I have always thought of encounters as a way to add color to the core interactive system based on linguistic interaction. But what if we simply ditched the entire linguistic interaction and built a system based solely on encounters? It’s a radical idea, to be sure, but it deserves consideration.
People have been experimenting along these lines for many years. Text adventures were their first expression, and the interactive fiction people have taken the technology of text adventures a long way, making great improvements. However, their internal algorithms have never been centered on personality models, so the level of character interaction is incidental to the core interactions. I think that even the interactive fiction people must admit that they haven’t cracked the problem of interactive storytelling.
I still believe that, had lots of people jumped on the Storytron technology, it would in time have flowered into full-blown interactive storytelling. However, that technology was simply too complicated to be accessible to people, so it failed. My thinking now is that, perhaps by stepping way back, we can at least start building a community that can solve the problem.
Many years ago my friends Eric Goldberg and Greg Costikyan built a remarkable boardgame about the Arabian Nights stories. It was an amazing production, and I was surprised that they chose to use the boardgames format instead of the computer.
The problem with all such attempts is the number of encounters (or nodes, or leaves, whatever you call them) required to provide a worthwhile experience. Player who experience the same encounter two or three times conclude that they have seen everything there is to see.
The obvious solution is to stuff the storyworld with more encounters. But the numbers aren’t good. Suppose that you make 100 encounters for a storyworld, and the average game lasts 50 turns. On a player’s second game, they will experience the same encounters 25 times; by the player’s fifth game, they will have experienced three encounters every single game, and only three encounters will never have been experienced. If we establish the simple rule that the player loses interest when having seen at least half of the available encounters twice, then the story lasts only 3 trials before the rule is satisfied. That’s just not acceptable.
We can increase the number of times the player can experience the storyworld without violating the rule by either increasing the total number of encounters, or decreasing the length of the average story. Here we’re caught in the jaws of a dilemma: if we reduce the length of the average story, we make it too short, but writing more encounters is too onerous. Most attempts run out of gas after about a hundred encounters.
Why do they run out of gas? I think it’s because people run out of ideas for interesting interactions. But there’s a solution: what if a lot of encounters are devoted to describing the storyworld itself? That is, instead of thinking primarily in terms of encounters that crash two characters together, why not have encounters the primary content of which is to reveal more about the storyworld to the player? There can still be an antagonist, but the interaction with the antagonist can be minor. Here’s an example from a hypothetical Arthurian storyworld, with the player as Arthur:
You’re patrolling Galahad’s borderlands with him and a handful of katterfacks when you come across a gang of workers strengthening a dike. They’re digging the trench in front of it deeper, and using the soil to pile the dike up higher. It’s hot, hard work. A worker in the ditch loads soil into a basket; when it’s full, he shoulders it with it straps and slowly, unsteadily climbs the steep slope to the top of the dike, where he dumps his pitifully tiny load. Then he staggers down the slope, trying not to dislodge the soil, and resumes digging. There are a dozen men at work, and three using their rest break to serve as lookouts in case the Saxons make an appearance.
You shake your head in dismay. “If we could drive the Saxons further away, your people wouldn’t have to expend so much time on this kind of work.”
“They don’t seem very enthusiastic about their work, do they?”
“Are these the only workers you can muster for this important work?”
[The reasons for the dikes will be explained in several other encounters.]
Now, the interaction with Galahad is minor, but it still affects the relationship between the two. With lots of encounters like this, it wouldn’t be too difficult to modify relationships enough to make a big difference.
What makes this work is a factor that has in the past been a problem: expositing the backstory. For Siboot, I wrote an entire novella to provide the backstory, and required the player to read it before playing. That wasn’t very sporting of me, was it? This way, the backstory is woven into the main story. This provides two additional features: first, there’s an element of mystery as the player struggles to understand the storyworld in their first playing. We expect the player to lose the first pass at the storyworld, because they won’t know enough about it. Second, the player will develop a growing sense of satisfaction as they learn more about the storyworld and it starts to make more sense.
Additional ideas will be posted in the next essay.