Chris Crawford: Interactive Storytelling
Paul J. Furio
book. At about 100 pages in, I flipped ahead to see what was still in
store for me, when I noticed a subsection on Interactive Fiction.
On page 337, Crawford dismissed Planetfall's Floyd Death Scene as
purely scripted, and concludes that Interactive Fiction will not lead
to Interactive Storytelling. Once I got past my initial thought
("jerk."), I wondered if the pure openness that Crawford seems to be
aiming toward is realistic for any medium. I've recently been
interested in the "magic and mentalism" of Derren Brown, and he
clearly manipulates whole audiences into behaving in a certain manner
and making certain choices, apparantly of their own free will, except
not. Isn't part of what we do in weaving a tale to subconsiously
nudge players to have a certain subset of experiences, out of the vast
unprogrammed variety of possible experiences, that we (as authors)
have decided were important? Certainly, as Crawford states, even if
we abuse or insult Floyd, he'll still sacrifice himself at the
appropriate moment, but aren't the responses to that prior abuse
intended to make all but the most sociopathic of us feel guilt for our
actions?
I suppose the Meta-Question is, are Interactive Fiction authors subtle
guides or purely open ended tale weavers?
Emily Short
> Isn't part of what we do in weaving a tale to subconsiously
> nudge players to have a certain subset of experiences, out of the vast
> unprogrammed variety of possible experiences, that we (as authors)
> have decided were important? Certainly, as Crawford states, even if
> we abuse or insult Floyd, he'll still sacrifice himself at the
> appropriate moment, but aren't the responses to that prior abuse
> intended to make all but the most sociopathic of us feel guilt for our
> actions?
>
> I suppose the Meta-Question is, are Interactive Fiction authors subtle
> guides or purely open ended tale weavers?
I don't think there is much IF currently available that does (or even
seriously tries to do) the kind of thing Crawford has in mind, where
the NPCs can behave in a more or less unbounded variety of ways based
on the player's interactions and the plot is completely undetermined
from the outset. I have some serious doubts about whether Crawford's
approach is viable: I think it is likely to be hard to program in, and
(if one gets over that hurdle) likely to produce bland, homogenous
experiences which are essentially pumped-up versions of The Sims. Not
really stories at all, at that point.
That said, I think there's IF that falls a bunch of different places
on the subtle-guide vs. open-ended-tale spectrum. Jon Ingold tends
very much to write IF that is a magic trick performed with the player
as audience (and is fairly against having real player choices in his
IF, as a matter of philosophy); see also some of J. Robinson Wheeler's
work, which has a knack of always giving the player one obviously
interesting thing to do next without making him feel as though he's
being led by the nose.
On the other end of the spectrum, see: most conversational games;
games deliberately about moral choice, such as Pascal's Wager, Fate,
The Baron, et al.; and some art show and exploratory pieces. But even
in the latter group, the work usually has some set of points it wants
to explore: the idea is *not* to "let the player do anything he likes"
but rather to let the player have any of the options which are
pertinent to the game's premise and theme. Even works which *pretend*
to be quite open-ended, in the sense that they accept a lot of
different input, tend to collapse the complexity (and therefore focus
the work thematically a bit) through interpretation: everything the
player does is construed to be in some respect relevant to the major
choices/paths of interest.
Paul J. Furio
I agree, Crawford is looking for a nonexistant Holy Grail. There are
some interesting ideas in the book, as well as some serious
technological errors, but overall I think his thesis is a flop.
George Oliver
Christopher Armstrong
Yeah, definitely looks like a flop to me:
http://www.storytron.com/images/howtoplay-storytellersnapshot.jpg
--
Christopher Armstrong, International Man of Twistery
http://radix.twistedmatrix.com/
http://planet-if.com/ - Planet IF blog aggregator
brit....@gmail.com
Soon you will not hear his voice
His job is to shed light, and not to master
- Robert Hunter, "Lady with a Fan"
Paul J. Furio
> Wait, you've looked at the Storytron site, right?
>
> http://www.storytron.com/
I have not, but I'll check it out. Thanks for the link.
David Fisher
<1e91c249-6901-4da3...@e53g2000hsa.googlegroups.com>, Emily
Short<ems...@mindspring.com> wrote:
> On Aug 12, 6:13 pm, "Paul J. Furio" <p...@staticengine.com> wrote:
>> I suppose the Meta-Question is, are Interactive Fiction authors subtle
>> guides or purely open ended tale weavers?
>
> I don't think there is much IF currently available that does (or even
> seriously tries to do) the kind of thing Crawford has in mind, where
> the NPCs can behave in a more or less unbounded variety of ways based
> on the player's interactions and the plot is completely undetermined
> from the outset. I have some serious doubts about whether Crawford's
> approach is viable: I think it is likely to be hard to program in, and
> (if one gets over that hurdle) likely to produce bland, homogenous
> experiences which are essentially pumped-up versions of The Sims. Not
> really stories at all, at that point.
Emily -- you recently wrote in your Blog
(http://emshort.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/money-and-ambition):
> Interactive story-telling is the next great art form. It may not end up
> looking much like text-based IF, but some medium based on player/reader
> feedback will become (and remain) culturally relevant and widely-valued.
> I say this not out of homage to the technology - the computer is widespread,
> but so are cars and telephones, and they haven’t engendered any great
> enduring art forms as yet - but because there is potential for sorts of
> communication and forms of audience experience in interactive storytelling
> that are not mirrored in any of our existing media.
When I read that, the first thing that came into my mind was the kind of
thing that Chris Crawford is (unsuccessfully) trying to do ... games where
the player is able to affect the story line in a dramatic way, depending
on their choices. It seems like an area where there have been lots
of false starts, but I believe there is a huge amount of potential to explore.
The kind of thing you described above (in response to Paul's post) could well
end up feeling "bland", but if the program also had a sense of what makes an
enjoyable/dramatic game, the plot could be dynamically adjusted to keep
everything going in the right direction. It needn't feel like The Sims at
all (or like Chris Crawford's "Facade"); and it can certainly still feel
like a story -- done really well, it could be indistinguishable from a
game where the author happened to anticipate all the choices the choices
the player makes, whereas in reality the game is adjusting the plot
invisibly behind the scenes so that everything keeps going smoothly.
There is commercial game due out later this year (Far Cry 2) which the
designers claim dynamically adjusts the plot in this kind of way;
it would be interesting to see if it works:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3727/redefining_game_narrative_.php
Here is a quote:
What does it mean to do narrative design? What is the function of a
narrative designer on a large, open-world, highly-systemic game like
Far Cry 2? I mean, really, my job is to kind of enforce the notion
that the most important story in any game, honestly, is the story
that the player can actually play, and can actually determine the
course of through his low, mid, and high-level actions and choices.
And that in a highly open-world environment where one of the major
pillars of the player experience is freedom, it becomes all the more
difficult to sort of try to retain some kind of authorial control
over the way the narrative progresses. And it's interesting, because
even at his keynote at GDC, Ken Levine was talking a lot about the
importance of shifting to more of a pull-based narrative structure,
and BioShock is relatively linear, and it's still an important idea
there.
Well, imagine in a game like Far Cry 2 where we don't know where the
player is, we don't know what direction he's traveling in, he literally
could have assassinated one of the main characters during the last mission.
