction of the author, while
interactivity depends on the player for motive power.

This doesn't mean that I'm backing down from my call for the game
industry to create more adventure games - far from it. But I
recognize that adventure games, at least at present, tell only a
limited kind of story: the mystery or quest.  We can't yet make an
adventure game about a troubled family or a young man's slow descent
into madness. Adventure games have to sacrifice some of the best
things about stories for the sake of interactivity.

I think adventure games should be just that: games about
adventures. They should give the player a sense of achievement and
accomplishment. They're about doing, making a difference. This does
not mean that they have to be shooters or twitch games, only that
the player and her actions are the most important things in the
game. In computer gaming, you subordinate the player to the plot at
your peril.

It's not our job to tell stories. It's our job to build worlds in
which players can live a story of their own creation.

  Ernest Adams is a game designer at Bullfrog Productions in
  Guildford, England. For the last several years he was an
  audio/video producer on the Madden NFL Football product line, and
  in an earlier life he was a software engineer. He has developed
  on-line games, computer games, and console games for everything
  from the IBM 360 mainframe to the Nintendo 64. He was a founder of
  the Computer Game Developers' Association, and is a frequent
  lecturer at the Game Developers' Conference and anyplace else that
  people will listen to him. Ernest would be happy to receive E-mail
  about his columns at eadams at ea.com, and you may visit his
  professional web site at http://members.aol.com/ewadams. The views
  in this column are not necessarily those of Electronic Arts.
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--
J C Lawrence                              Internet: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                            Internet: coder at kanga.nu
...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...


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