In Masq's blog:
http://alteraction-masq.blogspot.com/ in the post from Sunday, April 8, 2007
Aynen started an interesting conversation regarding the possibilities of interactive conversations. I moved it here given that the topic is more realted with the authoring and creative process.
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9 comments:
Aynen said…
“Apart from the production, the design itself might suffer from long conversations in that they would force players to go through them every time.
Even though they can do them differently, over time they would have encountered the same conversations multiple times.
For the conversations not to become boring they would have to be of such an intellectual proportion that it might even require multiple reading sessions to understand fully.
This CAN be done.”
Javier said…
It can be done, obviously it requires superior writing as well as authoring tools that allow the author to focus more on the substance than on the technicalities, but it can be done and should be done, not only in the conversations but in the whole experience. The player will replay part of the story again and again (mainly the beginning) so we should build experiences where subsequent “plays” reveal something different. E.g. watching The Sixth Sense movie the second time is a different experience because what we learned the first time we saw it.
Another (complementary) way to make conversations interesting is for them to contain information that is useful somewhere else in the story; What you learn in a conversation can be used to gain the trust of a character, or used to open her heart . And maybe even more important is to design the expercience in such a way, that selecting different choices during the conversation trigger different consequences in the story.
Regarding the “intellectual proportion” of the conversations, they will have an impact on the kind of interactive experience created, and therefore in the market interested in playing them. I’m not saying this is good or bad. Ideally this design model should become a platform for different authors to create different kind of experiences.
Aynen said…
But lets see if there's another way...
Perhaps you can separate the deeper conversations from the rest of the game, where the making of choices is of greater importance.
From the start menu one might have the option to talk to any of the game characters which would be scened as flashbacks or appendixes.
This makes all these conversations completely voluntary without holding up the story.
This makes the conversations kind of like some background story you might find in the manual of some games, designed to be able to read them when you're not behind your pc and to emerge you further into the game.
These conversations would then be about a character's history, their opinions of you and everything else, it's philosophical points of view, etc.
The game itself is nearly devoid of these elaborate background conversations to keep the speed and pressure into the story.
This also creates a different method of producing them, as they are not required for the story to function, they can be made and added to when the core of the game is already produced and published.
You can then spend as much or little time and effort on them as you can afford, it is completely flexible.
Since you can play with the principles of prologues and appendixes the possibilities for adding to the story in any way you see fit are endless.
Link this to a system of being able to purchase individual appendixes and prologues separately without it ruining the main story and you have a story any user can expand on in the way he or she sees fit.
Javier said…
In a great degree, our design philosophy will prevent us from keeping the conversations as separate elements, (which doesn’t mean it can’t be done) but our uniqueness is the intertwining of game design with storytelling. Most games in the market can’t integrate storytelling with game play, we can, and we like it. An interactive conversation will demand having different dialogue choices, otherwise it will be a linear piece, and to make these choices meaningful (playable) they have to have some effect on the conversation. As it happens sometimes in Masq, the effect can only be changing the chronological order of what is discussed, but I don’t think that is good enough. Players (and me) want more dramatic consequences to our choices.
I understand that conversations can have different uses; in most traditional graphic adventures they are used to bring some humor or to provide functional clues to allow the player to ultimately open a physical gate. And as you point, the conversation should be used to discuss interesting themes, back-story, or even previous relationships.
But for us, a big part of the appeal of this genre (or design model) is the ability of the player to affect his relationships with the characters through his choices, how the character and the player feel about each, or even how the characters themselves feel about each other because of the player choices. So having a conversation that does not affect these relationships (relationships that will affect the whole experience) may not only be difficult (try a conversation where no feelings are involved) but would be a wasted opportunity.
I believe that at least a good share of the conversations may have different relationship-outcomes, and different outcomes will trigger more story alternatives. As authors we want to force ourselves to have the conversations (and all interactions) integrated organically, affecting the relationships, but also, as you propose, exploring interesting themes and reveling more about the characters. Masq was only our first attempt, so yes; we can do better than Masq.
Coming up with solutions to design issues is one thing, but coming up with solutions that fit a specific design philosophy is a whole different ballgame.
Having interactive conversations that are deep and full of consequence without becoming repetitive is quite a hard nut to crack indeed.
To get the best of both worlds, you might have to fiddle with time...
As you said, the beginning of the game will be played the most, so perhaps the game would gain an element of diversity if the first choice of consequence was where to begin...
This is not easy to implement, but, once again, let me think out loud.
An event has ingredients, causes, effects and the opinions people have of the situation.
If one was to start with the effects rather than the cause, then normally the cause would have to be set, since time is liniar.
But in games that rule can be broken.
You might start with an upset protagonist who got beat up, but since you don't know how he got there, anything is still possible.
So as you go forward in the story, and back in time to explore the cause of the situation there is still freedom of consequence and choice.
The difference is that if the player can chose the situation he is in before he starts playing then the starting point, and therefor the order at which certain events and conversations take place becomes variable, and so you don't have to worry about a repetitive beginning.
It sounds like an interesting idea to explore. I can see also some disadvantages, such as the multiplication of paths based in multiple starting points or the tendency of many players to "game" one path to achieve the desired result, which means they'll choose the same beginning again and again, etc. But maybe they can be solved. One way to find out is to implement those ideas at some level and see what happens.
You're right that is is by no means easy, but there is an underlying logic to stories told with an unusual chronological order.
Those rules might make things a lot easier.
