Lecture 5
CS148/248: Interactive Narrative
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www.soe.ucsc.edu/classes/cmps248/Spring2007
michaelm@cs.ucsc.edu
24 April 2007
Build it to understand it
 Building experimental games necessary for
theoretical progress in game studies
 Façade as an empirical investigation of the
ludology/narratology debate
 Resolving tension between game and story
 Authoring story structure (mixable progressions)
 The wicked nature of game design
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Game studies and game design
 A primary goal of game studies is to understand the form and
structure of games
 Usually accomplished by analyzing existing games
 However, existing games sparsely sample design space
 Commercial games heavily constrained by market concerns
 Theories informed by existing games are at best incomplete and at worst
wrong
 Theoretically informed construction of experimental games…
 Provides a more complete understanding of already sampled regions
 Opens up new regions of design space, providing raw material for
theoretical and prescriptive advances
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Case study: the ludology vs. narratology debate
 The question: can gameplay and narrative combine (to what
extent do games and narrative overlap)
 Status
 Fatigue and malaise (including claims that the debate never took
place)
 Occasional flare-ups indicate little progress
 Our concern is that if pushed, some game scholars would say only
“pure” gameplay can offer high-agency
 Fundamental tension: agency vs. narrative progression
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Existing games insufficient
 Easy to conclude that narrative is incompatible with
gameplay from existing commercial games
 Canned missions and cut-scenes
 Fixed or mildly-branching paths
 Can’t develop theories regarding intersection of story
and narrative solely from existing points in design space
 You can’t make strong statements of what’s impossible without
building things; dangerous to be prescriptive
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Façade
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Game reinforcement and feedback
Game
Position, time, score
“Score” (summary state)
Game state
Player
Run, jump, shoot
 Concrete player actions directly manipulate state
 Game state is primarily numeric, relatively simple
 The score is directly communicated to the player
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Story not amenable to simple numeric state
Plot structure
(global constraints)
Tension/Complexity
Climax
Crisis
Falling action
Rising action
Exposition
Inciting
incident
Time
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Denouement
Characters
(consistency, inner life)
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Personality
Emotion
Self motivation
Change
Social relationships
Consistency
Illusion of life
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Façade as social, dramatic game
Game
Head game scores
Enriched dramatic performance
Abstraction2
Abstraction1
Game state
Player
Praise, bring up topic, flirt
 Abstract player actions (discourse acts) manipulate social state
 Game state is heterogeneous, multi-leveled, symbolic and numeric
 Score is indirectly communicated through dramatic performance
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Façade’s social games
 Affinity game
 Player must take sides in character disagreements
 Hot-button game
 Player can push character hot-buttons (e.g. sex, marriage) to provoke
responses
 Therapy game
 Player can increase characters’ understanding of their problems
 Tension
 Not a game, but dramatic tension increases over time and is influenced by
player actions (e.g. pushing character hot-buttons can accelerate the
tension)
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Multiple, mixable progressions
 Each social game, plus tension, forms a mixable
progression
 A progression consists of
 Units of procedural content (e.g. beats, beat goals)
 A narrative sequencer that manages the progression and
responds to player interaction
 Multiple progressions run simultaneously and can
intermix
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The progressions
Beat sequencing
(overall story + tension)
Beat goal sequencing
(affinity game)
Global mixins (hot button game)
Therapy game similar
Handlers + discourse
Beat manager
Handlers (ABL
meta-behaviors) +
discourse
management
Beat library
Mix-in library
Canonical beat goal
sequence
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The atom of performance
 Joint dialog behaviors form the atom of performance
 Façade consists of ~2500 joint dialog behaviors
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Each 1-5 lines of dialog long (5-20 secs)
System sequences these, including transitions between
Most are interruptible
JDBs use ABL’s joint intention framework to coordinate
performance
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Local agency
 Players get immediate responses
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interruption often possible
context-specific <-> more general <-> deflection
emotional
information revealing
 Narrative effects
 Which topics discussed, info revealed
 Current affinity
 Increase in tension
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Global agency
 Player’s “score”
 Pattern of player’s interaction is monitored over time
 Player’s response to key moments
 Used to modulate beats when possible
 Some influence over beat sequencing
 More if we had more beats!
 Ending beat chosen by calculus and evaluation
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Lessons for game studies
 Narrative and agency can be reconciled through intermixable,
dynamic progressions
 Progressions provide narrative structure at multiple levels
 Progression management provides responsiveness to interaction
 The narrative is potential – interaction evokes a specific narrative
progression
 Generative narrative does not require an AI-complete “author in
a box”
 Combine human authorship and autonomous generation
 The “gun-toting Gandhi” problem is a red herring
 Constrained action spaces still create agency (just like in games)
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Useful residue of the L. vs. N. debate so far
 “Interactive narrative” should mean something
 Not enough just to declare all games “narrative” by fiat
 For a specific game-story, designers must clarify what they mean by
“story”
 Pushes on procedurality and agency as the essence of games
 Any attempt to combine games and narratives should respect this
 But for a design field (like games), theoretical arguments (based,
e.g. on theoretical definitions of “narrative” and “game”), will
never be sufficient
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Wicked problems
 Introduced by Rittel and Weber in context of public policy
(1973).
Problem
Solution
 Lack definitive problem statement
 The problem is only understood through looking for a solution
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The wicked nature of game design
 No definitive statement of problem
 “Create a game in which you roll a sticky ball around and pick up stuff” does
not define a fixed problem statement
 No stopping rule
 Resource management determines when you stop
 Solutions are not correct/incorrect
 Games are only judged relative to each other and in a social and economic
context
 No immediate nor ultimate test of solution
 Every game design changes the design space (some subtly, some dramatically)
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Interactive story as a wicked problem
 “Integrate narrative and gameplay” is not a well-defined
problem
 Need to build something to even figure out what the problem is
(e.g. “create progressions with both local and global agency”)
 Formal definitions of narrative (e.g. structuralist) don’t provide
a stopping criteria
 Determining whether you’ve built a “high-agency interactive
story” is fundamentally audience-centric
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Design and architecture
Author
Player
Game
An architecture is a machine to think with
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Interactive story: architectural and design problem
 Concepts such as “progression”, “global agency”, “cumulative
history”, “discourse acts” are inextricably technical
 Relationship between two semiotic systems: the code machine and the
rhetorical machine
 You must iterate architecture and content to explore new regions
of design space
 No design-only solution
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Conclusions
 Building games is a necessary part of game studies
 Need to explicitly sample the design space
 Game design is wicked
 A priori theorizing or empirical investigation of existing games are
insufficient to fully understand the design space
 Construction of experimental games can shed light on thorny
game studies questions
 Example: The ludology vs. narratology debate
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Game Design as Narrative Architecture
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Jenkins argues for a middle path in the games/stories debate

