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Post by chriscrawford on Nov 1, 2016 8:57:37 GMT -8
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Post by alexvostrov on Nov 1, 2016 11:17:56 GMT -8
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.
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Post by jiraindivisualarts on Nov 1, 2016 12:33:19 GMT -8
I really think, that i need to comment on this. Especially, because you really seemed to get me total wrong on the Unity-Thing, Chris. I watched and listened to many of your publications in the last time. I don't know the original siboot or balance of power, or any other of your games. Shame on me, but unfortunatly I started to play games in 1995. But i do read one of your books a couple of moth ago, i watched your lecture at ICIDS and the video about the paradigm shift, you posted on youtube. I even watch your interview with jason rohrer on "arte". Long before i learned about siboot, your vision and your thoughts about interactive storytelling, i just told exactly the same ideas to my friends, my teachers, my colleagues, and every person who want to hear about my mumblings about interactive storytelling. I founded my own indie game studio, just for the purpose of creating interactive storytelling games, and push the borders, because i'm totally bored with many of this games about things, about weapons, about rescue the damsel in distress and all this annoying video game cliches, we see in so much games. It was a big surprise that there was someone who had the exactly same ideas about this topic. It is really hard to have a vision, to know that this vision is possible, but if you tell this to anyone they just told you, that it is "impossible". I become a programmer myself to prove them wrong. I thougt, if i got the hard skills, become an expert on this topic and support my vision with boring scientific facts, the people WILL listen and maybe there is a possiblility to start something new, a paradigm shift, if you will. But they don't. Gamers don't listen, my colleagues don't listen neither. I wrote a bussiness proposal for an german start-up investor, but the feedback was, that they don't see how to make money with this kind of technology. So i gave up. I really don't know how to convince people that this kind of games are possible and fun to play. I just try to make something with my limited ressources and just do it as best as I can. People tend to refuse to a new idea, if there don't know a prominent example, so they can imagine what you are trying to do. I just wanted to tell you that, because i was a student myself until a year ago. There are people like me, how want to push the borders, but there is many resistance and ignorance on this topic. Its sad, but unfortunatly in many cases, its reality. But now to the Unity-Thing: It was not my itention to ask for unity support because of this "spatial reasoning"-thing. I do get your point,really! Please believe me! I just have to repeat that. Because it would be really ironic, if you think, that i asked for unity support just because i want to make something in 3D, adding a map or something like that. You got the wrong idea here. The only reason for me was, because of the distribution of your technology. Unity is a common game development tool these days. And its perfect for prototyping, experimenting and make little games really fast. But if you dont want to support Unity for your technology, this is absolutely fine. I just tought, that supporting Unity just could improve the popularity of your technology. If that makes no sense to you, this is fine, too. Just don't get me wrong on this. That was everything i wanted to say kind regards, Jira
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Post by alexvostrov on Nov 1, 2016 13:34:12 GMT -8
Long before i learned about siboot, your vision and your thoughts about interactive storytelling, i just told exactly the same ideas to my friends, my teachers, my colleagues, and every person who want to hear about my mumblings about interactive storytelling. I founded my own indie game studio, just for the purpose of creating interactive storytelling games, and push the borders, because i'm totally bored with many of this games about things, about weapons, about rescue the damsel in distress and all this annoying video game cliches, we see in so much games. 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?
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Post by chriscrawford on Nov 1, 2016 15:21:22 GMT -8
Thanks for the excellent criticisms, Alex, and don't ever apologize for criticizing me. I never learned anything from praise. I think that both of the assumptions you critique are indeed subject to question.
The first assumption, that there is indeed a critical mass of young people who have lost confidence in the creativity of the games industry and really want to do something with storytelling, is clearly an assumption; I have no polling evidence whatever to justify it. It is a gut feeling of mine based on the little information I do gather about activities related to interactive storytelling. I readily admit that I could be completely wrong on this; that's why I intend to do considerable "market research" on this question before committing any resources to it.
The strongest argument in favor of this assumption is the fact that I'm certainly NOT going to get anywhere appealing to gamers or novelists. I tried hard to reach both groups, and failed miserably. Perhaps it's just that I'm the world's worst salesman. I hear that there's an orange-headed fellow with small hands who'll be in search of a new career starting next Wednesday, and he's reputed to be a magnificent salesman. Perhaps I could engage his services.
