A new strategy for Siboot

If I understand your plan properly, it seems to rely on a couple of assumptions.

1) There is an untapped audience of creators and players out there who will be more receptive to Siboot and Dramagine than people who already care about games.

2) The primary challenge in launching IS as a medium is the technological barrier of learning Dramagine.

First, I'd like to point out that this isn't drastically different from the previous direction that you've taken with Storytron. That has nothing to do with whether the choice is right, but I'm always extra paranoid when a long bout of thinking ends up exactly where it started. That's a cause for re-examining basic assumptions - people are very good at fooling themselves. So, with this in mind, I'd like to poke at the above two presuppositions and see if they hold up. (Alex takes out his Devil's Advocate hat)

Untapped Audience

I don't tour colleges like you do Chris, but I do run an indie group. For example, two weeks ago I helped put together a conference for 500 people. They're different crowds, but we do get a lot of students. Perhaps my group is just visited by unusually shallow people, but let's consider the opposite.

My observation is that most students are not burning inside to overthrow the status quo. The opposite actually - growing up with games has constrained their imagination. I like to make the analogy of Plato's cave here. Chris, when you make games you think of the world outside of the cave. Most people who grew up with games think of the shadows which are cast upon the walls. To them, a game IS the shadow. It takes a lot of work to break out of that mindset and most beginners don't have the intellectual framework to do it. (At the very least, it requires a broad base of knowledge, which students have yet to develop). Sometimes you get geniuses like Jason Rohrer or Lucas Pope, but that's an exception.

The other thing is that the world is different from 10-20 years ago. Games are mainstream. Yes, I know that they're not mainstream in the way you'd like them to be. They're mainstream in the same way Vegas is, but there are no more naive players out there. Everyone is going to have some sort of preconception about what a game is and how it's supposed to work and look like. What if people demanding Unity support aren't some weird subgroup? What if that's the world?

Remember Orson Welles? He was another creator who refused to compromise with the system. For this, he was effectively exiled from Hollywood - Citizen Kane was the only movie of his that had full studio backing. Did you know that he insisted on shooting his films in black and white, long after colour became available? Welles is revered by film aficionados, but most of his work is completely lost on the mainstream. I dare you to show Chimes at Midnight to a random person and see how fast they'll flee for their life.

You can shoot in black and white if you want - that's your right as a creator. It's also the audience's right to walk away. They don't owe us anything, especially not hard effort to decrypt our work. We owe it to them to make our work accessible.

I challenge your assumption that modern players are so incredibly conservative that nothing new can flourish. Firstly, all large audiences are conservative - that's life. However, if Lucas Pope can succeed with a game about stamping documents as a border guard, then you can make Siboot work, if you want. It will never appeal to the mainstream, or even most people who play indie games. Who cares - all that's important is if there's a market there for 1 person to continue making games like that.

Barriers to Entry

Is learning Storytron the primary barrier to authors making IS? Let's assume that Storytron is up to scratch - that it's really the framework we need to jumpstart the field. Is it just too confusing for people to use? I don't think that's the root of the problem.

I think that you're trying to teach people how to use a hammer, but they've never seen furniture or houses in their life. Let's picture Chris Crawford in the agora, instructing eager acolytes in the use of the new hammer technology. An especially eager member of the class grabs the hammer by the head and starts banging it on a nearby column. Excellent! He's making music - that's art, right?

The reason nobody could use Storytron isn't that it was too hard to use (that's still true). The root reason is that it was a tool without a clear purpose that people could grasp. What's the use of a mass spectrometer if you don't know what atoms are? What's the point of a typewriter in an illiterate society?

This is why Siboot is important - it's there to help creators shift their brains into new gear. People have to be able to think in this new paradigm to make anything for themselves. Will it be enough? Hopefully people will extract general ideas from Siboot and not "We should make games about alien dream combat." I have to say, though, I've been wrestling with the people games problem for a couple of years now and I feel like I've made very little progress. If this is how long it takes for other to wrap their heads around it, we're in trouble. Of course, I'm both trying to prototype and make a marketable product - that might be crazy.

The New Paradigm

The first thing I wanted to do with Storytron was a scene inspired by Marco Polo where you come into the hall of a great ruler and you have to negotiate with him for personal gain. Not a bad seed for a linear story, but a horrid Storytron idea. Something I realised much later is that Storytron is incapable of working with truly deep characters.

Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them

That's not a thought that a Storytron actor could ever have. In fact, I doubt that an AI actor will ever be able to genuinely express something like this in my lifetime. The best we can do is have the designer make a DoHamlet verb somewhere that fakes things with smoke and mirrors.