Not all games tell stories – for those games, such as Tetris, for which there is no
strong narrative component, we need non-narrative terms and concepts
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Many games do have narrative aspirations – games explicit tap the narrative residue
of previous story experiences (e.g. the Star Wars games tap your memories of the
Star Wars story)
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Narrative analysis doesn’t need to be prescriptive – he’s not arguing that games
must be narrative, but just that (some) games can contain narrative elements
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The experience of playing games can’t be reduced to the experience of a story
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Games will not tell stories in the same way as other media – “Stories are not
empty content that can be ported from one media pipeline to another.”
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Evocative spaces
 “The most compelling amusement park attractions build upon stories or
genre traditions already well-known to visitors, allowing them to enter
physically into spaces they have visited many times before in their
fantasies.”
 “Arguing against games as stories, Jesper Juul suggests that, "you clearly
can't deduct the story of Star Wars from Star Wars the game," whereas a
film version of a novel will give you at least the broad outlines of the plot
(Juul 1998). This is a pretty old-fashioned model of the process of
adaptation. Increasingly, we inhabit a world of transmedia storytelling, one
that depends less on each individual work being self-sufficient than on each
work contributing to a larger narrative economy.”
 “In such a system, what games do best will almost certainly center around
their ability to give concrete shape to our memories and imaginings of the
storyworld, creating an immersive environment we can wander through
and interact with.”
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Enacting stories

