Player characters and their primary antagonists should always be stronger, faster, or smarter than your run-of-the-mill non-player characters. It makes sense that the storyworld would favor these characters and grant them special authority. After all, it wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for their experiences within its borders.
I did not mean to imply that the two camps referenced in the previous post were mutually exclusive. It is merely a description of focus—one outside moving inward and the other inside looking outward. There are studios who seem to have people standing in both camps. Lionhead, as I mentioned, and Team Ico both spring to mind.
Nor did I mean to imply one was more valid than another. Both have their limitations and struggles. Both have their strengths and benefits. I personally feel like exploring the idea that game mechanics convey meaning is too often overlooked and the more we learn about it, the better it will be for the industry at large.
I also did not mean to imply that every single developer falls into one of these two categories. Developers who aren’t remotely interested in storytelling clearly don’t fall into either (although their work can still be examined for its ability to communicate meaning).
Interactive fiction developers quite likely also fall into different camps altogether. As the core mechanic of IF utilizes language, it muddles our attempts to break people out into convenient philosophical camps.
I think I may have hit upon why I become so frustrated when I read what other developers are saying when they talk about storytelling in video games. I mean, even people that I really like, people who want to tell good stories with video games.
My theory is this—there are two camps of people interested in the storytelling potential of video games.
The first camp believes that Video Games are Platforms for Storytelling. This is the largest camp and the vast majority of AAA titles released today are created within this camp. This camp wants to use the medium of video games to tell stories. It’s an outside-in approach that inherits all the baggage of traditional video game design, along with all the conceits that stories are linear constructs. Despite all their very different outputs—Bethesda, Bioware, Double Fine, and Konami are all in this camp. Looking Glass was in this camp as well, but were really freaking good at making it work. I actually place Tale of Tales in this camp as well and believe they try to resolve the “design baggage” by leaving it at the station when the train pulls out.
The second camp believes that Game Mechanics Communicate Story. This is a rather more niche approach and the best examples of it can be found among indie games. This camp examines how game mechanics themselves convey meaning. It’s an inside-out approach that often breaks the “rules” of game design and runs the risk of alienating traditional gaming audience and being accused of “not being a game.” Daniel Benmergui and Gregory Weir are in this camp. I believe that Peter Molyneux himself is in this camp, even though Lionhead Studios and their output is not. Will Wright is probably in this camp as well.
Clearly, my sympathies and focus lie with the latter camp. I don’t feel the former camp is “wrong,” but I do feel they’re not advancing the art as much as they’re iterating past successes and failures.
I’ve been asked a few times now to talk about my design process—including to students of game design. So I figure it’s about time I quantified my approach, found personal ways of expressing my goals, create slides, etc. But for now, here’s a rough outline:
Hm… I should probably make a flowchart of this…
I’m putting this here because it’s a sidebar to the official Rev03 announcements I’m making on Man Bytes Blog at the moment. Not to mention that the notebook could use some more content…
I’m seriously considering using comparative die rolls for every challenged action in Rev03.A challenged action is any action a storyteller wishes to take that another storyteller thinks isn’t within easy range of their skills.
This will enable the storyteller prime (SP? S0? Szero?) to focus on thematic content and story-flow, rather than scrambling to draw up new life wheels when the other storytellers decided to try and approach she hadn’t prepared for.
I’m currently thinking that the SP would declare the storyteller’s challenged action to be of one of the following challenge levels and they would each roll die. If the storyteller’s die roll was higher, it’s a succes. If lower, it’s a failure.
The storytellers facing the challenge always roll a d10, where 0 is an absolute failure and 9 is an absolute success. If she is performing an uncontested action (i.e. picking a lock, jumping a chasm, fixing an engine), the SP rolls a d6 against the effort. With no 0 or 9 on a d6, there is no chance of automatic success or failure on the part of the world, and the storyteller herself has a higher chance of success, since she’s rollng a d10.
If the storyteller is performing a contested action (i.e. an action against another living being), the SP also rolls a d10.
There’s a conversation that’s been bouncing back and forth among my online circle lately. It involves the use of forums or collaboration sites to further our conversations or increase our visibility. Some feel this is a vital step forward. Others, like myself, either see little value in the idea or actually feel it would be a step backwards.