I assume that all the links from player's choice to the direction of the story are man-made and set instead of generated through a system of rules?
If it was to be generated instead of pre-determined, then over time the player might understand and use the logic followed by the program versus knowing what choices the writer made.
The former might feel a bit more realistic, and can have surprising results in spite of still making good sense to the player.
The rules the program would follow would not only be the rules of social behavior of the characters, but more the rules of story-telling.
So the details of how characters respond to things is still written by a writer, but the order in which things are told is generated following those rules.
You mentioned that players tend to want to play the game the same way each time, with generated content, they can still make the same choices leading to roughly the same character's reactions (you might not want that), but the order of events is different, even if a player does things in exactly the same way twice.
I'm not sure if I'm following you. Without concrete examples to work on these ideas it's hard. Any examples will make easier for me to understand what you mean.
Well, it might be a strange game to compare to, but if you look at the Sims, what the non-player controlled characters do isn't what a writer wrote them to do, it's generated with the use of statistics that are kept track of which trigger certain actions and reactions.
Even though Masq is a completely different game, you can still use that system.
The thing that makes it worthwhile is a measure of randomness.
In the Sims, a character might choose to go to the bathroom when his bladder is getting full, but the chance of him choosing to do so steadily increases when his bladder gets fuller.
He might choose to go to the bathroom earlier or later, which means a measure of randomness while still coherent to logic and player intervention.
If the characters in Masq work in the same way, they have a chance to do certain things which increases if the corresponding stats are increased by the player's actions.
If you do this, you have a factor of variety you cannot create with set written paths and reactions.
This counters predictability and repetition.
Also, from a moral perspective, if reactions are predetermined then a player who knows the reactions might choose to act to get a specific reaction, and not because he feels it's the right thing to do morally.
Remove this predictability and you'll have to make your choices for different reasons, hopefully moral ones.
Yes, my short answer is that we can use the randomness plus stats system to give more variety to the game. Something like that was suggested by Noah Falstein for future projects (Masq was already to advanced when Noah started advising us).
But in the case of adding the random-stats layer you have to consider that story experiences require to a certain degree an “arch” or dramatic structure. The order of the events that the player experiences makes a difference. So introducing randomness and stats will change the timing of the events adding another variable to work. So you have to create a story experience that “supports” time ranges where certain reactions or events can happen.
Even in Masq, with no randomeness, by allowing the player to execute different actions at different time we run into very time consuming problems; from the almost inconsequential catching up with Nikki before she leaves the party, to the erasing of the tape, or the critical actions required to warn the characters about Williams danger once we threaten him with the tape. Timing matters and users selection of choices changes it. Even worst, not being able to branch forever, we need to bring back the action flow to certain common points; being sure that x amount of things had already happened. So, if you want to add randomness and stats the complexity increases dramatically. Is it worth the cost? Does the player will notice it?
Most of the comments we receive about Masq is that it’s so deep, that there are so many plots, that the story really changes with your actions, and that it's not easy to understand how to achive desired results . Do we need more complexity? And there may be easier ways to make it feel different every time they play, some more related with storytelling that with AI, but I guess everybody will use their own strengths. In addition we have learned that most players are not experiencing a great amount of story possibilities. So in the next story we expect to facilitate the discovering of more possibilities, and we’ll known what does not make sense to produce because no one will find it anyway.
Regarding morality we believe that many people who are gamers decide to be moral not because they are moral but because they assume that it will help them to win the game, even when we state there is no winning here. Others want to do things that they can’t in real life and that is part of the fun of Masq, to allow them to do that(inside certain limits). Obviously expecting they won’t do it in their real life. This aspect is something that I had very clear since the start of the design phase. I can not impose too heavy my moral framework (obviously there are some limits to what the players can do in Masq) but for the experience to work, it can not be a right path, because then it becomes a linear story. Players should get an exciting experience whatever choice they make, and that was a great challenge to accomplish from in the writing perspective. And ideally you should build circumstances where is difficult to know what is right and what is wrong. As I believe great stories show, life is much more complex than black and white.
Obviously, you've put a great deal of thought into it, and it's hard to argue with a design philosophy that was created and perfected over the course of half a decade.
And if I look at Masq, you're right, it would not have benefited from a statistic driven random engine.
For a game to benefit from it, the other elements have to fit to it, the story, the visuals, the game mechanics...
You can't simply apply a random engine to any design.
And to make good use of it in a story, the engine would have to be made with a good understanding of story telling and structure.
I understand and fully agree with not using it in Masq, but there are some definitely interesting possibilities in using it, if the rest of the game's design is suited for it.
I'd love to see what comes out of the creative processes of Alteraction next, and would have loved to be involved in what is clearly groundbreaking game-design.
I like seeing how you have solved design dilemmas in unique ways, and I hope our public brainstorming sessions about interactive conversations and storytelling have contributed in some way to making the next game that rolls out of Alteraction just as groundbreaking.
If you ever need a second opinion about your products, drop me a line.
-Aynen.
dendaas@home.nl
I don't mean that Masq or any future project could not benefit from a statistic driven random engine. I just wanted to share the additional complexity it implies and the challenges. But I agree that if made with a good understanding of story telling and structure there are some interesting possibilities in using it.
The key is this "story understanding". As I point somewhere in our discussion site, even many good linear writers don't understand how they do it. And on top of that, try to intertwine the storytelling with game design. Again, challeging but doable.
I appreciate your input and enjoyed the conversation. I'll be in touch. Thanks.
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