All of these elements end up making the way the story unfolds potentially
extremely dynamic.
And if we had tried to not support that dynamic approach, what we would
have ended up with is a story that really felt like it was kind of
progressing along more or less independently of player action, as
though the player couldn't really have any ability to affect its outcome.
And we felt there was no point in doing that.
We felt like if we were going to bother to support - pretend like we
were supporting - some kind of narrative component to the game, that we
really needed to make sure it was a systemic narrative, what we call
"dynamic story architecture", which takes large banks of content,
chops it up into very, very small pieces, and then allows the systems
to kind of deliver those pieces in a way that reflects the current
state of the game's world.
And that sounds like a complicated thing, and sometimes it's insanely
complicated, but there's kind of a simple underlying idea there, which
is that rather than having an enormous tree of dialog, or a huge branching
structure, where basically we can guarantee that a typical player only
ever sees ten percent of what we've created, why don't we instead try to
pick the right pieces?
Figure out the right way to break content down, for a dialogue, or for
an animation, or for a scripted event, so that we can reuse as much of
that content as possible and make sure that it can be used in lots of
different locations with lots of different NPCs. And that's really the
nuts and bolts of it. That's mechanically how we have to do it.
...
We need to get to a stage where we can make that smallest, indivisible
piece of content as small as possible. So that ultimately we can build
AI-driven engines that generate narrative.
...
[We're trying to create a] moment epiphany where they're like, "Oh, I
get it. This world really is affected by my actions. It's affected at
a very, very low level when I bump into things or set things on fire,
or unjam my weapon, or yank a bullet out of my arm with a pair of pliers.
And it responds at a high level when I choose to assassinate the leader
of one of the factions, or abandon my buddies in the time of their need."
I like this quote:
And honestly, if we mess this up, it will be one of the most useful
epic failures of all time, because the shrapnel will be useful. There
will be a lot of good forensics to have on this.
David Fisher
Mike Rozak
"David Fisher" <David....@efs.mq.edu.au> wrote :
> When I read that, the first thing that came into my mind was the kind of
> thing that Chris Crawford is (unsuccessfully) trying to do ... games where
> the player is able to affect the story line in a dramatic way, depending
> on their choices. It seems like an area where there have been lots
> of false starts, but I believe there is a huge amount of potential to
> explore.
All games (not just IF) are an attempt to fit several impossible things into
one package, and then fool the player into not noticing the hack. The
impossible things include but aren't limited to: (a) simulation (often
including visual) of a world, (b) the ability for players to make MEANINGFUL
choices that affect the world, and (c) create a sense of order/purpose to
the world (aka: plot/theme).
What Chris Crawford is doing is emphasizing part of (a) (NPC AI only) and
(b). He assumes that (c) automatically happens; (I think) it doesn't.
A FPS shooter emphasizes combat and 3D simulation for (a), with very little
in meaningful choices (other than how to kill the enemy shooting at you),
and has a strict sense of order/purpose in a linear plot (c).
Oblivion (CRPG) is about combat/AI/3D simulation for (a), with quite a few
meaningful choices about what happens in localized areas of the world (b),
and not an awful lot of plot, except in localized areas of the world (c).
Comment about "meaningful choices" - See
http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/Choices3.htm . By definition, for a choice to be
meaningful, it must change the world in a way that players care about. If
players can't change the world in ways that they care about, then they get
frustrated and leave. A game designer must (a) allow the players choices to
change the world in the way a player cares about, or (b) design the
experience so that players don't have the urge to do something that's
impossible. For example: In a FPS, the idea of defeating the evil overlord
in a knitting contest never enters the player's mind - intentionally -
because the world as programmed doesn't allow for knitting. Conversely, in
Myst, you never have the urge to pick up a pistol and start shooting the
D'ni.
Peter Pears
> "David Fisher" <David.Fis...@efs.mq.edu.au> wrote :
>
> > When I read that, the first thing that came into my mind was the kind of
> > thing that Chris Crawford is (unsuccessfully) trying to do ... games where
> > the player is able to affect the story line in a dramatic way, depending
> > on their choices. It seems like an area where there have been lots
> > of false starts, but I believe there is a huge amount of potential to
> > explore.
>
> All games (not just IF) are an attempt to fit several impossible things into
> one package, and then fool the player into not noticing the hack. The
> impossible things include but aren't limited to: (a) simulation (often
> including visual) of a world, (b) the ability for players to make MEANINGFUL
> choices that affect the world, and (c) create a sense of order/purpose to
> the world (aka: plot/theme).
>
> What Chris Crawford is doing is emphasizing part of (a) (NPC AI only) and
> (b). He assumes that (c) automatically happens; (I think) it doesn't.
>
> A FPS shooter emphasizes combat and 3D simulation for (a), with very little
> in meaningful choices (other than how to kill the enemy shooting at you),
> and has a strict sense of order/purpose in a linear plot (c).
>
> Oblivion (CRPG) is about combat/AI/3D simulation for (a), with quite a few
> meaningful choices about what happens in localized areas of the world (b),
> and not an awful lot of plot, except in localized areas of the world (c).
>
> meaningful, it must change the world in a way that players care about. If
> players can't change the world in ways that they care about, then they get
> frustrated and leave. A game designer must (a) allow the players choices to
> change the world in the way a player cares about, or (b) design the
> experience so that players don't have the urge to do something that's
> impossible. For example: In a FPS, the idea of defeating the evil overlord
> in a knitting contest never enters the player's mind - intentionally -
> because the world as programmed doesn't allow for knitting. Conversely, in
> Myst, you never have the urge to pick up a pistol and start shooting the
> D'ni.
Regarding open and dynamic storytelling... didn't "The Last Express"
pioneer that sort of thing? And didn't the openess of it all drive
away scared players?
Jerome West
> There is commercial game due out later this year (Far Cry 2) which the
> designers claim dynamically adjusts the plot in this kind of way;
> it would be interesting to see if it works:
>
> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3727/redefining_game_narrative_.php
Thanks for posting that interview David, it's intriguing stuff. If Far
Cry 2 succeeds in doing interactive storytelling half as well as the
article suggests, it would seem almost embarrassing that we* have not
made more progress on the problem. On the surface, we seem to have it
easy. We don't need to create 3D models, animations, textures, sound
effects and voice-overs for every little bit of content that we write,
and this leaves us free to explore all sorts of experimental approaches
to storytelling in games. Admittedly the big developers have the
advantages of huge piles of money and manpower to throw at the problem,
but I've seen little evidence (this article aside) that this is an issue
the game industry is even aware of, let alone attempting to solve.
I'd love to see them succeed in this, but I refuse to get my hopes up.
I've seen too many games hyped up like this before release, only for the
final version to excise most of the interesting ideas. Republic: The
Revolution was a classic example, being originally billed as a
simulation of a whole country, populated with realistic citizens, all
modelled as individuals. On its eventual release it was just a
lacklustre strategy game, with nothing remaining of the original
concept. Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl suffered a similar fate, losing
many of the more innovative features which were mentioned in early
previews, although at least the final result was a fun FPS with some
fresh ideas, despite all its rough edges.
Still, he does say in the interview "let's fail as big as we can on
this", so at least there is some hope that, even if the project fails,
they will release it as a flawed masterpiece (rather than simply gutting
it and releasing yet another dull first person shooter). I'd happily lay
out good money just to see the "useful shrapnel" from something this
ambitious.
