Once upon time, some people went to Phrontisterion
4...
Held on June 26 to 27 there were 19 people in attendance.
The group
was approximately evenly split between the techies, and the artists /
designers / writers.
Three people in attendance had written programs to allow
Interactive
Fiction (I.F. hereafter). They were Brian Magerko, Jeff Rawlings
& Chris
Crawford, so the talk was considerably less theoretical than in previous
years.
The talk was a round table discussion with everyone asking
questions
or making comments as they chose.
Interactive Fiction (I.F.) is not computer games & is not
Interactive
Storytelling (that term has been used by the people making text based
puzzle games). It is used here to mean writing programs to tell
stories
based on the actions of one or more users of the program. They
may be
player characters (PC's) or a more third person fate like being.
It has
proved to be very difficult to do this and the field lacks strong
examples of what this entertainment form will eventually become.
Chris has finished his new book on I.F. & had sent out a
galley
version of it to the attendees. Most of us had read it before the
conference began. The talk was structured around the chapters of
his
book, until mid Sunday, when we started discussing other
books on the subject. This write up will hit the high lights (in
my
humble opinion) of the two days of talk.
We began by talking about stories & the characters in
them. The point
was made early, that the people in games were little more than objects,
and the ways that they interacted with each other are typically both
simple and violent. Interesting drama can not be made when the
only
verbs allowing characters to interact are 'shoot'.
Generally stories are about people and games are about goals.
A point was made that I found very interesting: if the animation
is
very cartoony people accept it for what it is. Animation that is
very
close to photo realistic causes people to notice the tiny flaws in the
animation.
With artificial personalities the same thing may occur: if a
artificial personality is close to how we expect people to react &
is
_almost_ right then the character feels monstrous. This
emphasizes the
difficulty of making software that can create and control interesting
characters.
The importance of emotions to drive behavior in software
characters
was emphasized.
The game Ico (where you must carry a person with you who is
unable to
walk on their own) was given as an example of a game with stronger than
normal characters.
Gordon pointed out that the thing that was really important was
the
mental state of the player of our story worlds. If the user of
our I.F.
is enjoying themselves and thinks that a cool story is going on, then
the job is done. A good point, (which partly explains the
popularity of
the Sims I believe) but something has to be there first to get the
user's imagination going.
The discussion of how important graphics and sound was to
I.F. It was
pointed out that MUDS had tens of thousands of players, but graphical
MUDS like Everquest and Origin Online have millions of players.
(Are
they really up to millions of regular players?) The first
Interactive
Fictions may have text based interfaces while we are figuring out the
art form, but they must get graphics before they will become a medium of
mass communication.
Chris brought up his thesis that space is of limited use in
drama; all
needed movement can be done on various stages with out any relationship
between them in Cartesian coordinates. A few counter examples were
offered but generally the group agreed with his point.
We then discussed Machinima. I had never heard of this but
apparently
it is a type of story telling using interactive level editors (such as
Unreal Editor or Macromedia Director) to create
characters and stages. People move on these small levels and
dialog is
added to make stories. Thus game tools are being used to make
small
movie like entertainment.
This is not interactive and we moved on.
Chris pointed out that we needed LOTS of verbs for interesting
stories. (In his experiments he found that more than 2,000 verbs
were
needed to allow interesting drama to happen.) This is one
of the major difficulties with the art form.
Consider various user interfaces in computers:
Joystick with several buttons: ~Max 24 verbs.
Command Line
interface:
~Max 50 verbs. *
GUI
interfaces:
~Max 300 to 400 verbs. *
Language:
Many thousand verbs.
* A command line interface or a GUI can have a theoretical limit of
nearly an infinite number of verbs, but in practice user memory places a
practical limit on how many commands are allowed. Power users who
are
highly expert on this can push this higher of course.
Chris thus feels that a simplified language is needed.
There was much
discussion on this. It turns out that evidence suggests that a
class of
languages know as creoles are extraordinarily easy for humans to learn,
and they may be the based on the fundamental language circuitry of the
brain. Very interesting stuff, see Chris'
writing for more details.
Chris suggests I.F. should use an artificial language based on
creoles.
This caused a lot of argument: people would not want to learn a
language to play a game. Chris offered the counter example of
Siboot.
In that game, people did learn the small
language very quickly and easily. Gordon pointed out that if
people
think that they have to learn a _language_ to play a game, they just
won't buy it. True, but if it is perceived to be a subset of
English, I
think that people won't obsess about it.
