May 10th, 2023
I think I have figured out where we went wrong with interactive storytelling. The problem is below. Just keep scrolling.
Ta-da!
This is the graphical representation of our blunder. It’s the visualization of the choices that we give our players. The player faces two doors; they can choose Door A or Door B. Now, how is the player to choose between the two options? Perhaps one door is orange and the other door is purple. Perhaps one door is “give the donkey a yo-yo” and the other door is “ask the donkey for directions”. In other words, there’s no indication of which door the player should choose. The player might as well flip a coin to decide, because there’s no way to make a decision. Boring.
Or perhaps one door has a sign saying “This way to heaven” and the other door’s sign says “This way to hell”. Or perhaps one door says “Death” and the other door says “Life”. The choice is obvious, and there’s no decision to make. Boring.
OK, so perhaps we could make it trickier. Each door has some obscure poetry on it, and the player must figure out what the poetry means. There is indeed a correct answer, but the player must figure it out. It’s a puzzle. Boring.
The real problem here is that the player must make a boolean decision. There’s a right choice and a wrong choice. And that’s the mistake we’ve been making for decades, because there’s nothing interesting about choosing between black and white.
The mistake is the notion that we must give the player a choice between two, or three, or some other small number of options — and that choice has an immediate, direct effect on the course of play. I have always thought that the diagram above holds the essence of interaction, that it represents one atom of interaction. That’s the blunder. Interaction in stories does not come is tidy, discrete atoms. The player does not experience one interactive event comprising 1% of the total interaction, then another 1%, and another 1%, until after 100 interactions the player has obtained the full measure of interaction. Storytelling is a process, not an object; the end result of storytelling is a story, which IS an object. However, the process of understanding a story is a process, not an object. Messy, huh? Stories cannot be assembled out of pieces like Lego structures. You cannot assemble a living animal by gluing bones, organs, muscles, tendons, and skin together. A living creature is assembled in systems, not parts.
Suppose that you go to the theater to see a movie. You pay for your ticket, sit down, and the movie starts. It’s a good movie, but partway through, the sound system fails. You can see that the movie is still playing, but you can’t hear what the characters are saying to each other. After two minutes, the sound system is repaired and you can once again hear the dialogue. The movie lasts 120 minutes, after which the manager announces that, in recognition of the failure of sound, they’ll be refunding one-sixtieth of your ticket price. After all, you were able to experience 59/60ths of the movie, so they need refund only the portion that you missed.
It’s obvious that this is not fair. The missing two minutes contained crucial information that ruined the entire movie. Because you missed that information, you could not understand why Doris decided to slap Donny, which is what led him to leave her in a huff, which in turn led him to meet Diane, whom he later fell in love with and married, causing Doris to commit suicide at the end of the movie. All because of a slap that you never could figure out!
Long have I railed against the use of boolean variables in game design. Now I extend that prejudice to the decisions we offer the player. We must stop offering the player black and white choices between the “right” option and the “wrong” option. We must stop thinking in terms of right versus wrong or correct versus incorrect. Instead, we must thing in terms of “better in this dimension, worse in that dimension, about the same in a third dimension, and so on.” Every choice we give the player should present that player with a mix of different consequences. The outcome of the storyworld depends upon the CUMULATIVE result of all those mixes of all those decisions.
This is what I did with Le Morte D’Arthur, but in a very primitive fashion. The next step is to expand the number of numeric variables that are affected by each option presented to the player.