There's an interesting interview with Will Wright at
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=211273, where he talks
about similar issues, albeit from a slightly different perspective (as
one would expect from the auteur behind games like Sim City and Spore).
He says: -
On the game design side, we've put way too much emphasis on linear
storytelling, embedding that in our games - when people talk about,
'what's the story in this game, and who are the characters?' - when
inherently I think games should be a much more user-driven experience
where the user is unfolding the story and we give them more creative
opportunities. That's not to say that games shouldn't have stories, I
just think the story should be the player's story, and find more ways
to celebrate and promote that, rather than the game designer's story
that you're imposing upon them.
He also critiques the tendency for games to try to emulate Hollywood
movies in their form, saying: -
[With] games, the real power is in the interactivity, the player
driving the experience. But initially, early games, once they had
the graphics, were trying to be movie experiences: here's the
beginning, here's the back story, and then you rescue the princess
at the end. So I think games creatively are now getting enough
surefootedness, and enough technology underneath them, to give the
player that freedom.
Could this criticism perhaps also be applied to IF? Do we sometimes go
too far in emulating static fiction, and so neglect the possibilities of
interactivity?
Jerome
* I use the word "we" somewhat loosely here, as someone who has yet to
release a work of IF!
steve....@gmail.com
> On page 337, Crawford dismissed Planetfall's Floyd Death Scene as
> purely scripted, and concludes that Interactive Fiction will not lead
> to Interactive Storytelling.
Can you recollect the logic of the argument for us please, for those
of us who do not have a copy of said book on hand?
Many people on this newsgroup (not least Short) decry non-interactive
passages. I doubt that the argument was as simple as "here's one non-
interactive passage, therefore IF will not lead to interactive
storytelling."
> Once I got past my initial thought
> ("jerk."), I wondered if the pure openness that Crawford seems to be
> aiming toward is realistic
Yeah, you probably went wrong on your initial thought. You failed to
track the logic because you disliked the idea. Don't worry -- it
happens all the time.
Maybe you'll reinterpret Crawford as a true romantic, trying to touch
the ideal, but fated to beautiful failure -- or even better, messy
failure. Realistic? Bah, realistic tasks are the specialty of ants,
and even they frequently surprise.
David Fisher
<Pvuok.27851$IK1....@news-server.bigpond.net.au>, Mike
Rozak<Mi...@mXac.com.au> wrote:
> "David Fisher" <David....@efs.mq.edu.au> wrote :
>> When I read that, the first thing that came into my mind was the kind of
>> thing that Chris Crawford is (unsuccessfully) trying to do ... games
>> where the player is able to affect the story line in a dramatic way,
>> depending on their choices. It seems like an area where there have been
>> lots of false starts, but I believe there is a huge amount of potential
>> to explore.
>
> All games (not just IF) are an attempt to fit several impossible things
> into one package, and then fool the player into not noticing the hack.
Nice way of putting it ... :-)
> The impossible things include but aren't limited to: (a) simulation (often
> including visual) of a world, (b) the ability for players to make
> MEANINGFUL choices that affect the world, and (c) create a sense of
> order/purpose to the world (aka: plot/theme).
>
> What Chris Crawford is doing is emphasizing part of (a) (NPC AI only)
> and (b). He assumes that (c) automatically happens; (I think) it doesn't.
I agree ... I don't think throwing a group of AI-controlled NPCs together
and hoping for some interesting emergent behaviour would result in a good
plot much of the time.
But there are some other options; I was mainly thinking of the idea of a
"drama manager" being in overall control, which can work out the appropriate
things to do to the plot to keep things interesting. In the Far Cry 2
article, they gave an example of a major leader being assassinated;
presumably the plot would then involve the after effects of the new power
gap. If the player hadn't assassinated the leader, maybe the next plot
event would involve a move to quash a rebellion. This is a different kind
of idea to the Sims or something like that, where events are controlled
by modelling individual NPCs' desires and letting a "plot" evolve from
that somehow.
There is an article here by Michael Mateas about an attempt to use the
idea of drama management on the game Anchorhead (not that successfully,
though):
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.58.9503
David Fisher
George Oliver
> But there are some other options; I was mainly thinking of the idea of a
> "drama manager" being in overall control, which can work out the appropriate
> things to do to the plot to keep things interesting.
The funny thing about that is Crawford does have a drama manager,
which he calls Fate.
I don't agree with Mike's assessment of what Crawford is doing. In
Storytron it's up to the author to create thematic verbs for the
player to interact with. The NPCs are not 'generalist' AI but actors
created specifically for your storyworld; many people seem to assume
that Storytron is about letting players 'do anything' and seeing what
pops out of that but it's not really the case.
However that doesn't change my opinion that the Storytron interface
right now is not a good idea.
Mike Roberts
> Could this criticism perhaps also be applied to IF? Do we sometimes go too
> far in emulating static fiction, and so neglect the possibilities of
> interactivity?
I think there's actually a paradox to this. We all know the conventional
wisdom that it's easy to code up special cases and spectacular special
effects in text games (you just write a passage describing them) and hard in
graphical games (where you have to have animation and sound effects). So at
first glance you'd think text games ought to be miles ahead in terms of
"open" gameplay, branching narrative, and so on, just because it's so much
less work to code up a given number of branching paths, alternative scenes,
and so on. But I think the reality - the paradox - is that graphical games
actually have a big advantage in creating more open and interactive game
worlds.
The key is that open gameplay is something you get from simulation, not from
explicitly coded branches. Simulation naturally creates "branches" at an
exponential rate by defining a physics on the world and making it work
uniformly on the things in it. You add more things and you get more things
to do.
Simulation is hard in a text game. The text medium works in your favor when
creating special cases, but it works against you for simulation. Generating
a good textual description of a physically modeled event seems to be an even
harder AI problem than parsing text input. Sure, it's easy to hard-code a
ton of special cases, but the mathematics of will defeat the most
industrious IF author - there's just no way you can keep up with the
exponential branching of a simulation by adding special cases. This is why
the basic "physics" (such as it is) of IF is still so spare - just a
containment tree and a local connection graph and a few standard properties
(mostly mere booleans, like open/closed, transparent/opaque, lit/dark).
It's a lot easier to draw a picture from a 3D model (you can do it at 60 fps
on modern hardware) than it is to generate a good textual description of it.
So graphical games have it easier on this count.
For example, pick one of the celebrated open-gameplay games, like The Sims
or Spore, and imagine it as a text game. (Yes, I know we've had our IF
versions of Doom and Centipede and Missile Command and so on. There's a
reason those are parodies.) They just wouldn't work. Rendering the
repetitive "process" aspects of those games as text would make them
impossibly dull. Text games are a different kind of experience; they thrive
on the unique, author-written passages, and get boring quickly when there's
repetition - and anything the computer generates is (with the current state
of the art) bound to be repetitive, because it comes from simple templates.
So: I think the kind of open, unbounded, simulationist gameplay that
Crawford likes to talk about is really hard to do in text games. I wouldn't
call it impossible, and I wouldn't discount the value of adding incremental
elements of simulation to text IF, but I think fully simulationist IF is
beyond the current state of the art (by which I mean computer science, not
just IF dev tools).