Yesterday, on Twitter, Michael Abbot suggested to Roger Travis that my Blogs of the Round Table (BoRT) was… well, let’s just quote him:
“@CorvusE BoRT is a model of how to have it both ways. Broad reach; individual voices.”
If you’re not familiar with the BoRT, it’s a monthly blogging event in which people are invited to post on a single topic. They submit the permalink to me and I add it to a MySQL table that updates a centralized list on my blog. However, it is important to me to make the BoRT as decentralized as possible. It is not my event—it is a community event. And although it may serve as a promotional tool for Man Bytes Blog, that’s a side effect. It would be more accurate to say that I’m leveraging hatever caché MBB might have to promote the BoRT contributors.
To this end, I ask that contributors include a drop down box at the end of their post ( I provide an IFRAME code that calls a script on my server), which automatically updates with new contributions so you can navigate the BoRT without the need to visit a centralized site.
Anyway… I joined in the Twitter conversation with the following:
“I see this as the pull between consolidation of access vs. consolidation of broadcast.”
I thought it would be worth following up and trying to clarify that a bit. When I first started using the internet, it looked a lot like this:
Lots of individual nodes at discreet URIs that I had to visit each node one at a time to see if any content had been added. Often times, as sites weren’t the data driven affairs they are now, the only way to tell if content had been added since your last visit was to click around the site for a while. This obviously wasn’t very efficient and posed a problem for the exceptionally curious. I wasn’t the only one to think so and a lot of people put their minds to finding a solution.
And so the search engine and the portal were born. Portals went and visited sites for you, scraping them for new information and letting you know if they found anything. Concurrently, internet forums became HUGE repositories and social meeting spots for like minded people to share their experiences, links, and ideas.
The problem here is one of homogony. Corporations, not wanting to be liable for presenting innapropriate content to minors, became gatekeepers of the signal—consolidating content into an editorial channel of their own choosing. There was suddenly a hidden message in the data—a message comprised as much of what they chose not to tell you, as what they did.
Community forums were also subject to power struggles over how to control the flow of information, as well as corporitization. The internet experience, while becoming ever more popular, became safer, more predictable, more bland, and less useful.
The answer to this issue lay in the technical solution to a problem portals had—ever increasing server loads. That answer was RSS—really simple syndication.
RSS, along with the rise of blogs, helped transform the face of the internet. Now we could easily return to the distributed broadcast signals of the early days and allow usere to consolidate their own signals. The portal sites haven’t gone away, but with the dramatic increases in internet citizenry, they have become more free to specialize and with our ability to consolidate their data into our feed, we can track more of them in less time than we once could.
This has given rise to the social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Friendfeed. These are nothing more than skeleton structures with APIs to allow customized input and output filters, as well as RSS, SMS, and email outputs—so it’s possible to interact with sites on your own terms, to a large degree. We have become the gatekeepers of our own individual portals. This allows us to connect directly to the content providers we wish and allows them to connect directly to us as well. This is consolidation of access to the data on the web.
You’ll notice what is missing from this final diagram—the community forum. I believe it is possible to decentralize a forum, but I have yet to find a community forum platform that uses RSS well, or allows new models of interacting with the conversation. Google Groups and Yahoo Groups aren’t a terrible platform, but they’re heavily branded and not highly customizable visually. The upcoming IGDA site is attempting to merge the concept of forums and mailing lists, which is an excellent start. But the idea still has some major issues to work out at this stage in its development.
I prefer this decentralization and expect it will continue. Ultimately I’d prefer to have a single application that used plugins to receive output from RSS feeds, email accounts, Twitter timelines, Friendfeed streams, and any other input I wished. And furthermore allowed me to fully interact via inputs of my own choosing—using SMS to comment on a Facebook shared item, emailing a Twitter reply, or leaving a voice mail message in response to a blog post.
I think there’s a place for both consolidated broadcasts and consolidated access. But until I never actually need to visit a web site to successfully interact with it—I’m not sure I’m going to feel the web has reached its true potential.
