From Jeff On Games: Toward Interactive Stories

From Walkerings: Primarily Out of Control (expanded version of Mark W.’s comment above)

What moments in people’s own gameplay have created intense story pleasure or have aroused story expectations and succeeded or failed in satisfying them in a memorable way? My answer here

But in short, there’s a very good reason why the game industry isn’t making interactive stories: they’re too busy making games. As has been pointed out, there are people who want more story, better interaction, cooler character arcs. But there aren’t many who want “intermixable chains of events.” If you want to get people fired up about this stuff (and it’s well worth getting fired up about), tell them what they’re going to get out of the experience, then work back from there. They’re going to get to live the story, be the character, experience the highs and lows of the hero’s journey. They’re going to be faced with important choices at every turn, they’ll be able to see their character express what they themselves are feeling, they’ll identify with their onscreen self like never before as they first learn about their world and its dilemmas, venture forth to slay the monsters and solve the problems in their path, and finally struggle with the long journey home, always wondering whether there’s not something more satisfying that still lurks out in the wilderness for them to conquer.

I’m buying (or investing my $3 million) in that game. I’m not buying the game that offers me “intermixable chains of events.” It may seem like a snarky quibble, but I think it’s important to keep the end product in mind. The best games (the best examples of any art form, in fact) arise out of the creator’s passion, which stirs some passion in the gamer, the reader, or whoever’s on the other end of the experience. People react to passion, and making a great game that incorporates the very good ideas laid out above just isn’t going to be possible without it. Gamers are very passionate about their games, and if you really want to move these ideas forward, you’re going to have inspire the same kind of passion they already feel.

However, it should be noted that the currently available literature doesn’t deal with interactivity. My opinion is that I’ll have to give the client/player access to all the Character Elements the system uses, no matter whether I use Archetypes or Complex Characters. Archetypes can be useful for categorizing player behavior, but I wouldn’t want to tie the player to having to use certain archetypes to communicate in the story, at least not in the early stages of the interaction, where the player is likely to test any behavior that comes to mind.

Scott Miller of 3DRealms just updated with a piece from Bob Bates talking about the hero’s journey. I like this bit:

“Carl Jung argued that mythical motifs are structural elements of the psyche. In fact he went further to argue that there are patterns that are biologically present in our brains. He gave these patterns the name “the collective unconscious.” Just as Pinker believes humans have the capacity for grammar wired into our brains, waiting for a particular language to come along and imprint itself upon us, Jung believed we have mythic structures built into us, waiting for a particular belief system to be imprinted upon us by the culture we grow up in.”

Sooo,
If we approach the creation of believable characters with this in mind, where they all have these ‘myth templates’ present in their ‘minds’, I could see stories popping out that fit the heroes journey. Each character, from their own point of view, can take the role of a hero, acting out their own story, and acting in supporting roles in the stories of other characters, one or more of which could presumably be controlled to some degree by a player.

I’d like to elaborate, but I’d prefer to hear anything you guys would like to say about this type of approach.

I haven’t seen Jade Empire yet, but if it uses a similar visual style during conversations, that would be a good place to see their current state-of-the-art.

In my Interactive Narrative class this year, students built story-based NWN mods in which objects, actions and places (levels) take on more symbolic meaning. Since the NWN authoring tools are really designed to create dungeon crawls, it’s an interesting exercise in working against the affordances of the tools. Danny Mueller, a master’s student who worked with me a couple of years ago, and who has a background in screenwriting, built an NWN mod based on one of his screenplays as a way to investigate catharsis in games, and particularly, as a way to investigate mise-en-scene in level design.

Doug Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association, gave this state of the industry speech at E3, in which he said:

We need games with better stories, more interesting and complex characters, games that keep you up in the middle of the night wrestling with whether you made the right ethical or moral choices, games that stay with you when you’re done with them, games that make you happy when you play them, and afterwards.

Many of today’s games are amazing creative and artistic accomplishments, and many are incredibly fun and absorbing. But we have only scratched the surface of what games can be. We cannot let the lure of onrushing technology blind us to the essence of what makes great entertainment. Great entertainment – whether books, film, or games, must engage us at some emotional level. If video games aspire to movie-like status, then games need to become topics of conversation at dinner parties and happy hours and they won’t ever achieve that if they are mainly the province of an elite few who speak their own language, congregate in chat rooms and LAN centers, and have an endless amount of time on their hands.