What's Storytron good at? Ensemble casts! Lots of relatively shallow characters interacting in interesting ways. Whatever you do, don't lock the player in a room with one of the actors - then the paint will start to come off. If you do the opposite and lock 7 people in one room, then some interesting drama could happen. That's why the Marco Polo idea is bad - it's just the wrong thing to make with the tool.

I mention this for one reason, Chris. You've released Storytron into the world, but you never told people what sort of things it was good for. That's why people picked it up, flailed around for a bit then walked away. If you want Dramagine to work, you'll need to address that. People have to colour inside the lines before they start breaking the rules.

Conclusion

I think that a lot depends on whether there really is a cadre of fresh new creators willing to take up the torch. Me, I'm a cynic in this respect - I see most of my colleagues work on remixing existing ideas. They're pretty happy doing it too - even most creative people are satisfied with sticking to what they know. If Siboot or something similar is a big success, they will flock to copy and imitate it. Most people will drive down a mountain road once it's been blasted through with dynamite.

Hopefully I'm wrong - Russian pessimism vs. American optimism at play! Heck, I'd welcome some fresh ideas from new creators - I'm tired of going down blind alleys. Maybe there really is some enclave of college kids hungry to break new ground. As you know, writers tend to worry a lot more about the ideas in their work. At least if you talk about the theme of a book you don't get a blank stare. Likely, 99% of them still copy each other, but at least the tradition of reflection is there. Maybe if you can tap into people like that then you'll get enough motive power for a revolution.

Now you have me curious. How far did you get? Do you have any prototypes to show off?

The farthest I've gotten is the "neat prototype" stage. It's somewhat more complicated than Chris's Gossip prototype, but a little simpler than Siboot '87. The thing that I'm working on now is scaling these ideas into something marketable. No luck on that front so far, but I'm plugging away at it.

How about you? Got any interesting war stories to share that will push IS forward?

Sure, but I think it's a numbers game. If you can get even a thousand creators using your tool, at least a few are bound to be doing something new and advancing the state of the art, just by sheer numbers or luck alone. I've long felt that was the main failing of Storytron (not just the impenetrability of SWAT, though that was a factor), even back before they officially shut their doors: a lack of community.

Take Photoshop. In the 80s, there was no demand for a powerful color image editor; almost no personal computers could even display color.* But from the release of the color version 1.0 in 1990, Photoshop quickly grew to dominate the image editing market, boasting an 8-digit userbase today. (Creative Cloud alone has over 7 million paying subscribers.) Despite being enormously complex—I'd say even worse than Chris's favorite example of feature creep and design cruft, MS Word—that number keeps growing. And that's because of that community; Photoshop may be hard to learn, but there's a million resources to help you get started. If you run into a problem, you can google it and find an answer, from guides and tips to step-by-step videos, not to mention art discussion boards all over the place. Storytron never reached that self-reinforcing critical mass of creators. That was a marketing failure.

Compare the community of ChoiceScript writers today, mainly found on the choiceofgames.com forum, to Storytron's at its peak. Their biggest threads have views of over 100,000 unique IPs, with typical popular threads getting 5-digit unique views, and nearly every thread in their ChoiceScript Help forum each gets hundreds of views.** Any problem posted there quickly sees several helpful people respond. That's a self-sustaining creative environment, even with a less forgiving language than Sappho: CS is a simplistic interpreted language, in which you have to provide your own text editor or IDE to write, that allows both syntax errors and runtime errors, and requires a specific browser configuration even to test. And yet SWAT's numbers were a far cry from those; it had what, a few dozen people at most active on the forums at any one time? And probably less than ten people ever really dug into the software to any depth: Chris released BoP2k and was getting somewhere interesting with his L'Morte SW; Mixon had her regency romance; Maya had half-finished his port of Siboot to SWAT; I even released a story—small and limited as it was, at least it was playable from beginning to end. And... that was about it. I may have forgotten one or two other partially-completed projects.

I feel the most important thing that needs to be conveyed by a demonstration of the technology—E.G., Siboot—is the breadth of the possibility space, and what Crawford terms the subjunctivity, of the experience. Trying to present it as another game won't work, because it can't really be judged on the same criteria. Even indie games have their own set of tropes and standards which mostly don't apply. You mentioned Short's Versu before, and I think some of her earlier works in IF—Galatea and Alabaster—are also prototypical IS. But as far as marketing goes, explaining what this thing really is, we're mostly in uncharted territory.