I am today approaching a couple of members of this generation whom I know well, and whose judgement I trust. Their testimony will play a large role in my decision.
The second assumption (that the killer problem is the difficulty of using SWAT) is also subject to question. As you rightly point out, I first need to motivate people, THEN I need to get them to use the development tools. And in fact, that is the sole purpose of Siboot. I know that I must make Siboot compelling, but only as a demonstration of the possibilities of the technology. If its flaws are readily overlooked by the audience, then I am unworried. Anybody who is turned off by a cosmetic flaw is too shallow to accomplish anything with the technology. I need people with a modicum of intellectual acuity.
While you're right that interactive storytelling will never have the dramatic power of a hand-crafted story, that failing doesn't disturb me. No action game ever approaches an action movie in visual or aural quality, but the game has something that more than makes up for it: interactivity. Remember, back in the 70 and early 80s, people were mesmerized by stupid little games with 8-bit low-resolution graphics, which were far, far inferior to what they could get in the movies. Compare Star Wars IV (1977) with Breakout! (same year) and the difference is astounding. Yet Breakout! made a ton of money, too.
I disagree with your suggestion that large ensemble casts are the best way to get around the dramatic shortcomings of any algorithmic storytelling system. The problem is that the player must first develop a sense for each character. In movies and novels this is quickly accomplished by a few minutes of preliminary material before the action begins. We can't do that with interactive storytelling -- although the new idea for utilizing encounters for this will certainly help. I believe that we need to keep the cast small in order to permit the player to figure out who's who.
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Post by Chris Conley on Nov 2, 2016 8:26:02 GMT -8
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. 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.
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Post by alexvostrov on Nov 2, 2016 9:23:16 GMT -8
I disagree with your suggestion that large ensemble casts are the best way to get around the dramatic shortcomings of any algorithmic storytelling system. The problem is that the player must first develop a sense for each character. In movies and novels this is quickly accomplished by a few minutes of preliminary material before the action begins. We can't do that with interactive storytelling -- although the new idea for utilizing encounters for this will certainly help. I believe that we need to keep the cast small in order to permit the player to figure out who's who. Let's assume that you ship a giant 10-book series with the game. It's going to get inside the heads of the characters, masterfully paint their worries, motivation, and what makes them tick as people. The reader will walk away feeling like they know these characters in real life. Great! What happens when the reader becomes a player? You walk up to Julius Caesar and you want to ask "Hey Jules, how come you're so relaxed around these senator fellows? They seem to be kind of miffed about the whole dictator for life thing." Too bad that you're playing Gossip - all that Caesar can say is "I like Brutus, double plus good!" Are we doing the player a favour or a disservice by implying all these things that aren't there? If the novel says that Siboot is wise and patient, I'd expect to see that reflected in the game somehow. I'll grant you that it helps with suspension of disbelief. I just hope that it doesn't set up false expectations. It's clear that we have different approaches here and I'm curious to see what comes of yours. The thrust of my thought has been to try making the characters feel real inside the game. I think that it's doable with the right design, but I haven't tested my prototypes with non-designers yet.
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Post by alexvostrov on Nov 2, 2016 10:11:02 GMT -8
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. 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.