I think this is why most IFers at the moment seem to be more focused on
"emulating static fiction," as you put it. Except I don't think that's
quite what they're doing; I think what they're really doing is coming at the
problem from the other direction. You pointed out how Will Wright
criticizes game designers for trying to emulate Hollywood - trying to graft
storytelling onto games. I think what a lot of IFers are doing is trying to
figure out how to take traditional narrative and add interactivity. It
seems like a useful thing to explore - maybe at some point the two camps
will meet halfway and there'll be a golden spike ceremony or something.
--Mike Roberts
mjr underscore at hotmail dot com
David Fisher
<ae49250a-2af2-46b6...@v1g2000pra.googlegroups.com>, George
Do you think the Storytron idea would have some potential for IF if
the interface was a parser instead of the graphical language "Deikto"?
Something that got me thinking in the article I mentioned before was
the idea of specialised tools for designing this kind of thing:
Chris Hecker did his talk about the sort of decoupling of structure
and content. And his point about AI, like the fact that we currently
lack a kind of Photoshop of AI, a way of intuitively authoring the
behaviors that will ultimately make for a more robust and life-like
in-game agent. And I think that that is at the heart of this issue.
Right? We really need to be able to handle our story systemically.
And that means we need characters that can behave systemically when
we give them things to talk about, when we give them situations to
react to.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3727/redefining_game_narrative_.php?page=4
My impression of Deikto is that it is a tool for creating/managing
dynamic plot. It really surprised me when I found out that it was
actually the user interface as well; I expected there to be another
layer on top of it (a text generator + parser).
As an aside ... even if this kind of thing never gets off the ground,
the idea of a tool for managing smaller aspects of a game, like a
particular NPC's knowledge and behaviour, could still be useful on
its own. Or does such a tool already exist?
David Fisher
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J. Robinson Wheeler
> For example, pick one of the celebrated open-gameplay games, like The Sims
> or Spore, and imagine it as a text game. (Yes, I know we've had our IF
> versions of Doom and Centipede and Missile Command and so on.
> There's a reason those are parodies.)
I can't help but bristle at this brush-off categorization of my game
"Centipede." That was a quality piece of work, not a throwaway
parody.
Thanks for the mention, though.
--
J. Robinson Wheeler http://raddial.com/if/games/centipede.html
JRW Digital Media
Smoov...@gmail.com
The only game, and I mean the *only* game, that I've ever seen which
matches Crawford's platonic ideal is called "Tail of the Sun". It's
an old playstation game, and it came without a manual. In it, you're
a caveman in a prehistoric world. There was no game manual. There
was a suggestion that the goal was to build a tower to the sun out of
mammoth tusks, but you didn't really have to do that because to the
best of my knowledge there was no "you win" sign or indeed any
indication that what you were doing is right. The feedback came from
the fact that everything you did have an effect: hunt one type of
creature too much, they start to go extinct (I was never able to build
the tower without driving the mammoth population to extinction), plant
placement changes through grazing, etc. Your character would
eventually grow old and die, and you could play as one of his
decendants or relatives.
It was one of the strangest and yet most satisfying games I've ever
played. And it was a total, critical flop. But it was a great game
nontheless.
This sort of thing has a much smaller likelihood of working at all in
If. And ironically that's due at least in part to the input
mechanism. On a video game controller, there are only so many
buttons. The direction pad has so many directions. The text input on
the other hand has theoretical limitlessness, which means the player
has to be led at least somewhat to figure out how to play the game.
There has to be a different kind of feedback. There are differences
in programming as well; a large game can afford to have a huge world
that changes dynamically on multiple levels regardless of the player's
actions. Not so in text (things do not move forward in real time, nor
should they), especially text programmed by one or two people. You
can't build a world vast enough to fool the player into thinking they
have limitless choices, even though the world is actually bounded.
Not yet, anyway.
And I say, so what if we can't make the game that Chris Crawford wants
to play? As I said, Tail of the Sun was great. But good IF has made
me feel much *more* involved, even though it's more tightly scripted.
I *know*, even as I'm playing it, that I am not the caveman on the
screen in the video game. However, due to the language (use of words
I, you, etc.), my brain will confuse text for what I am actually
experiencing. This is true of most people. Get a good enough
description of being locked in a coffin and slowly suffocating, throw
it in the first or second person, and the average person will start
loosening their collar nervously upon reading it. The potential
immersion makes up somewhat for the lack of non-scripted choices. In
a well-written IF, you have the potential to make the player feel that
the choices really were theirs, even if it was scripted.
To be fair, I agree with Crawford on the death of Floyd. Playing now,
it does not have the same effect upon me that others have described
feeling years ago. I feel this is more of an indicator of how far
we've come rather than an indicator of an inherent flaw.
Ironically I think Crawford's dream will come true in the next
generation of mmorpgs. Look at Eve Online: all direction and
initiative is made by the players. Events are organized by the
players. The world is still bounded by what the designers made
possible, but it opens the door to a whole world of collaborative
storytelling. I'm still waiting for a game where the mmo designers
understand and really take advantage of that, changing the world to
reflect the actions of the players in it for more than game balance
reasons, being more like gamemasters for many hundreds or thousands of
roleplayers as opposed to implementors.
This is something that will likely never happen in IF, but again it
does not matter. It's not what we should be shooting for, I think.
Emily Short
wrote:
> On Aug 13, 9:50 pm, "Mike Roberts" <m...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > For example, pick one of the celebrated open-gameplay games, like The Sims
> > or Spore, and imagine it as a text game. (Yes, I know we've had our IF
> > versions of Doom and Centipede and Missile Command and so on.
> > There's a reason those are parodies.)
>
> I can't help but bristle at this brush-off categorization of my game
> "Centipede." That was a quality piece of work, not a throwaway
> parody.
Well, but the reason it's a quality piece of work is that it
completely replaces the behavior of the original game with something
much more IF-appropriate. (So maybe "parody" isn't the right word, but
"complete re-envisioning" is -- at any rate I don't think it
undermines Mike's argument.)
Peter Pears
example - "Balance of Power". Assuming that they want the only
available example to be a correct and accurate display of the system
(the same way one can consider "Adventure" to showcase IF, and maybe
Photopia to showcase the optional extreme literary side of IF), then
their revolutionary system is merely a Java version of, say, Shadow
President or Hidden Agenda. It's a simulation.
I understand their goal, but the system they've come up with is so
*daunting* as to be useless. For the kind of ultimately open
experience they want, the player should have dozens of possible
actions at any time, all displayed as buttons for him to click and
sentences for him to construct. Sentences? Actions? Why deliberately
cut bonds with IF if IF already works with sentences and is designed
to give player all those same actions without making him scroll
through all those actions to click? Besides, what can better
elliminate the imersion than to see your possible actions displayed in
front of you, when the whole point of immersion is feeling you can do
anything? For an illustration of what I mean - how many people played
Gateway using only the mouse and the lists of verbs and nouns?
If they reduce the openness to a playable amount, then in the case of
their example they're left with a simulation game like Hidden Agenda.
And in other cases they'll most likely come up with IF - mouse-driven
IF, a weird sort.
It sounds too much like reinventing the wheel, and coming up with
something oval-shaped - it's so close to the wheel as to make you go
"Why not use the wheel instead?", and so awkward to use as to make
practical use impossible.
