In the previous essay in this series, I offered the notion that a story consists of a network of densely interconnected ideas, and that the brain is particularly good at absorbing such networks that are presented in narrative form. Now I would like to develop this concept in two directions.
First, I'd like to declare war on the very notion of plot, at least as regards interactive storytelling. A plot is a single path through a storyworld. Plot is not a component of the architecture of storytelling, it is a consequence of storytelling. Bringing plot into the design considerations of interactive storytelling dooms any such effort to failure. True, we must consider how the architecture we create will generate plots during its operation, but the plots themselves are not part of the mechanism we build -- they are the result of its operation. When we design a car, we do not ask ourselves, will this car go from Decatur to Wilmington? We ask the more general question, will it go? When we design a calculator, we do not worry whether it will add 2 plus 2 and get 4; we worry about getting it to perform addition properly. Yes, it is imperative that the car be able to go from Decatur to Wilmington, and that the calculator get 4 when the user adds 2 and 2, but we don't design from these starting points; our considerations are more abstract. In the same fashion, worrying about any particular plot is simply too narrow a consideration. Interactive storytelling demands that we move up a level of abstraction to something I'll call a "metaplot".
What, then, is a metaplot? I have two ways of thinking of it, and I'm not sure which one constitutes metaplot -- perhaps they both do. One way is the tried and true Erasmatron storyworld, a webwork of verbs. Each action taken could lead to one or more consequential actions, which in turn lead to other actions, and so on. The plot is then that particular sequence of actions that emerges in a single playing of the storyworld.
However, there is another way of thinking about metaplot, a view that is closer to the concept of what narrative actually does inside the brain. This is a conceptual breakdown of the ideas of the story. For example, let us consider metaplot abstractable from Romeo and Juliet. The core concept here is the conflict between love and obligation, so we could characterize the metaplot as a mesh with just two components.
However, this arrangement is too simplistic to be interesting; we need to break it down further. For example, Juliet loves her father as well as Romeo, so her conflict is not just between an obligation and a love, but also between a love and a love.
Romeo finds himself in a similar position. And each of them faces additional stresses as their relatives murder each other; for every murdered relative, the two lovers must feel some hatred for the murderer and, from that, some reflected hatred onto the murderer's family and therefore the other lover.
There are also pragmatic considerations here; social position is vital to personal well-being, and defying family obligations risks a loss of family support. Thus, the mesh that the story represents is a messy, complicated affair. And this complicated mesh is precisely what constitutes the meat and bones of the story. If relatives weren't killing each other, their dilemma wouldn't be so acute. The truest and most intense love must be counterbalanced by a truly intense conflict in order to push characters to reveal the deepest strains of human existence. All those forces pushing and pulling on the two lovers could not be simply added and subtracted from each other; they need a complex mesh to express their intricate interrelationships. This mesh can also be called metaplot.
So we have two ways to characterize metaplot: the Erasmatron storyworld of verbs enmeshed, and the psychological mesh of motivations, inhibitions, and drives. The next task is to explore the relationship between these two meshes.