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Post by jiraindivisualarts on Nov 2, 2016 11:13:31 GMT -8
Now you have me curious. How far did you get? Do you have any prototypes to show off? Unfortunatly, no. I do work on little prototypes, but I dont have much time or ressources to work on it. I work full time for IBM, so there isn't much spare time. How about you? Got any interesting war stories to share that will push IS forward? As i said, i tried to get funds from a german start-up investor. There are funding programs by the gouverment too and some business competition(you write a business proposal and if you win, you get some money and start-up support). But as i discovered, it is really hard to get money for making new technologies. Business men dont really believe in it, because its new and the possibility to fail is really high. After this, I tried to corporate with my universitiy, start some research program, but they dont give you money, just because you have a business plan and a university graduation. So I decided to stop trying to convince people and do the work alone. I wrote some papers and make a solid plan on my own, do the scientific stuff beforehand and then try it again someday if i have a working prototype, or just create something on my own in my freetime. I made some good progress in planing and creating first prove of concept programs, but as I said, just very basic prototypes at the moment. With this in mind, it just sounds logical to me to support Chris Crawford and Siboot/Dramagine. I really want to support Chris vision, but at the moment I dont know how exactly at the moment. My first attempt was not that successful, dont you think? kind regards, Jira
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Post by alexvostrov on Nov 2, 2016 11:26:35 GMT -8
So I decided to stop trying to convince people and do the work alone. I wrote some papers and make a solid plan on my own, do the scientific stuff beforehand and then try it again someday if i have a working prototype, or just create something on my own in my freetime. I made some good progress in planing and creating first prove of concept programs, but as I said, just very basic prototypes at the moment. 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: LINKI 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).
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Post by Chris Conley on Nov 2, 2016 22:32:10 GMT -8
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. I mean, I hear you about the wealth/patronage thing. But just to play devil's advocate a bit, you say that about Choice of Games, and yet they've been the most money I've ever made writing by far. I've heard that from a number of other CoG writers, as well. I know CoG's typical release is a shadow of actual IS, but there clearly is a large and growing market for interactive stories, as demonstrated by the success of Inkle with 80 Days, Failbetter, Twine, and so on; in the mobile space especially. I think it's reasonable for that market to expect deeper and more satisfying interactions over time, not just longer stories or prettier cover art; it's mostly or entirely text, after all, and as any novelist can tell you, text is cheap. There's none of the economy of scale involved in the production of a AAA game, which requires a team of dozens to work years just to make enough content to not get repetitive two hours in, let alone actually compete at that level. With the exception of the interaction design, of course—the personality modeling, AI scripting, and verb web building. That's where all the time in IS design goes—rightly so, I'd say. The idea of interactive stories is clearly compelling to a lot of different people; Hamlet on the Holodeck is nearly twenty years old, some games people try to reach for it, Hollywood's tried a few things (not just spinoffs), academia tends to publish a paper or two about a one-off experimental system and then disappears with no funding, interactive fiction has possibly gotten the closest.* But we can ask why there's been no fully-fledged storyworld yet. I think there's a few reasons: - Lack of tools. This is killer. Storyworlds have a lot of moving parts; tools are needed not only to reduce the workload and automate repetitive tasks, but to provide information and analysis of a project under construction. SWAT provided the most extensive framework I've seen to write one. Trying to make one without a dedicated tool is like trying to write a 3D game without an engine, just coding the whole thing from scratch. Sure, some people try every year, but most don't get far; and they have thousands of past examples to draw from as a reference. Which brings me to the next point:
- Lack of examples. There's been some attempts, as mentioned. But for the most part we're flying blind.
- Lack of skilled people. The design issues of IS are very different from typical game design, and hence often poorly defined, let alone understood. I feel like tabletop RPG design shares some interesting elements, especially coming out of the indie space over the last two decades. But paper RPGs hand off character behavior to human participants, which sidesteps half of the problem of IS from the outset.
Alex, maybe your incrementalist method will work. I wondered about that for years, tracing the lineage of genres like RTS, with no substantial choices to make outside of combat zones in Westwood's first few, to making a few plot choices of the course of a campaign in their Emperor: Battle for Dune or NWC's Heroes II, to adding more Diplomacy-style actions to the map in games like Big Huge's Rise of Nations and Rise of Legends. But it feels a bit like watching evergreen trees grow and spread and waiting for one to produce a sunflower. CRPGs might be a bit more promising; I've heard some good things about later The Witcher entries, but I haven't really looked into it. Maybe the recent Kickstarter renaissance of Black Isle style RPGs will attract more developers to push things in the IS direction. I'm fairly hopeful about the Numenera Torment game; it would take a radical reworking and stripping away of many expected RPG tropes to approach IS, but all the mechanical changes the team made compared to the original Torment seem like steps in the right direction. We'll see. * Short's written some blog posts over the years about the disconnect between the various fields; each one more or less has a handle on one part of the elephant, but until very recently none of them ever really got together and talked.