Personally, I wouldn't like to play a game that open, because I love
the story, and no story that I write by myself in such a huge world
can ever be as beautiful as Brian Moriarty's Loom, or Wishbringer, or
as oppressive and creepy as Anchorhead and Babel. Their proposed
system effectively kills authors.
I played Wishbringer yesterday for the first time (yeah, sorry about
that - only now REALLY coming into the IF scene). On a replay (I'd
forgotten a necessary item in the "West of House" - wham, restart),
the little mailbox that followed me around confronted the big mailbox.
I'd forgotten all about it. Was caught completely off-guard.
Can you imagine that I was on the edge of my chair, practically
chewing my fingernails, while I read the description of their brief
fight? The demise of the small mailbox so affected me that I went "Nuh-
uh, I don't care if I can still win the game, I'm not going to let it
die like this."
That scene, coupled with the magick shoppe scene and the very ending,
are the reasons I play IF, and they are only possible if we have
authors.
Honestly, something I think true freedom in games is overrated, and is
something best left to players whose life is so bad they'd rather live
a virtual one.
Andrew Plotkin
>
> This sort of thing has a much smaller likelihood of working at all in
> If. And ironically that's due at least in part to the input
> mechanism. On a video game controller, there are only so many
> buttons. The direction pad has so many directions. The text input on
> the other hand has theoretical limitlessness, which means the player
> has to be led at least somewhat to figure out how to play the game.
> There has to be a different kind of feedback.
On that level. But you have many levels to work with. It's perfectly
possible to use the open range of the text parser to train and then
support a small number of logical moves, which then train and support
a broad (even simulation-like) range of world states.
That's what gives (the illusion of) a paradox. We're all familiar with
the model of an IF game, with its wide-open text parser, that turns
into a CYOA at the plot-line level. (You have a choice of just three
significant moves at the significant scene, leading to three distinct
endings.) That could go the other way, theoretically. It could even go
the other way on *top* of the narrow-choice level. Isn't "just three
endings to the scene" analogous to "just four direction-pad buttons"?
Note that this tension is identical to what's going on in the other
thread, on graphical adventures. Pre-rendered art at node points is a
form of hand-crafting, which can support lots of customized detail.
Free movement in a 3D world is a simulation technique which gives a
much greater sense of involvement *in that layer of interaction*, with
a cost elsewhere. But that whole question is separate from the puzzle
interaction. Myst 4 and Myst 5 use essentially the same kinds of
puzzles, with essentially the same kind of puzzle UI (tablet aside),
because that's a different layer.
> There are differences in programming as well; a large game can
> afford to have a huge world that changes dynamically on multiple
> levels regardless of the player's actions. Not so in text (things do
> not move forward in real time, nor should they), especially text
> programmed by one or two people. You can't build a world vast enough
> to fool the player into thinking they have limitless choices, even
> though the world is actually bounded. Not yet, anyway.
I'd say that IF has been fooling people in that way since 1976. It's
not a question of "whether", but of "in what way".
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
When Bush says "Stay the course," what he means is "I don't know what to
do next." He's been saying this for years now.
rgrassi
> I suppose the Meta-Question is, are Interactive Fiction authors subtle
> guides or purely open ended tale weavers?
IMHO, it is still not clear what "interaction" means.
The term is ambiguous and each game genre and people use it in
different ways and for different purposes.
Rob
Ron Newcomb
> and hoping for some interesting emergent behaviour would result in a good
> plot much of the time.
After writing that recent SPAG article, I may sound like I contradict
myself when I say I agree. Aristotle told us that plot which emerges
dialectically from character tends to produce dull stories. Not hard
to see why: spend enough time with characters, and you know them well
enough to often predict what they'll do. Then the story becomes
predictable because its parts are.
I patch my contradiction by saying a drama manager is also an AI. The
only difference between the manager and a NPC is the degree and kind
of information given to it, not in the fundamental decision-making.
- - -
MMORPGs, MUDs, and other multiplayer games with good world-sim look
like sports to me: everyone wants to be the protagonist, everyone
wants to be special. So, nobody is special. And just as the rules of
American football occasionally collude to produce a thrilling and
memorable Super Bowl, more often than not they don't.
A deep worldsim and smart, reactive characters (AI or human) may be
enough for great interactivity, but to make that interactivity
dramatic requires a third component that knows when and how to
meddle.
-Ron
Paul J. Furio
> Can you recollect the logic of the argument for us please, for those
> of us who do not have a copy of said book on hand?
I'll have to go home and check, but I seem to recall that he stated
that because it didn't matter how you treated Floyd (punched him,
kicked him, etc), the robot would still sacrifice itself for you (and
the sake of the story), it was not interactive storytelling. What got
my goat was that Crawford specifically stated in other parts of the
book that if you have an NPC in your game and your player treats them
badly and that's against the grain of the story, you should have the
NPC react in a manner that dissuades that kind of behavior, which is
pretty much what Floyd does with his responses to physical violence.
Anyway, it seemed like Crawford wanted to have things both ways, and
again, I'm not convinced that truly open world designs will lead to
the kind of epiphony-based stories that are real emotional milestones
in the world or art, literature, and gaming.
Paul J. Furio
> Honestly, something I think true freedom in games is overrated, and is
> something best left to players whose life is so bad they'd rather live
> a virtual one.
I think this is part of my problem with a true "open world"
experience. I mean this in the least insulting way possible, but
isn't real life just an open world experience, with all the people on
the planet representing a large chunk of the possible choices that can
be made at every moment, and their outcomes? And what percentage of
those choices, made in series, wind up being really interesting story-
worthy lives? 1%? A tenth of one percent?
As an average guy, I don't want to experience an average story, I want
an amazing experience that I probably won't have a chance to do in the
real world, and I'd like a little handholding to get to that
experience. If I didn't need handholding, I'd probably have lead a
more interesting real life, and if I'd already lead a more interesting
real life, I wouldn't spend time playing games.
This is not to say that we're not all unique and beautiful snowflakes,
but I hope my point is clear.
Mike Roberts
> I can't help but bristle at this brush-off categorization of my game
> "Centipede." That was a quality piece of work, not a throwaway
> parody.
I hope you know I meant no disrespect to your Centipede or the others. I
didn't mean "parody" in any sort of brush-off or otherwise negative way, and
anyway it's probably not the right word for this example. What I should
have said about Centipede is that, yes, it's based on an arcade game, but
it's not an IF adaptation of the original in the sense that a Harry Potter
movie is a film adaptation of a Harry Potter book.
Sorry for the slight - that certainly wasn't my intention.
Jerome West
> On Aug 14, 3:59 am, Peter Pears <peter_pe...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> Honestly, something I think true freedom in games is overrated, and is
>> something best left to players whose life is so bad they'd rather live
>> a virtual one.
>
> I think this is part of my problem with a true "open world"
> experience. I mean this in the least insulting way possible, but
> isn't real life just an open world experience, with all the people on
> the planet representing a large chunk of the possible choices that can
> be made at every moment, and their outcomes? And what percentage of
> those choices, made in series, wind up being really interesting story-
> worthy lives? 1%? A tenth of one percent?
I've always found it interesting that this point of view seems pretty
widespread, whereas I can't get my head round it at all.