So there are at least some non-academic folk interested in deeper characters and stories.

Even assuming that you could get the NLP down and the management of event chains to create believable character-driven narrative sequences, would the average player get the sense of mastery, control, and reinforcement on anything like the schedule of these games?

This is a good point; progressions, by their nature, require both the passage of time and the player remembering their interaction history in order for the player to develop a model of how their interaction effects the progression, and thus to develop a sense of mastery and control (agency). In Facade, we attempted to design for both local agency (being able to provoke immediate responses from the characters) and global agency (having a sense of mastery and control over longer-term progressions). Developing this understanding definitely takes mutiple playthroughs and experimentation on the part of the player (since any one playthrough is only ~20 minutes, it’s not onerous to play Facade multiple times, and in fact is hopefully enjoyable). The character dialog tries to communicate the “score” (underlying changes in character emotions and relationships that drive the progressions forward), though we were not as successfull at this as we would like. Creating global agency, that is, providing reinforcement, control and mastery over longer-term progressions, is definitely one of the key design challenges.

One of the very nice features of implementing language games is that the function space and the content space are nearly identical – at times, I even have to introduce artificial differences to draw a boundary between computer language and natural language, so that the character can seperate what she “says” from what she “thinks” -, and the question of which is more important doesn’t arise here.

How many players are happy with how things are doesn’t concern me either, as long as I’m not happy. For a long time, most people seemed to be quite happy with the idea that they live in a flat world that is circled by the sun.

And technical challenges are there to be solved. Hardly anybody believed that motorized flight was possible, either.

The question of interface here is not trivial. It is not sufficient to provide the player with the appropriate range of options, but also to ensure that the mechanism for making those choices is as intuitive (if you want to reach a large audience) and as transparent as possible. If it takes the player significantly longer to express their desired action than it does to reach that conclusion, you’re going to lose the audience.

This is where we come back to the NLP problem, because it’s not just a case of coming up with a sufficiently delimited subset of natural language, but rather of handling effectively the full range of natural language the player is going to attempt to use within the game experience. You can train the player to some extent (provided you can keep their interest long enough) and you can use some shortcuts, but the premise of generating player involvement through this interface is going to be violated by the extent to which you cut off their instinctive reactions and force them to work within (what will seem to them to be) arbitrary limits.

Beyond that, you have to look at whether this interface feedback loop and the timing of dramatic progress is going to compare favorably to the loops of more clearly game-focused games like Diablo II, the Sims, or Medal of Honor. Take a look at the timing on these games, and you’ll see that the timing of that loop is very, very short. The training time on the interface is very quick, the use of the interface is very quick, and the reward situations for effective use of the interface not only happen quickly, they cycle quickly.

Even assuming that you could get the NLP down and the management of event chains to create believable character-driven narrative sequences, would the average player get the sense of mastery, control, and reinforcement on anything like the schedule of these games? This is one of those points of disconnect, I think, between the academy and the industry. Industry folks look at this problem and see the player experience at the functional level as more important; academic folks look at this problem and see the content as more important. If you want to compete in the marketplace, I think this is one of those issues that needs to be addressed.

On point 3, you guys should look at BioWare. While the Valve guys did a good job of hyping their character technology, BioWare has been taking this stuff seriously for years, building from project to project, and working to keep an internal knowledge base active and evolving from both the content and technology angles. Not only are they closer in focus to what you’re advocating, they’re also using a methodology that’s fairly similar to what you’re proposing.

On question 2, I’ve said it too many times to be worth more than simply repeating: most players are happy enough with what they’re getting and the underlying technical problems are vast.

On question 3, I think you’re tremendously underestimating the challenges. Your model also doesn’t include producing actual content once the technical, design, and writing challenges have been solved. There’s nothing in there for mise-en-scene.

Ultimately, I agree with Warren Spector’s points at the talk, that as noble as the project may be, it’s fundamentally misguided and impractical to look at this as being a viable approach to achieving a commercial success in the games market. It’s an interesting academic exercise, and it may someday flourish in a micro-community, but it’s not what the gaming market on the whole is looking for.