People pointed out that we might be able to get away with fewer
verbs
and lots of adverbs. This is true but they still must be learned
by the
users and still must be programmed by the programmers so I was a bit
unsure how much this would gain us.
Next we talked about I.F. itself. First, would it be
popular? Laura
pointed out that the mediums which have stories (books, TV and
movies) are multi-billion dollar industries. That suggests that
people
are willing to pay serious money for stories.
Interactive entertainment (computer games) are also a
multi-billion
dollar industry even tho it reaches a very limited market of hobbyists.
(Game industry propaganda aside, most games
are still played by young males. There are very few women are much
interested in the violence in games.) The Sims is a non-violent
game that significant number of women bought and it is now the most
successful computer game in history (in terms of sales). However
the industry has not been able to repeat the success of The Sims in
other games.
Anyway, Laura suggests that I.F. WILL appeal to a mass market
including women and there is no reason it could not someday become
bigger than movies (as games have already done) or traditional computer
games.
I strongly believe in the power of interactivity and agree with
her.
Laura has made a graph showing the relationships between various
entertainment media which graphically suggests the
size of the market for I.F. I believe that this graph will be
posted on
the BLOG that will be formed for this group.
Also interactivity is the competitive advantage for I.F.
If you want
a non-interactive entertainment (multi-media for example) well, TV or
movies will do it better. Only with interactivity does the
computer
really shine. Story telling on computers must use interactivity
or it
will be done better and cheaper else where.
Using I.F. where all characters are Player Characters (PC's) was
brought up. Using the computer as a communication device to bring
people together in an I.F. (everyone is an actor) is a
possibility. I
have my doubts, most interesting stories that people buy are created by
a single artist, not by a collection of people. (However, if it
is an
interesting enough virtual reality the users may be willing to pay for
it.)
The point was made that trying to tack a story onto a game
sucks, you
do not get software that tells stories, at best you get some context for
the violence in the game. As long as games have
verb sets of 40 or fewer verbs, you CAN NOT have drama.
If you are to have good stories in games two things must happen:
first
the writer and game designer must be working together from the very
start as equal partners. Second, the game designer can NOT say:
the
only verbs you can have are jumping, moving, shooting and picking up
ammo. If that sort of constraint is put on the writer, he or she
has
been in fact demoted.
It was pointed out that those interactive entertainments that
have
poorish content that have succeeded are those that allow people to SHARE
the content. People put their home pictures on websites, they post
blogs and tells stories of their Sims people. The ability for
people to
share or talk about their experiences can leverage
the success of Interactive Fiction (I.F.). Thus we may wish to
consider
how to make it easy for people to share stories about what the I.F.
did. Perhaps a replay function allows people to recreate an
especially
interesting play thru of a story world and let their friends see how
they did would be useful.
A discussion was made of the 'two cultures'. The way
techies often
communicate alienates and puts off non-techies. Many artists make
little or no effort to understand math or science. I.F. will
require
story world builders who are both techies who have an artistic bent.
About 3% of the people producing salable artistic content have this
ability to span both worlds. Some discussion was made on if
people can
train to be able to think both ways. I believe that this can
be done, but it is difficult.
Programmers, read widely: all SORTS of different books. Do
try
writing for ordinary people, on non-technical subjects. (Fiction
or
non-fiction.)
Artists, learn some math and programming.
There was a short discussion on forms of thinking. Noun
based verses
verb based thinking. (For example the English language is a noun
powerful language where as Latin or Hopi put more emphasis on their
verbs.) Building story worlds will require a verb-centric way of
thinking which comes hard to some people. (Programming requires
verb
based reasoning which is an additional reason for artists in any form of
interactive entertainment to practice programming.)
Also intuitive and pattern based reasoning was compared to
sequential
based reasoning. Both will be needed for I.F. (with a bit of fuzzy
logic IMHO).
Current styles of building story lines were discussed. A
branching
tree is unworkable. (For example, a short story I analyzed had
about
100 decision points with often several decisions possible at each
point.) Assuming a minimum choice of a yes / no decision, that is
2 to
the 100th power of story elements to be created. (Trillions of
trillions of elements.) So in practice story trees are
tightly
constrained.
One way of trimming this impossibly huge tree is to 'kill them
if they
stray'. If they deviate off the main story, they die. This
is
basically a linear story along with the mechanic of going back to the
last save point. This awkward in my opinion; it breaks the
suspension of disbelief.
Fold back gives the person a choice but very soon both choices
come
back to the same node. This is irritating to people as they soon
find
that their choices are not meaningful.