Imagine a complete simulation of the real world. Every country in the
world is modelled, with all of its cities, and every one of the people
within them. Then you, the player, are placed within this world. The
simulation is entirely immersive, it seems just like being there for
real. You can do anything you like, you can tweak any aspect of the
simulation in any way you wish.
Like you said, I don't mean this in an insulting way, but would this
really not be of interest to you? Would you (for example) rather play a
spy thriller which was equally immersive and graphically real, but in
which the plot unfolded pretty linearly, to ensure that your character
always ended up killing the bad guy and getting the girl?
Of course a "complete world simulation" is a ridiculous example, but I
think it gets across the basic idea of why simulations can be so compelling.
Jerome
Peter Pears
Of course this is entirely subjective, and my jab at "not having a
good enough life" was, on reflection, somewhat aggressive (for which I
apologize, but fortunately noone seemed to be offended - whew!), but
my view on it is just as I stated.
And the interesting thing (and entirely predictable, of course) is
that, just like you can't get your head around me preferring to play a
linear game, I can't get my head around playing an extremely open
game. Methinks it boils down to what we are looking for in a game...
I'm looking for entertainment, meaningful or silly. I'm looking for a
story in which I can participate, and where I can get things going.
Mostly, I'm looking for an experience. If the story branches a lot, no
problem - it's still a story. I don't even mind the randomization of
Blade Runner, because all the endings were absolutely great, the
writing was way above par, and it remains as one of my favourite games/
stories/experiences ever, up there with Loom, Anchorhead and Gabriel
Knight.
Players such as yourself are, presumably, looking for the freedom to
do as you will. This is a short sentence, but since I can't look in
your head and you've already expressed yourself anyway, I hope you'll
forgive me. :)
Anyway, the point is that the plot does not have to unfold to a good
conclusion. The gameplay may be linear, and that's allright, but I'd
rather a less linear story. I want a story which evolves. I want a
good story, basically, and that's why I play adventure games and IF.
I also happen to be one of those players who want to see as much of
the story as possible. I want to talk to people about as much as I
can, want to try everything I think can be done. This is in part fault
of adventure games, graphical and textual - it was sometimes waaaay
too easy to get into an unwinnable situation just because you didn't
explore everything. Can you imagine me trying to play a game with
virtually no limits? :)
Besides, can you really tell a story like that? I'll end this post
paraphrasing 1900, the pianist from the film of the same name, played
by Tim Roth. He was born on a ship and never set foot on dry land - he
once made up his mind to, being in love, but took one look at the city
and went back in, never talking about it again... until the end of the
movie, and this is his explanation. These aren't his words, but this
is the general idea.
"It was so big, so vast! How can you possibly live there? [...] In a
piano you have 88 [i think?] keys. Those are the keys you have, no
more and no less. And with those keys you can make infinite music. But
if you have a piano with infite keys... you can't make music on a
piano with infinite keys. There's just too many keys."
Peter Pears
"Christ, did you... did you see the streets, just the streets? There
were thousands of them! Then how you do it down there, how do you
choose just one... one woman, one house, one landscape to look at, one
way to die...?"
"Take piano: keys begin, keys end. You know there are 88 of them.
Nobody can tell you any different. They are not infinite. You're
infinite... And on those keys, the music that you can make... is
infinite. I like that. That I can live by..."
"You rolled out in front of me a keyboard of millions of keys,
millions and billions of keys that never end. And that's the truth
Max, that they never end. That keyboard is infinite... and if that
keyboard is infinite, then on that keyboard there is no music you can
play. You're sitting on the wrong bench... That is God's piano. "
Mike Roberts
>>> Honestly, something I think true freedom in games is overrated, and is
>>> something best left to players whose life is so bad they'd rather live a
>>> virtual one.
>>
>> I think this is part of my problem with a true "open world"
>> experience. I mean this in the least insulting way possible, but
>> isn't real life just an open world experience, with all the people on
>> the planet representing a large chunk of the possible choices that can
>> be made at every moment, and their outcomes?
>
> world is modelled, with all of its cities, and every one of the people
> within them. Then you, the player, are placed within this world. The
> simulation is entirely immersive, it seems just like being there for real.
> You can do anything you like, you can tweak any aspect of the simulation
> in any way you wish.
Two points:
First, most simulations aren't of the real world per se - they're of some
more interesting fantasy world. That's one of the key compelling things
about narrative games and simulations, I think - the setting can be a lot
more interesting than reality, the characters can all be more powerful,
mysterious, and attractive than in reality, and the characters don't have to
spend most of their time on the banal real-world tasks of everyday living.
Second, an un-fantastical real-world simulation would still have an edge on
reality: you could take risks you couldn't or wouldn't take in the real
world. If your character gets killed or loses all her money or gets thrown
in jail, you just hit UNDO or RESTART.
Between those two factors, I think a simulation can be inherently more
"dramatic" than reality. That's not to say that you're likely to get *good*
drama out of it, in the sense of epiphanies and personal transformations and
all the pieces falling into place at the climactic moment, but you
definitely get a kind of drama that you can't get in real life (or, if you
can get it, that you really don't want to happen to you :).
So, I'd propose that there's a hierarchy of dramatically interesting: at
tier 0, you have real life, where you're frankly happiest if there's not all
that much drama happening to your avatar; at tier 1, competent but formulaic
static fiction, say, CSI; tier 2, open-ended simulations, like table-top
RPGs and MMORPGs; and tier 3, the really good stuff, with the ephiphanies
and so on, like the best books and films. I guess the question is whether
IF or interactive media in general have a place in tier 3 - clearly there's
a big constituency for Yes here.
Jerome West
> It's a lot easier to draw a picture from a 3D model (you can do it at 60 fps
> on modern hardware) than it is to generate a good textual description of it.
> So graphical games have it easier on this count.
I agree with almost everything you said, I think our positions are very
close, but I'd take issue with the above. It's nightmarishly complex
to draw a picture from a 3D model. I know, I've tried. But the problem
has been solved, and now everyone just uses the already-known solution.
The same can be said about physics in 3D games - a few years ago it was
the holy grail of gaming, and now a game just looks shoddy without it.
I strongly believe the same thing applies to IF, only no-one has solved
the problem yet. Each IF system puts a different amount of emphasis on
simulation. I7 does less than TADS 3 by default, for example, but
provides a bunch of cool extensions and "recipes" to make up for it.
I believe it's possible to go much further. The objection that's often
raised is that textual descriptions of simulated IF would be too dry. I
can't think of anything drier than "(taken)", but no-one complains that
we should not be modelling the carrying of objects by default. The
author is always free to customise the most important (or most likely)
outcomes.
> I think this is why most IFers at the moment seem to be more focused on
> "emulating static fiction," as you put it.
Eeek, put like that it sounds like I was being terribly dismissive; I
apologise if I came across that way!
> I think what a lot of IFers are doing is trying to figure out how to take
> traditional narrative and add interactivity.
Indeed, but my conviction is that the interactivity could potentially go
much further, without taking anything away from the narrative.
> It seems like a useful thing to explore - maybe at some point the two
camps
> will meet halfway and there'll be a golden spike ceremony or something.
I sincerely hope to be there for that - preferably as an active
participant, but if not I'll be happy just to bring the champagne.
Jerome
John W Kennedy
"Can not run out of time, there is infinite time. /You/ are finite,
/Zathras/ is finite. /This/ -- is wrong tool. No. No. Not good. No. No.