“Spatial stories, on the other hand, are often dismissed as episodic -- that is, each episode (or
set piece) can become compelling on its own terms without contributing significantly to the
plot development, and often the episodes could be reordered without significantly impacting
our experience as a whole.”
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“Spatial stories are held together by broadly defined goals and conflicts and pushed forward
by the character's movement across the map. Their resolution often hinges on the player
reaching his or her final destination…”
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“The organization of the plot becomes a matter of designing the geography of imaginary
worlds, so that obstacles thwart and affordances facilitate the protagonist's forward
movement towards resolution.”
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“Just as some memorable moments in games depend on sensations (the sense of speed in a
racing game) or perceptions (the sudden expanse of sky in a snowboarding game) as well as
narrative hooks, Eisenstein used the word "attractions" broadly to describe any element
within a work that produces a profound emotional impact, and theorized that the themes of
the work could be communicated across and through these discrete elements.”
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Micronarratives
“We might describe musicals, action films, or slapstick comedies as having accordion-like
structures. Certain plot points are fixed, whereas other moments can be expanded or
contracted in response to audience feedback without serious consequences to the overall
plot.”
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Embedded narratives

The distinction between story and discourse exists in games as well
 The story is recovered through the active work of recovering information distributed
across the game space

“Read in this light, a story is less a temporal structure than a body of information.
The author of a film or a book has a high degree of control over when and if we
receive specific bits of information, but a game designer can somewhat control the
narrational process by distributing the information across the game space.”

“Within an open-ended and exploratory narrative structure like a game, essential
narrative information must be presented redundantly across a range of spaces and
artifacts, because one cannot assume the player will necessarily locate or recognize
the significance of any given element. Game designers have developed a variety of
kludges that allow them to prompt players or steer them towards narratively
salient spaces.Yet, this is no different from the ways that redundancy is built into a
television soap opera, …”

