Oh, and the challenge about “making someone cry” wasn’t intended literally – more as general comment about genre vs. non-genre narrative emphasis in games…and I don’t think doing it in an FMV sequence really “counts” either…
;-)

To throw down or pick up the first burning gauntlet (ouch!), I think that looking for a “middle ground between structured narrative and simulation” may be like looking for a middle ground between narrative and poetry. The Odyssey isn’t a strange artifact in that middle ground; it’s a narrative poem. It’s completely both of those things. The question might be whether simulation and narrative can be made to work together as well as poetry and narrative. Or maybe we’ll wonder how to manage that. But I don’t see some category of really cool semi-narrative semi-simulation things waiting to be developed in a middle ground.

Congratulations on the initiation of grandtextauto!

In the hopes of fanning the flames of these burning issues of yours, I’ll toss a few thoughts in the fire:

1) I agree with the previous post regarding simulation and narrative. I ultimately believe there may be something we might call “structured simulation” that is not midway between structured narrative and simulation but exists at a “meta” level to both of them. I believe it is possible, though it perhaps has yet to be proven, to develop contexts, rules and constraints that may be generative of either a fixed narrative (in the mind of an author creating a novel or a play for instance) or a dynamic simulation (in the experience of an interactor) but which maintain the same overall structure in either case. I know these are gross generalizations, but I will elaborate further in future posts.

2) The big question/challenge for those of us who passionately believe in the necessity of an independent games movement is “how do we make it affordable to create games of real substance?”

3) This one I’ve got mixed feelings about. As an artist who programs I certainly understand the benefits of this, but then, I’m also a painter who mixes his own oil paints from dry pigments. That said, I also think it’s possible for artists working in established (digital) media to produce great works of art without knowing how to program, by working with existing tools, or with collaborators who are software (or hardware) engineers. It all depends on the nature of the art.

4) This I could talk about for hours, but I (and I think a lot of other people) would rather hear what you’ve got to say on the subject.

5) This goes in part to my earlier issue about trying to make deep, sophisticated, meaningful interactive art on the cheap. Knowledge representation and more importantly experience representation, are two of the technlogically stickier wickets for the more “right-brained” artist trying to develop a serious structured simulation. (if I use the term one more time it officially joins the lexicon!)

6) The industry’s undergoing a lot of consolidation in spite of (or perhaps because of) it’s growing successes. Big, old school publishers hell-bent on protecting market and mind share are clinging to proven formulas over new ideas. A CTO of a MAJOR game publisher recently told me that they were not in the business of innovation, but of execution, and that they preferred to acquire (and franchise) games that had been developed by smaller companies which had become successful rather than take a chance on something new themselves. Problem is, as the stakes rise it becomes harder for independent developers and small publishers to fight for increasingly limited shelf space (see #2 above) so we are likely to see more formula and less excitement from this avenue (kinda like network television)

Academia’s great if you want to work on stuff no one (in the general public) will even see for at least 3 to 5 years. All kidding aside, I think this may be one of the only real avenues left for individuals who want to create “art” as it’s the one arena left where sufficient freedom and adequate resources may found in the same place.

Finally, I think the “starving artist” mode is kinda hard in this field. Once again, it depends on the nature of the art, and there certainly are cheaper forms of digital creativity, but when we talk about building structured simulations (that’s three!) and the like, we’re usually talking about the kinds of resources that the average “non-digital” artist never has to contend with.

Simply put, you may have to be rich to starve in this business. (Once again, see #2 above) :)

– Athomas

Actually, I need to open this up a bit. What I’m really after here is to find ways to give the player of a digital fiction what I’ll call a well-formed experience, while at the same time giving her all the freedom and expressivity (agency) that a simulation offers.

By well-formed experience, I mean an experience where tension and complication builds in a paced and satisfying way, where boring, unimportant events are kept to a minimum, where interesting, funny, compelling dialog is the rule, not the exception. I.e., drama – life with all the boring bits cut out. But I’d rather call this a dramatic experience, rather than a dramatic story. “Story” brings a lot of baggage and expectation with it that may be more trouble than it’s worth.

Nonetheless, essentially I’m restating the fundamental problem with interactive stories, that we are all familiar with: how can a story be told with a proper narrative structure, while at the same time allowing one of the characters (the human player) to do or say anything they want at any time? (In an interview from a few years ago, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas said interactive stories were “impossible”, but what do they know.)

I’m not going to go into that whole argument here; it’s been discussed at length over the years. To read up on the debate, for starters, check out the writings of Chris Crawford and Greg Costikyan.

I’d like to try to relate this problem to the state-of-the-art in deeply interactive experiences. These days we’re seeing the benefits of “immersive simulations”, in games like Grand Theft Auto 3. If you build a detailed virtual world, in which players are given a huge slew of things they can do at any time (invariably physical actions), and you do a thorough enough job of simulating all of the objects in these worlds – that is, programming the basic rules of behavior for each object, allowing objects to act on other in “natural” ways – then players now have a high degree of agency. Akin to “real life”, they can make a lot of stuff happen in a lot of different ways.

But, like real life, simulations are unstructured. In a simulation there is no guarantee that interesting things will happen any time soon; as the player, you might have to do quite a bit of work to make truly interesting shit happen. For some people, that’s the fun of it; somehow they enjoy spending dozens hours a week slogging through the tedium of such a game (presumably, as a tradeoff for all the agency they get). But for me, I don’t have the patience. I don’t want to have to work for my pleasure. Yet, I don’t want it spoonfed to me either – I do want to interact, I just don’t want to work! Nor, I suspect, do others who are not hard-core-gamers – probably the majority of the population.

This post is already getting long; I’ll wrap this up for now. Michael and I have described one approach to solving this problem, a particular way of structuring hierarchies of behaviors. I’m curious to hear more approaches, more ideas, and to discuss them.