Never use this."
--
John W. Kennedy
"I want everybody to be smart. As smart as they can be. A world of
ignorant people is too dangerous to live in."
-- Garson Kanin. "Born Yesterday"
Peter Pears
I appreciate the quote, but I don't really know what it means in this
context (could be because I don't know where the quote is from, or
could be because I just don't get it). Could you please clarify?
On the off-chance that your point was that my own quoting was unclear,
I meant that if the game is too vast, like a piano with infinite keys,
then there can be no story within it. The bit about "God" was a little
extra with nothing to add.
Andrew Plotkin
>
> Imagine a complete simulation of the real world. Every country in the
> world is modelled, with all of its cities, and every one of the people
> within them. Then you, the player, are placed within this world. The
> simulation is entirely immersive, it seems just like being there for
> real. You can do anything you like, you can tweak any aspect of the
> simulation in any way you wish.
>
> Like you said, I don't mean this in an insulting way, but would this
> really not be of interest to you?
It is interesting, but it is not a game, nor is it a story.
It has storytelling *potential*, but then so does a set of D&D
manuals, and those were a lot easier to design and sell.
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
If the Bush administration hasn't subjected you to searches without a
warrant, it's for one reason: they don't feel like it. Not because of
the Fourth Amendment.
J. Robinson Wheeler
Yes, in fact I supported the gist of the argument Mike was making in
that
post. (I originally had a sentence mentioning that, but I decided to
keep
the post confined to my gripe and not muddle around.)
There was (ha ha, sigh) this much more elaborate sequel I had in mind
that was going to tell a very long and complete story in that same
world,
and I had notes at one point about trying to construct an in-game
battle
that would operate something like a simulation of the arcade game, but
trying to tailor it so that it wouldn't be dully repetitive, like Mike
was
arguing. I'm not sure I solved the problem, which might be one of the
reasons why it's still incomplete.
I got away with it in Centipede by actually hand-writing every step of
the battle, since there was only one to deal with and I could afford
to
plot it all out. I did end up making use of what reminded me of an
animation program's timeline with keyframes as the thing running
underneath, and I always wanted to expand that technology a bit.
I still haven't done that either, though it seemed like it was going
to
ultimately be a fruitful line of research for a certain type of IF
game
-- or a certain type of sequence within an IF game, I should say.
Key "frames" having triggers that flipped other switches to make
other little "animation" lines run -- that was actually something like
I7's scenes, come to think of it. Though it's not random coincidence
that the ideas are similar.
--
J. Robinson Wheeler http://raddial.com/if/
JRW Digital Media
Jerome West
> First, most simulations aren't of the real world per se - they're of some
> more interesting fantasy world. That's one of the key compelling things
> about narrative games and simulations, I think - the setting can be a lot
> more interesting than reality, the characters can all be more powerful,
> mysterious, and attractive than in reality, and the characters don't have to
> spend most of their time on the banal real-world tasks of everyday living.
Absolutely, I was merely over-simplifying in order to make a point. A
realistic simulation of the real world exactly as-is would be amazing.
Begin to change aspects of that world, and you've got something
potentially even more intriguing. Create fantasy worlds, which behave
totally differently to ours, and a huge range of possibilities are
opened up. It's still the simulation aspect which holds it all together
though, and makes the entire thing believable.
> Second, an un-fantastical real-world simulation would still have an edge on
> reality: you could take risks you couldn't or wouldn't take in the real
> world. If your character gets killed or loses all her money or gets thrown
> in jail, you just hit UNDO or RESTART.
>
> Between those two factors, I think a simulation can be inherently more
> "dramatic" than reality. That's not to say that you're likely to get *good*
> drama out of it, in the sense of epiphanies and personal transformations and
> all the pieces falling into place at the climactic moment, but you
> definitely get a kind of drama that you can't get in real life (or, if you
> can get it, that you really don't want to happen to you :).
I'd suggest that the epiphanies might come for free, once simulation
reaches the levels we're talking about. Giving everyone the chance to
re-live their lives risk-free, with as many retries and save points as
they like, is almost bound to create "good drama". Would anyone bother
with their so-called "real" lives at this point though, and would this
make the epiphanies redundant, or all the more important? But I guess
that's straying somewhat from the discussion of what simulation with
currently feasible technologies might achieve. :)
> So, I'd propose that there's a hierarchy of dramatically interesting: at
> tier 0, you have real life, where you're frankly happiest if there's not all
> that much drama happening to your avatar; at tier 1, competent but formulaic
> static fiction, say, CSI; tier 2, open-ended simulations, like table-top
> RPGs and MMORPGs; and tier 3, the really good stuff, with the ephiphanies
> and so on, like the best books and films. I guess the question is whether
> IF or interactive media in general have a place in tier 3 - clearly there's
> a big constituency for Yes here.
That's certainly an interesting hierarchy, I can't say I'd ever thought
of it in quite those terms! Whilst avoiding drama in tier 0 is always my
first instinct, these could turn out to be the moments one might regret
in retrospect. I'd generally be happy to avoid tier 1 entirely. It's
tiers 2 and 3 which are somewhat of a grey area though. Certainly I'd
agree that IF and interactive media have a place in tier 3. I'm just not
sure you can have truly interactive media without the simulation that
you've consigned to tier 2.
Jerome
Mike Roberts
> Mike Roberts wrote:
>> It's a lot easier to draw a picture from a 3D model (you can do it at 60
>> fps on modern hardware) than it is to generate a good textual description
>> of it. So graphical games have it easier on this count.
>
> I agree with almost everything you said, I think our positions are very
> close, but I'd take issue with the above. It's nightmarishly complex to
> draw a picture from a 3D model. I know, I've tried. But the problem has
> been solved, and now everyone just uses the already-known solution.
I don't think we disagree at all here - I didn't say drawing a picture was
easy, just *easier* than describing it textually. Maybe I should have said
"less impossible"? :) But in any case, graphical rendering from a 3D model
is pretty much a solved problem - you can even pick from different
approaches, depending on whether you want it good or you want it now (i.e.,
image quality or frame rate). In contrast, I don't think anyone even knows
where to begin with the text-rendering version. Text generation has shaped
up to be an unexpectedly hard AI-ish problem.
> I believe it's possible to go much further. The objection that's often
> raised is that textual descriptions of simulated IF would be too dry.
Well, it *would* be pretty dry with the current state of the art: "7.5
meters ahead is a rhombus of height 1 meter, minor width 50 centimeters
along the top edge, major width 75 centimeters along the bottom edge, 70%
red reflective with 'brick' texture, angled 85 degrees to the horizontal.
7.4 meters ahead..."
> I can't think of anything drier than "(taken)", but no-one complains that
> we should not be modelling the carrying of objects by default.
Yeah, but that's just the thing - we're not *modeling* carrying anything,
we're pretty much just recording the fact of carrying. Actually modeling
carrying in 3D would involve a lot more than a containment tree; it would
involve (x,y,z) coordinates of the objects involved and their volumetric
envelopes and some topology calculations. The model IF uses instead is so
simple because we don't know how to turn anything more physically
descriptive into text. What we've done is essentially reverse-engineer the
text we want to generate into a stylized and abstracted data model. Or,
rather, Crowther and Woods did, and we've carried their model forward more
or less intact. (People occasionally visit the raif customer service desk
to lodge the complaint that this tenacious data model has straitjacketed our
thinking, kind of the IF Whorfian hypothesis, but that's a separate topic.)