“Game designers might study melodrama for a better understanding of how
artifacts or spaces can contain affective potential or communicate significant
narrative information. Melodrama depends on the external projection of internal
states, often through costume design, art direction, or lighting choices.”
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Emergent narratives
 “Emergent narratives are not prestructured or preprogrammed, taking
shape through the game play, yet they are not as unstructured, chaotic, and
frustrating as life itself. Game worlds, ultimately, are not real worlds,…”
 “Characters [in The Sims] are given desires, urges, and needs, which can
come into conflict with each other, and thus produce dramatically
compelling encounters. Characters respond emotionally to events in their
environment, as when characters mourn the loss of a loved one. Our
choices have consequences, as when we spend all of our money and have
nothing left to buy them food.”
 What does this have to do with space?
 “Urban designers exert even less control than game designers over how
people use the spaces they create or what kinds of scenes they stage
there.Yet, some kinds of space lend themselves more readily to narratively
memorable or emotionally meaningful experiences than others.”
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Beyond Myth and Metaphor – Ryan
 Starts by exposing two myths of interactive narrative
 The myth of the Aleph
 The myth of the Holodeck
 She then moves onto an analysis of the different types of
interactivity possible in interactive narrative as a way to clarify
the possibilities and move beyond the myths
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The myth of the Aleph
 Early hypertext theory enthused over the infinite narrative possibilities of
hypertext
 A hypertext is infinitely (or at least vastly) productive of different stories
 “The term comes from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which the
scrutiny of a cabbalistic symbol enables the experiencer to contemplate the
whole of history and of reality, down to its most minute details.”
 But most of the many different orderings in a hypertext don’t constitute
different stories, but different discourses (different edits of the same film)
 And many possible orderings won’t make sense
 “Textual fragments are like the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle; some fit easily
together, and some others do not because of their intrinsic shape, or narrative
content. It is simply not possible to construct a coherent story out of every
permutation of a set of textual fragments, …”
 “What we have, instead, is something much closer to the narrative equivalent
of a jig-saw puzzle: the reader tries to construct a narrative image from
fragments that come to her in a more or less random order, by fitting each
lexia into a global pattern that slowly takes shape in the mind.”
 How does the myth of the aleph relate to emergent narrative systems?
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The myth of the holodeck
 The focus on first-person experience will disallow certain types of stories
 “If we derive aesthetic pleasure from the tragic fate of literary characters
such as Anna Karenina, Hamlet or Madame Bovary, if we cry for them and
fully enjoy our tears, it is because our participation in the plot is a
compromise between the first-person and the third-person perspective.
We simulate mentally the inner life of these characters, we transport
ourselves in imagination into their mind, but we remain at the same time
conscious of being external observers.”
 “Interactors would have to be out of their mind-literally and
metaphorically--to want to submit themselves to the fate of a heroine who
commits suicide as the result of a love affair turned bad, like Emma Bovary
or Anna Karenina. Any attempt to turn empathy, which relies on mental
simulation, into first-person, genuinely felt emotion would in the vast
majority of cases trespass the fragile boundary that separates pleasure
from pain.”
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External vs. internal interaction
 In internal mode, the user projects themselves into the
storyworld
 Identification with an avatar or first-person experience
 In external mode, the user situates herself outside of the
world
 God-like interaction or navigation of a database
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Exploratory vs. ontological interaction
 In exploratory mode the user can navigate the discourse, but
not the story (can’t effect the plot)
 In ontological mode the user’s actions effect the possible
world (influence the story)
 Internal/external distinction is analog – relates to the distance
from the world
 Exploratory/ontological distinction is digital – the user either
does or doesn’t have influence over the real plot
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External/exploratory
 Classical hypertext
 Choose routes through textual space, but not influence the story
 Classical hypertexts are too densely interconnected for the author to control
the sequence – therefore the sequence of nodes visited is almost random
 The only way to maintain narrative coherence is to view the text as a puzzle
to be put back together (reconstruct the story)
 “Moreover, just as the jig-saw puzzle subordinates the image to the
construction process, external/exploratory interactivity de-emphasizes the
narrative itself in favor of the game of its discovery. The
external/exploratory mode is therefore better suited for self-referential
fiction than for narrative worlds that hold us under their spell for the sake
of what happens in them. It promotes a metafictional stance, at the
expense of immersion in the fictional world.”
 Choose-your-own-adventure hypertexts are not external/exploratory –
they are an implementation, in the technology of hypertext (material
medium), of external/ontological interaction
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Internal/exploratory
 The user has a body in the storyworld (first or third person),
but can’t influence the plot, only reconstruct it
 Myst
 Many of Jenkin’s strategies for spatial narrative are applicable
for constructing internal/exploratory narratives
 “The user exercises her agency by moving around the fictional
world, picking up objets and looking at them, viewing the
action from different points of view, investigating a case, and
trying to reconstitute events that have taken place a long time
ago.”
 Doesn’t have to be events that happened a long time ago – the user’s
interaction can move the story along (trigger story moments, etc.)
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External/ontological
 User sits above the world, but can have a real impact on the story (rather
than only on the discourse)
 Providing external/ontological activity, without the help of a generative
system, requires simplifying/reducing the interaction points
 “Once the user has made a choice, the narrative should be able to roll by itself
for an extended period of time; otherwise, the system would lead to a
combinatory explosion-or fall back into randomness, the deathbed of narrative
coherence.”
 Choose-your-own-adventure is an example of external/ontological
 The Act – Cecropia Studios
 Simulation games provide a generative system that can be productive of
narrative experience
 Without simulation of “the laws of narrative”, how much of the narrative
resides in the head of the user?
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Internal/ontological

The holodeck dream – your in the world and have a real influence on the story

“In the meantime, the category will have to be represented by computer games of
the action and adventure type. Here the user is cast as a character who determines
his own fate by acting within the time and space of a fictional world. In this type of
system interactivity must be intense, since we live our lives by constantly engaging
with the world that surrounds us.”
 But how much do you really get to choose your own fate?

“The narrativity of action games functions as what Kendall Walton would call a
"prop in a game of make-believe." It may not be the raison d‘etre of games, but it
plays such an important role as a stimulant for the imagination that many recent
games use lengthy film clips, which interrupt the game, to immerse the player in the
game world.”
 This sounds like internal/exploratory to me

In action/adventure games, there is ontological interaction with respect to the
development (or death) of your player character
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