I’ve looked at the link you’ve provided @SPotter. I don’t know much about D&D, but I know it exists as a game to play amongsts friends, face to face, as well as in digital online versions. I must admit that I’ve never quite came to grips with massive multiplayer immersion worlds. I’ve taken interested, as of lately, in MUDs and MOOs, and experimented with Evennia (a FOSS Python framework for creating MUDs and MOOs), but maybe due to my Interactive Fiction experience I have a bias toward understanding the mechanics of multiplayer persistent worlds—and I’ve failed badly to understand how they are to be designed.
From D&D, I’ve started thinking therefore of multiplayer virtual worlds, and I remembered a passage from Richard A. Bartle’s Designing Virtual Worlds (considered by many as «the Bible» of multiplayer virtual world games), so I went and fetched it:
Players consume content quicker than it can be produced. To prevent a virtual world from becoming “played out,” therefore, some mechanism for reintroducing content must be installed—the reset strategy of the virtual world. There are two basic approaches: sudden and rolling.
This is not necessarily true of the virtual worlds of the future, in which content may arise from player actions rather than being introduced by designers, but it’s true for virtual worlds of the present.
[Designing Virtual Worlds, “Reset Strategy”]
He then goes on to describe different approaches to how a virtual world can be driven toward is final stages and then “resurrected”. I think this does tie in to the Grand Argument Story—after all, if we take the virtual world and its game experience as a narrative that unfolds through time (no matter which roles are served by the players), at the end of its narrative cycle, all players should be able to look back and appreciate the storypoints and dramatics they’ve experienced. So, a virtual world could have a set of rules by which to determine if the players are triggering the right dramatic points that would then shift the narrative to a next stage—and the virtual world would then take care of updating all its players population of the changes taking places. New stage, new pressures, new immediate apparent problems, and so on.
Any virtual world could emphasize things like forewarning, dividends, costs, ecc., in a manner of ways (NPCs gossiping in taverns, TVs, radios, newspapers, ecc.)
(note: the author speaks mainly of digital worlds, but not only! he points out over and over the link between table top games and video games of this genre).
As mentioned, I fail to grasp the multiplayer medium (especially NPCs, or “mobiles” as they are often called in teh genre), but I guess that there are backend tricks to ensure each player is granted basic appreaciations—even if by “enforcing” them on him, specifically.
In text-adventures IF the problem should be easier because they are single player, turn based, and take no account of real-time. A single player can easily be handled, and appreciations can be enforced on him—“cut scenes” in which the player is suspended from his role of controlling his subjective character, and presented with an objective outside view of the story, either out of character or from another character’s POV.
At the end, when we watch a movie or read a book, we as spectators/readers are able to jump in and out of the MC, the subjective and the objective view, and still appreciate his throughline even though we are participant to Overall Story events which are not part of the MC knowledge. The fact that the player might be controlling the MC actions as is in-game character doesn’t compromise this knowledge: in IF games is not enough to know something as a player, your character can’t carry out actions unless he has the prerequisite knowledge—so, for example, when you replay an adventure, and you already know the name of a given NPC, you might still not interact with him until your character discovers (ie: “earns” through interactions) the name/identity of that NPC.
Often IF puzzles are about discovering how to get to a specific situation, even if you already know the solution—you must still gather the means. And I think this could be a general consideration for any single player video game.
The IF game designer knows that he has to constrain player choices to make them consistent with the world he is building, and ultimately you deliver an illusion of choices, not a truly openworld in which all choices will be accepted—more like the conjurer’s freedom of choice when he asks you to “chose” a card. Some of these choices would be specifically tied to a different story-path, ultimately moving the player/character through different storyforms, at specific nodal points of the story.
Labeling some actions as “good”, “evil”, or other relevant qualifications, could allow the designer to measure and qualify the overall tendency of the player during a whole stage of play, and ultimately decide which storyform to employ for (e.g.) the second part of the game. This approach would avoid a binary situation in which the player has to chose at once his course of story, and in my opinion it would allow a subtler, more spread-in-time measurement of the player mental approach to the game.
I guess that different video game genres would have to approach it from different angles, so I can only really speak for IF since I have some experience in it. But the more I think about it the more I am convinced that, as long as the finished game presents the player with a complete Grand Arg.Story, interactivity can be introduced in different ways, at different levels, and the designer would only have to ensure that all possible narrative paths are consistent in themselves. Possibly, some Dramatica appreciations might be presented to the player in non-orthodox ways (ie: non-linear in time, or order), but counterbalancing tricks can be employed to make sure the player is reminded of their importance (or existence) at key points of the adventure—NPCs dialogues, a radio broadcast, a newspaper or TV in a room, ecc.
Inform7 is a good tool for experiment all these, because it allows to create such criteria in an almost natural language. So part of the code would (more or less, but quite closely) look like:
Hitting an unarmed person is an evil action.
Saving somebody and feeding somebody are good actions.
When Act 2 begins:
If the number of player's good actions is greater than the number of player's evil actions:
[...]
which of course looks much more familiar to us than some computerish-syntaxed language, and somehow makes it simpler to build decision rules which reflect our intentions and mental description of a problem—but then again, Inform7 is one of those things you either love it or ate it, and not all IF designer went for it, some stuck to older Object-Oriented Language designing tools.
Also, Inform7 has the Skein tool/functionality, which allows to keep track of all possible different player paths in the game—both graphically and textually—thus making it easier to test and debug all story paths and ramifications.
Anyhow, speaking from my experience I think that Inform7 as a tool, and text-adventures as a game genre, are a good medium for ground-testing Dramatica in non-linear interactive fiction: (1) Inform7 source code almost looks like English, so most people can make sense of it and follow the game mechanics; (2) text-adventures can be a good compromise between storytelling and gaming, without actually leaving the field of writing.
Then, whatever lessons are to be learned from such experiments, they can easily be transposed to other video game genres.
Tristano