_{* Technically, before being purchased by Adobe in 1988, Photoshop was a grayscale editor sold with an included scanner by its creator, but that version only sold about 200 copies.
** And note that discrepancy! At best, that means about 1% of their community is active on the CS-writing forum, not even taking into account that the percentage of people who check their forums is only a subset of people who've played and liked their games. Creators will always be a tiny subset of the potential audience; another reason establishing a large userbase is so important.}

It's probably one of those gnarly chicken-and-egg problems. If SWAT was easier to use, maybe there would be more of a community, more storyworlds, more interest.

I confess that most of my conversations are with people in the indie game space. That's obviously a self-selected group - most people go into games development because they think existing games are wonderful. Are there other people out there who want to leap into interactive design, but find games too restrictive? I'll be curious to hear what the outcome of Chris's consultation with his friends is.

My personal vision of the future is a bit different than the consensus here.

Art has always been entwined with money - a fact few artists are comfortable with. Artists need patrons or customers to pay the rent. Even if the artist is content to wait tables and support themselves that way, the gallery owner needs to deal with the realities of finance. There's a reason why the Renaissance centers of art were all places of commerce (and before that art was propped up by the Church). I think that if there is a revolution, it will be powered by cash. We need some sort of foothold so that people can stop poking at this as a hobby and start doing it full-time. It doesn't have to be piles of money - writers make almost nothing and Choice of Games isn't the path to wealth.

The only way I see of gaining that foothold is by integrating social reasoning into existing games. That's the only market that cares about new interactive experiences enough to pay for them. Working with existing gaming platforms means targeting people who already play games, probably on PC since other platforms are insane right now. Consoles are too action-oriented and have a crummy interface, so they're out. PC is the platform with enough weirdos who could enjoy something unique. The second step could be a mainstream mobile app, but to enter that space you need a lot more marketing muscle.

My plan is to graft social dynamics onto existing genres. Yes, you're still conquering the kingdom, but you're doing it through politics, not brawn. Sims did it, so we know there's some existing interest in games involving people. Eventually, there will be a little niche of games like this, but most mainstream players will still ignore it. We can use this niche to advance the technology and to create a market for creators. Eventually enough of the tech and creative ducks will be in a row to try approaching the mainstream audience, but that will take a long time.

I know that the above is anathema to a lot of people here. Before you break out the tar and feathers, I urge you consider the course of almost every technological change. Look at cars, Facebook, computers, cell phones, the Net. Every single invention starts out as useful to only a handful of fanatical customers. From there, it follows the adoption curve and becomes mainstream.

Who's going to care about our early work enough to deal with the bugs and still support it? The mainstream? Yes - there are isolated people out there who would love Siboot. The problem is that they're not unified - there's no way to reach them together. We'd need a stupendous marketing budget for that and most of it will be wasted. People who already play games are tightly connected and thankfully in the last few years they've become a lot more receptive to new experiences. That's the audience I plan to aim for.

Ok, now you can bust out the tar and feathers. I don't expect to convince anyone here, but I figure that the disagreement will be illuminating.

Well, I hope that you talk about how you tried to tackle the problem at some point. Can't let Chris have all the fun.

Here's an overview of one of my prototypes from 2014: LINK
I apologize in advance for the length - I didn't spend a lot of time editing.

Note - I'm very proud of this prototype.  Other than Chris's and Emily Short's work, I feel like it's one of the most advanced IS efforts out there.  It's also completely insufficient to ship as a real product.  Scaling something up from a prototype to a marketable game has turned out to be very very hard.  I recall Alan Kay saying something to that effect in a talk on innovation once (www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o).

I will, but I have to make sure, that my theories definitely work in real life.



Thanks. I will look into it.



That's funny, because "The Sims" was THE crucial example for me, why I think modern game design approaches are so totally wrong, if it comes to interactive storytelling and things like believable behaviour and emotions. The Sims don't create real stories about people, in my opinion. The Sims ripped off every crucial element of human relationships and simplify emotion in a really mechanic and artificial way. For me, there was no context, no real personality, just some heart- and soulless puppets, you can play with. It is not enough, to win someones heart by just using 4-5 generic actions(talk, hug, kiss, confess love), without any individual difference between the characters.

Because of that, games like Mass Effect are much better examples for believable emotions, in my opinion. Sure, character relationships and love was quite linear in Mass Effect, that's for sure, but on the other hand, every character had a believable personality, with believable goals, dreams and emotions. Sure, if you want to intensify your relationship, you have to talk to your love interest. But you can't just skip the important part of "getting to know your crush", because he or she tells you interesting facts about his/her life: What she wants and what she dislikes, stories of her past and her goals for the future. Later you have to remember what he/she just told you, and you must keep this in mind, if you want to support her in a way, he/she will fall in love with you.