I know you don’t believe me, that you can’t acknowledge the truth of this and still pursue your projects, but I pose this simple challenge: look at all the post-E3 coverage and find me even a handful of articles from outside the academy that have anyone complaining about the lack of character or the need for more interactive fiction.

Still tilting at windmills,
Eyejinx.

I am looking forward to seeing Façade in action, and I guess I haven’t seen enough good examples of recent successes.

Once it’s publicly released, you’ll have to judge for yourself how well Façade‘s NLP performs; Nick is giving it a glass-half-full evaluation, which is good of him. :-) We can say that anecdotal evidence from a decent amount of beta-testing suggests that our particular solution for our particular domain succeeds about 50% of the time, has partial success 25% of the time, and more or less fails 25% of the time. Over time we’re going to be doing some more formal user studies to get a better understanding of it.

Also, to date we’ve described our approach quite a bit, including both NLP and character behavior, in our existing collection of papers; however we’ve got a substantial new paper coming out next week at AIIDE, called “Structuring Content Within the Façade Interactive Drama Architecture”, which offers some new details on its authoring and implementation. We’ll put it online soon.

Finally, when Façade is released, we plan to offer a meaty “Behind the Façade” document that describes in relatively plain language the inner workings and design.

I don’t see either current gamers or casual-or-non-gamers putting down controllers and typing if they see “I only understood you as far as …” half the time.

Couldn’t agree more.

I wasn’t thinking of NLP as a currently fruitless endeavor, just a difficult one to apply to very generic scenarios. The most successful examples I’ve seen only understand a very restricted domain of knowledge, which I was assuming makes things much easier. NLP as an interface to a system which is simulating not only world events, but NPC events with emotional content, seems like the scope of knowledge and language that the system would have to contain understanding of would be pretty large.

(I guess my unstated assumption is that a text interface has to be significantly more capable than, say, current IF parsers if this is going to break new ground as a revolutionary new direction in gaming. I don’t see either current gamers or casual-or-non-gamers putting down controllers and typing if they see “I only understood you as far as …” half the time.)

Anyway, I would be interested to know what approach was used in Façade, once it’s released. (Secretly, I wish I could do R&D work in NLP and games, and occasionally dream of experimenting with learning NLP systems applied to a game world. Don’t tell anyone though.)

Natural language processing has been the goal of many an AI researcher for a decade or three, and has proven to be Really Damn Hard™. I think it’s still a worthwhile research goal, but isn’t it a bit insane to think that a single research team could solve that problem within 5 years, along with all of the other goals you’ve laid out?

Natural language processing is a field of research with numerous successful results. It’s not the name of an unsolved problem that people have struggled fruitlessly toward for decades.

You’ll recall that Andrew (and Michael) have already solved the NLP problem for the specific case of Façade, although you may not have seen the system in action yet. I’ve been able to play a pre-release version, and the approach they’ve taken does work at least reasonably well for their purposes. Plenty of other specific applications (for instance, the speech interface at 1-800-USA-RAIL) work well enough, although of course, computers can’t understand all general human language, spoken and typed, in every context. Still, I’d trust Andrew to estimate the amount of research time you’d need for this.

>What moments in people’s own gameplay have created intense story >pleasure or have aroused story expectations and succeeded or failed >in satisfying them in a memorable way?

Without using a bit of overly-hyped video/sound effects, the storyline of Marathon was told through a computer terminal interface found throughout the game. Three seperate artificial intelligences with distinct personalities and writing styles gave different elements of the story. I recently played through a couple levels of it and was still astounded that a FPS had this complex a narrative.

The creators, Bungie, went on to create Halo, depending on who you talk to, was either a bust or the greatest development on FPS in a long time.

Other than that, I’d love to see a research group take up these ideas and see where it leads. I just have a strong aversion to the all-or-nothing definition of the problem, when I don’t see a strong reason why your goals couldn’t be researched and applied individually to the current state of gaming.

(An example comes to mind, but I can’t remember the name of the group – but it was an academic research project which was creating a story engine within the context of a FPS with characters and events that adapted to the players’ actions, such as holding up a bank teller.)