A linear story with state variables can allow you to pick a
cluster of
different endings at the end of your linear story. This is the
strategy used by the Japanese Comic Book games. I've played a
couple of
these, and it is irritating having so little control of what is
going on. Most of your choices do not affect anything meaningful
and
having to make all of these choices that don't accomplish anything
grated on me.
(Of course ALL of these strategies can be used a LITTLE bit when
appropriate, with out damaging the story. But using them enough to
trim the impossible sized story tree spoils the interactivity except for
the simplest stories.)
Chris suggests a story web as a solution to the above
problem. It is
discussed in his book on interactivity.
A discussion of what forms of interactive entertainment are there
now. There are role playing games, improv, heckling in comedy
clubs,
storytelling to kids and the play "Tony and Tina's Wedding".
A number of problems were discussed in the play Tony and Tina's
Wedding. First it is VERY expensive, and the audience is
relegated to
low quality interactivity. They are not at the center of the
drama, the
Non-Player Characters (NPC's) Tony and Tina and their family are.
There
was some discussion of Neverwinter nights which allows a GM to make a
graphical rpg. Good idea but it requires so much work it has
limited
the adoption of the game so far.
Emergent stories were discussed. Create an interesting
environment, &
maybe good stories could be told AFTER the fact. The human mind
is good at making stories out of pretty flimsy material. This has
been
called the 'man in the moon' effect. (The brain finds order
even if there is not any.) This can work but we are looking for
something which gives the story world writer a bit more ability to
discuss important themes. Good stories communicate
something. Also, we
have lots of stuff now that people can do and tell stories
about it afterwards. (Stories of battles in Total Annihilation for
example.)
But even tho websites with such fiction exist, does not make
Total
Annihilation an example of an Interactive Fiction software project.
Personality Modeling is used to help drive and distinguish the
behavior of the Non-Player Characters (NPC's). Standard
personality
models created by psychologist and the way D&D models personality
were
discussed. The feeling was that render unto D&D that which is
D&D's.
Basically the models that have been built by others are optimized for
the use that the designers of these models need. The Lawful -
Chaotic /
Good - Evil model from D&D is designed to help the players of that
game
know how they should run their characters The models designed by
psychologists are designed to help people or
understand people.
However we want a personality model that will help our NPC's make
decisions. In other words, custom design a model that will drive
the
behaviors that you wish to model in your I.F.
Some time was spent on the discussion of values for personality
models. Should the personality attributes be orthogonal or more
'realistic' where you might have several values that say similar
things? I feel that the personality attributes should have as
little overlap as possible. Basically we are already taking on a
very
difficult task, by making the different values independent, we
simplify our job some.
Character growth in stories is very important and we would like
to
capture this with personality models. I don't see any major
problems,
the data structures just need to be set up with some care.
A drama manager is a software system that watches what is going
on in
the story & 'helps' it along if the story seems to becoming boring.
Kinda like a game master who throws a wandering monster at his PC's
anytime they talk for more than 5 minutes.
To do a drama manager well is a very difficult task, but a few
of the
people working on I.F. have been attempting it. Jeff's system
(if I understand what he said) will watch the player character and try
to deduce what the motivations or goals of that PC is. When the
drama manager knows this, it can place dramatic delays and problems in
the player's way that will correspond to the ebb & flow of the
story.
One idea I thought was very clever was using a drama manager to
rate
the players experience on an 'applause meter'. This idea came
under
sharp criticism as it turned interactive fiction into something more
like a game & it constrained the person's choices with values the
drama
manager used to score the drama.
I agree with the above, but...
The I.F. art form is so new I feel uneasy about closing off
avenues of
approach. Also it is a dream for many people to be an actor or
actress who gets a thunderous round of applause after a
performance. If
our software wants to give people that experience we pretty much need
the drama meter to gage the actions of the PC's.
Finally if the users of the system know that they will get 'high
marks' for choosing interesting or dramatic behavior (rather than
the safe or cautious behavior) then they are more likely to be
dramatic. If everyone does this, they are more likely to have fun,
which is the whole purpose of all this after all.
At this stage we began looking into the implementation details of
Chris' Erasmatron engine. Pick up his book for details, as he
says it much better than I can cover in this short summary.
Tho it is very difficult, having the NPC's and PC's trade
information
is very important. Lies also drive a huge amount of drama.
So we would
like our software actors to be able spy on each
other, gossip, blackmail each other, trade secrets, etc.