My favorite character in Mass Effect is Tali'Zorah, one of the female alien crew members on the main protagonist spaceship. If you listen to her feelings and thoughts, you learn, that for her and her way of life, her family and the reputation of her family is the most important thing. In the second Mass Effect game, she gets in trouble with the law of her people. During the trail, you discover that her own father has committed the crime, she is actually accused of. You have to decide if you tell the judges, that her father is the real culprit, or if you just try to convince them, that Tali isn't guility, without any evidence. If you don't understand, that she loves her father and that she rather die but to blame him for committing the crime, she is really pissed off if you tell the judges the truth about him. Needless to say, she don't like you anymore if you do so. If you dont, they find Tali guility for committing the crime, but nevertheless she is happy, because you don't betray her and respect her wishes, what is much more important for her.

That is the kind of gameplay i would like to see in games. Mass Effect sure is quit limited in many ways and the shooting sequences were quite boring sometimes, but in terms of character interactivity, it was much more believable than any "The Sims" game. Maybe that is another important but difficult point: There is no "definition" on how interactive storytelling should work exactly or how you have to represent and visualize emotions, to be believable.

But sure, that's just my opinion on this topic.

kind regards,

Jira

I actually think that CoG is wonderful.  It's just too bad that it's mired in a paradigm that will go nowhere.

It's quite intentional, by the way. I managed to corner one of the founders of CoG at GDC and I asked him why they persisted with the dead-end approach of ChoiceScript. You know what he told me?

They wanted to make a platform for authors to easily make games. Ideally, a published author (like Max Gladstone, for example) should be able to pick it up, learn it and make something neat, all without getting a 4 year degree in systems design. So, CoG is awesome, but it's not going anywhere because their creator audience is from a different medium. It's nice, but it's like recording theatre plays on film. A wonderful way for people who are writers at heart to earn extra cash, but a dead end.

Can you aim towards the same audience? Maaaaaaaybe. I'm just paranoid about low-graphical approaches. Did you play Emily Short's "Blood and Laurels"? They did a wonderful job of presenting text, but it just didn't stick. I think that people are so used to seeing pictures that it's hard to reach them with just text. Even 80 Days conceded to having graphics as a frame. Eventually, I think that text-only IS will be a thing, but it'll be hard to get traction there at first. It's sad, but in our culture most people don't like reading.

In any case, the problem with CoG is that their goals are not our goals.  They tossed out what we would fight to keep - real interaction with actors.


It's even more beautiful than that.

AAA will not be able to touch IS once it's invented for a very simple reason. They need to ship games with voice and 3D animation to justify the $60 price tag. Procedural voice acting and character performance are going to be mind-blowing problems on their own. Have you considered how hard it will be to simulate emotions (especially subtle intonation) in voice? What about simulating body language? It will be decades before that works without hitting the uncanny valley. Decades that we can use to make smaller games.



I don't see it as incrementalist. That would be trying to bolt on negotiation onto a space trading game or something. I want to jettison as much of the current mechanics as I can (all the space and resource stuff) and replace them with social interaction. (Although I'm starting to suspect that there's no such thing as a pure "people game" but that's another post.) It'll be called a "strategy game", but then they also called cars horseless carriages.  A "wolf in sheep's clothing" approach, if you will.

The way I see it is more like teaching. If you were trying to teach calculus to 7th graders, wouldn't you try to approach it at their level? The important thing is knowing what the core of your message is (people not things) and chucking everything else. Frankly, I don't give a damn if the game has orcs, as long as you talk to the orcs. We can do the French Revolution as phase 2.

By the way, there's a second good reason to start with strategy games. Our first creations are going to have some really shallow actors. Can I talk to characters in Siboot about morality? Tribal identity? Self-image and self-doubt? Abstract analogies? Inference and pattern recognition? How about a sense of humor? None of what makes up an interesting character in fiction is going to be there at pass one. Right now we're at the point where we pick a single social dynamic (trust in Siboot or status/prowess in my case) and we make a game around it. We can't let the player peer too closely at the painting lest they realize that the actors are all blotches of paint with no detail.

That means distance, which strategy games provide. Once we get better actors, we can move to CRPGs. It's a pity, because it'll result in emotionally stunted works for a while. I don't see a way around that at the moment, unfortunately. Good actors require detailed descriptions (specifically, their actions) and we just can't make anything that detailed yet. I'm hoping that the kick provided by interactivity will be enough to compensate for the lack of actor detail.