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Post by jiraindivisualarts on Nov 3, 2016 7:15:14 GMT -8
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. I will, but I have to make sure, that my theories definitely work in real life. Here's an overview of one of my prototypes from 2014: LINKI apologize in advance for the length - I didn't spend a lot of time editing. Thanks. I will look into it. 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. 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
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Post by alexvostrov on Nov 3, 2016 10:47:36 GMT -8
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. That's why I don't consider The Sims to be a "breach in the wall", so to speak. It has a lot of the right ingredients, but it has some high-level design choices that prevent it from being true IS. The problem is that Will Wright never wants to force his opinions on the player. He'd rather build a dollhouse than tell the player "Boy, you sure screwed up that relationship." The Sims is too non-judgmental as a game. Also, there's the bizarre focus on mundane chores and consumerist accumulation of stuff. Even so, it has a lot to teach us. Firstly, it shows that there are people in the audience who will play with low-conflict character-based games. We don't need orcs and space marines to reach these players. They might like a game about building a rock band, for example. Second, Sims characters have a glimmer of intentionality. They're still as dumb as a doorknob, but they like some things and not others. They act on those preferences. That's a start. Third, Sims has a ton of verbs. Chris is right - I think that we'll need games with thousands of verbs to really make things work. (Incidentally, I believe that Storytron forcing authors to hand-code verbs is probably a kludge. We'll need to give people more powerful abstractions if we want them to make tons of verbs). In any case, the Sims tried to make a game with hundreds of verbs and exposed the challenges therein. That's why I think that the Sims is important. It's not there, but it's close. In an alternate world, perhaps Will Wright could have launched IS, but instead it's up to us.
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Post by alexvostrov on Nov 3, 2016 11:27:08 GMT -8
I mean, I hear you about the wealth/patronage thing. But just to play devil's advocate a bit, you say that about Choice of Games, and yet they've been the most money I've ever made writing by far. I've heard that from a number of other CoG writers, as well. 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. I know CoG's typical release is a shadow of actual IS, but there clearly is a large and growing market for interactive stories, as demonstrated by the success of Inkle with 80 Days, Failbetter, Twine, and so on; in the mobile space especially. I think it's reasonable for that market to expect deeper and more satisfying interactions over time, not just longer stories or prettier cover art; it's mostly or entirely text, after all, and as any novelist can tell you, text is cheap. There's none of the economy of scale involved in the production of a AAA game, which requires a team of dozens to work years just to make enough content to not get repetitive two hours in, let alone actually compete at that level. With the exception of the interaction design, of course—the personality modeling, AI scripting, and verb web building. That's where all the time in IS design goes—rightly so, I'd say. 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. Alex, maybe your incrementalist method will work. I wondered about that for years, tracing the lineage of genres like RTS, with no substantial choices to make outside of combat zones in Westwood's first few, to making a few plot choices of the course of a campaign in their Emperor: Battle for Dune or NWC's Heroes II, to adding more Diplomacy-style actions to the map in games like Big Huge's Rise of Nations and Rise of Legends. But it feels a bit like watching evergreen trees grow and spread and waiting for one to produce a sunflower. 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.
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Post by jiraindivisualarts on Nov 3, 2016 12:32:07 GMT -8
Sure, i totally agree with you. Sims is a milestone in the history of videogame. And of course it is a proof that games dont have to be about violence to be fun. I'm totally aware of all this facts. I just want to point out, that in my opinion a non-vilonce game about social intelligence and emotional topics need more than trivial relationships to be successful. People like soap operas because they feel connected to the characters and want to see whats happens to them in the future. If we don't reach that kind of audience, I don't see how interactive storytelling can be successful. Sure, Sims is a valuable first step. I had lots of fun with this game when I was younger. But we have to go on and overcome the limitations of mechanic gameplay elements. For many tasks in game design this kind of algorithmic and simplified representation of complex processes are tollay fine(like character stats in role playing games). Convincing real people, that a fictional character feels "real" is not impossible, but much harder than just put together some state variables and put them on the bottom left of the screen. So we need technolgy to simulate human behavior at some level. I won't be realistic after all, but it will be sufficient for games and software, i suppose. Just wanted to point that out kind regards, Jira
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