[MUD-Dev] A footnote to Procedural Storytelling

[Raph Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu [mailto:mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu]On Behalf Of
> J C Lawrence
> Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2000 8:50 PM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] A footnote to Procedural Storytelling
>
> So if it is acceptable for the stories to be interesting only in
> retrospective, that's a WHOLE other ballgame.  Janet Murray comments
> on the live improv show only being entertaining for the
> improvisationalists, and not the audience.  If our definition of
> "acceptable" stories changes to enclude, "really good fun to tell
> others about but boring at the time", what the heck ARE the metrics
> of a "good story"?

This is what I refer to as the divide between a priori storytelling and post
facto storytelling. The difference between a sequence of events constructed
in advance by an author to have narrative shape, and a sequence of events
selected from a constellation of events by an author after the fact with the
purpose of shaping it narratively.

Muds lend themselves very naturally to the latter, and in fact we see it all
the time. They aren't nearly as good for the former. But there is an
expectation among the playerbase that the former is what storytelling IS.
This expectation also exists among the designers to a lesser extent (cf
Lee's dislike of the "sandbox theory").

Either way, though, a mdoerately high degree of skill is required. It takes
significant effort and storytelling ability to shape past events into a
narrative structure in the post facto model, just as it does to shape them
in advance in the a priori model.

A very real concern with distributed server models such as the Neverwinter
Nights model/player-run shards model, and a very real concern for the post
facto model, would be whether there are enough "authors" out there to supply
the desired amount of fiction. After all, there's arguably less than a
quarter million roleplayers total in the world, and a far fewer amount who
are decent interactive storytellers in the pen and paper medium. We can see
the scarcity of quality talent and skill sets in evidence in the published
interactive video games today.

A good counter-question is whether players really care about the quality, if
they get to participate; Murray's example in other words. As long as you are
not merely spectating, the alleged story can be shallow as can be and dull
as dishwater, perhaps? This increases the author pool substantially.

-Raph




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