The upside is that you can turn our tiny data model into decent text. The
downside is that it's awkward to impossible to wedge 99% of dramatically
interesting physical situations into the model, so we don't typically try;
we just add special cases with some extra flags saying "x is floating in the
air" or "x is under y" or "x is hanging on the wall," and then deal
laboriously, case-by-case, with the logical consequences of the special case
(usually missing about half of said consequences).
>> I think what a lot of IFers are doing is trying to figure out how to take
>> traditional narrative and add interactivity.
>
> Indeed, but my conviction is that the interactivity could potentially go
> much further, without taking anything away from the narrative.
I guess I agree in principle - and I think most people here would as well -
but it's a little fuzzy in the abstract like this. The interactivity could
go much further... than what, exactly? There's such a range of linearity vs
openness in the body of IF works out there already that it's hard for me to
get a handle on what "more interactivity" really means in such a wide
context.
Jerome West
> Here, Jerome West <jerom...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Imagine a complete simulation of the real world. Every country in the
>> world is modelled, with all of its cities, and every one of the people
>> within them. Then you, the player, are placed within this world. The
>> simulation is entirely immersive, it seems just like being there for
>> real. You can do anything you like, you can tweak any aspect of the
>> simulation in any way you wish.
>>
>> Like you said, I don't mean this in an insulting way, but would this
>> really not be of interest to you?
>
> It is interesting, but it is not a game, nor is it a story.
>
> It has storytelling *potential*, but then so does a set of D&D
> manuals, and those were a lot easier to design and sell.
Quite true. But it would contain the set of all possible stories which
could result from [starting point of the system]. A set of D&D manuals,
by contrast, would contain only the potential for those stories which
the DM (with the collaboration of the players) could imagine, within the
limits of the mythology in question.
I'm not sure that quite makes up for the difficulty in implementation,
however.
Jerome
JDC
> "Jerome West" <jeromecw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I believe it's possible to go much further. The objection that's often
> > raised is that textual descriptions of simulated IF would be too dry.
>
> Well, it *would* be pretty dry with the current state of the art: "7.5
> meters ahead is a rhombus of height 1 meter, minor width 50 centimeters
> along the top edge, major width 75 centimeters along the bottom edge, 70%
> red reflective with 'brick' texture, angled 85 degrees to the horizontal.
> 7.4 meters ahead..."
Apparently you've never read anything by Robbe-Grillet :).
-JDC
Mike Roberts
>> tier 2, open-ended simulations, like table-top RPGs and MMORPGs; and tier
>> interactive media in general have a place in tier 3...
>
> Certainly I'd agree that IF and interactive media have a place in tier 3.
> I'm just not sure you can have truly interactive media without the
> simulation that you've consigned to tier 2.
I didn't really mean to consign simulation in general to tier 2 - what I
meant was more along the lines of "open-ended simulations as we know them
today." So far, at least, I don't think there's been anything in that
category that can produce quite the same kind of emotional and intellectual
impact as the best static dramatic works.
My question at the end there really should have been whether or not
open-ended simulation has a place in tier 3. I think it's easy enough to
argue that *some* kind of interactive works will find their place there, in
that "interactive" is such a broad term.
John W Kennedy
> On Aug 14, 9:59 pm, John W Kennedy <jwke...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>> Peter Pears wrote:
>>> I found the quote, long live IMDB. :D
>>> "Christ, did you... did you see the streets, just the streets? There
>>> were thousands of them! Then how you do it down there, how do you
>>> choose just one... one woman, one house, one landscape to look at, one
>>> way to die...?"
>>> "Take piano: keys begin, keys end. You know there are 88 of them.
>>> Nobody can tell you any different. They are not infinite. You're
>>> infinite... And on those keys, the music that you can make... is
>>> infinite. I like that. That I can live by..."
>>> "You rolled out in front of me a keyboard of millions of keys,
>>> millions and billions of keys that never end. And that's the truth
>>> Max, that they never end. That keyboard is infinite... and if that
>>> keyboard is infinite, then on that keyboard there is no music you can
>>> play. You're sitting on the wrong bench... That is God's piano. "
>> "Can not run out of time, there is infinite time. /You/ are finite,
>> /Zathras/ is finite. /This/ -- is wrong tool. No. No. Not good. No. No.
>> Never use this."
> I appreciate the quote, but I don't really know what it means in this
> context (could be because I don't know where the quote is from, or
> could be because I just don't get it). Could you please clarify?
It's one of the most famous lines from "Babylon 5", and I could not help
being reminded of it rather forcefully. But I suppose it loses something
without the late Tim Choate's brilliant delivery.
--
John W. Kennedy
A proud member of the reality-based community.
Daphne Brinkerhoff
You don't have to even read him directly. Just read what Adam Cadre
says here:
<http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/12517.html>
and all will be made clear (IMHO).
--
Daphne
Andrew Plotkin
> Andrew Plotkin wrote:
> > Here, Jerome West <jerom...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Imagine a complete simulation of the real world. Every country in the
> >> world is modelled, with all of its cities, and every one of the people
> >> within them. Then you, the player, are placed within this world. The
> >> simulation is entirely immersive, it seems just like being there for
> >> real. You can do anything you like, you can tweak any aspect of the
> >> simulation in any way you wish.
> >>
> >> Like you said, I don't mean this in an insulting way, but would this
> >> really not be of interest to you?
> >
> > It is interesting, but it is not a game, nor is it a story.
> >
> > It has storytelling *potential*, but then so does a set of D&D
> > manuals, and those were a lot easier to design and sell.
>
> Quite true. But it would contain the set of all possible stories which
> could result from [starting point of the system].
Would it? Seems to me that in anything with the complexity of the real
world, *picking out* a story is a task equivalent to *creating* a
story. Because this is what a storyteller is *doing*, most of the
time -- picking out elements from her bank of life experience and
rejiggering them together into a narrative.
The other 1% of the storytelling work (in science fiction and fantasy,
anyhow) is making stuff up that doesn't exist in the real world. And
of course in your complete world simulation, the author has to do that
anyway -- the dragons and starships and wizards and robots won't be
present until the author tweaks them in.
This is not a nit that I pick down this road. The question of picking
out a narrative from a ferment of simulation -- whether simple
physical simulation or some complex biosphere -- is at the heart of
this discussion. Anyone can set up a big state automaton and start it
cranking, but what do you *do* with it?
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
J. Robinson Wheeler
> "J. Robinson Wheeler" <j...@jrwdigitalmedia.com> wrote:
> I hope you know I meant no disrespect to your Centipede or the others. I
> didn't mean "parody" in any sort of brush-off or otherwise negative way, and
> anyway it's probably not the right word for this example. What I should
> have said about Centipede is that, yes, it's based on an arcade game, but
> it's not an IF adaptation of the original in the sense that a Harry Potter
> movie is a film adaptation of a Harry Potter book.
Yeah, I know better than to think you meant it as a slight. I was
just
feeling touchy, and replied a little more hastily than I usually do
(and
felt Send-button remorse immediately afterward).
I think the cure for my touchiness is to start publishing new games
again so I'm not so worried about what people think of my old ones.