In Erasmatron version one, the PC spent so much time dealing with
minor, boring gossip it hurt the fun of the story world. In the
current
version (version 4) that Chris is working onthis is automated, but the
player loses control of the what to reveal. It is a tough user
interface problem as we would like them to have
the choice of what secrets to reveal (dramatically important) but don't
want to have the player bogged down with boring discussions
(dramatically important to avoid).
I suggested making custom verbs to 'socialize' (where boring
gossip is
automatically shared) and a 'reveal secrets' verb which allow the
player to reveal important information. (Since Chris already has
code
to rate the importance of information this should be doable.)
Anticipation is also dramatically important. For example,
Lancalot
beds Gueniver. He likes to gossip with his close friends, he
likes to
share information that is important to them & he likes to talk about
information that is important to him. So he rushes at once to
Arthur to
tell him...
There are two ways to handle this. First write recursive
routines
that will look at how Arthur will react before telling him, the
second is write some sort of dramatic inference engine which will weight
the dramatic values of situations. Both are tough problems but
Chris
feels that the recursive strategy would be simpler to implement.
We discussed 'roles' to place more context around social
situations.
Depending on how you approach the problem of implementing I.F.
roles
can be fairly straight forward or be a really complicated, driving force
in the design. Kyle talked about a system he was thinking about
where
he used roles as a central means of driving drama.
We discussed sequencing where one event drives another event and
so
on. Chris uses a diary of events to keep track of this
information.
Chris spent some time emphasizing the importance of development
environments for building story worlds in I.F. He says that at
least 2 to 3 times more effort must be spent on making the tools for
artists easy for them to use over (the big job) of making the story
engine itself.
We then did a review of other work that other people have
done Most
was of only tangential interest to I.F.
We discussed Facade' where you are a guest at a dinner party
given by
a 30's old married couple. You discover that their marriage is on
the
rocks, and in fact it may disintegrate while you are at the party.
Depending on what you do you may hasten the break up or buy the couple
some time.
Facade' is very tightly constrained and is pretty much hardwired
for
this one situation, but it is still a huge step forward. Anyone
interested in interactive fiction should take a look at it.
Grand Text Auto is a BLOG that talks about stuff of interest to
people
in the I.F. field.
Brian talked about his technology. It tries to figure out
the goals
of PC's and uses this to build the story. He puts down plot points
that must occur, but the player character is given wide latitude between
these plot points. The major limitation is that he does not use
language, communication is done via physical interaction (a stylized
body language?) and you can not interact with the NPC's. You are a
ghost who observes the interactions of the PC's and can affect things a
bit by revealing your self at various times.
Brian said that from what he learned in the conference that
perhaps
language was not as tough as he thought, and may put in a simple
system in his next version!
Jeff's story world engine has a number of interconnected stories
in
it. It will watch the user and try to pick which story line is
the most appropriate at this moment. Thus a fair bit of what is
going
on is moving form one story line to another. Story lines can be
suspended and then later picked up again.
If I understand it correctly, the major work is in the drama
engine
that tries to deduce the user's goals and pick an appropriate
story for the PC. I would like to see more on this, maybe next
year he
would have a demo to show us?
I am probably making some mistakes in describing Brian's &
Jeff's
technology, the two did not talk about their work for as long
as I would like. I confess that I am a bit vague on the details.
(Chris has an advantage over them, as Chris' ideas are written down in a
book that we had some weeks to study ahead of time.)
The remaining time in the con was spent in general discussion of
what
ever subjects interested people. Andrew Glassner wrote a book
saying that I.F. can not be done. (However if you do not use a
narrow
definition of plot but instead use a meta-plot where a plot arises as
people explore a story space his argument is largely undermined.
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud was spoken highly of to
anyone
who does creative work. I.F. will likely borrow some ideas from
comics
so this will be especially valuable to us.
A discussion of marketing I.F. was hotly debated. This
feels
premature to me (but that didn't stop me from putting in my two cents
worth!)
Syberia and Syberia 2 were discussed briefly. They are
games where
nothing blows up. They are produced by Similtronics.
We decided to make a BLOG that would allow us to discuss the
subjects
further. Watch Chris' website for a link to it.
Chris is making Erasmatron 4 object oriented so that the artist
is
given a working story world (tho boring) at the start, and progressively
modifies it. I think that this is a huge step forward, which will
make
the technology much easier to for people to explore.
And that was it, I had a lot of driving to do so was one of the
earlier people to leave the con. I enjoyed Phrontisterion 4 more
than
any of the others I attended. It was more practical and I learned
a
fair bit.
...and everyone lived happily ever after.