1. Story and Gameplay UC Santa Cruz School of Engineering michaelm@cs.ucsc.edu 11 February 2008 Michael Mateas

2. UC SANTA CRUZ Narrative  Games can tell stories  A game’s narrative is the aspects of a game that contributes to it telling a story  Questions concerning whether games are narratives, or whether narrative provides just one way to look at games are still actively debated.  Narrative is also used to describe the story itself  Computer games stretch the notion of narrative  The interactivity of computer games, like the interactivity of hypertext, pushes hard against existing theories of linear narrative  No longer just one privileged story being told; many possible ways to experience a non-linear narrative (computer game, hypertext fiction)

3. UC SANTA CRUZ Structures for Game Narrative  Embedded narrative  Pre-generated narrative content that exists prior to a player’s interaction with the game  Cut scenes, back story  Are often used to provide the fictional background for the game, motivation for actions in the game, and development of story arc  Emergent narrative  Arises from the player’s interaction with the gameworld, designed levels, rule structure  Moment-by-moment play in the game creates this emergent narrative  Are there any games that actually have emergent narrative?

4. UC SANTA CRUZ Example of embedded narrative

5. UC SANTA CRUZ Emergent narrative  Stories are well-structured, that's what gives them their narrative force  Unified causal chains  Closure  Emotional response  Achieving this structure requires an author, but interactivity is about player choice  Why is emergent narrative so hard to design? “I won't go so far as to say that interactivity and storytelling are mutually exclusive, but I do believe that they exist in an inverse relationship to one another… Interactivity is almost the opposite of narrative; narrative flows under the direction of the author, while interactivity depends on the player for motive power…” Ernest Adams in Gamasutra

6. UC SANTA CRUZ Interaction logic  An interaction logic provides the computational primitives that a game designer uses to design gameplay  An interaction logic provides  Commitments about what kinds of underlying game state the player can change  Commitments about how current game state influences future game state

7. UC SANTA CRUZ Graphical logic  Currently games are based (almost) solely on graphical logic  Computer graphics made playable  Movement  Collision detection

8. UC SANTA CRUZ

11. Simulation logic  Strategy and sim games make use of simulation logic  Simulation made playable  Resource management (causal chains)  Input change

13. UC SANTA CRUZ

15. Forced to skin  All game content currently expressed using graphical or simulation logic  Skinning – the re-labeling of visual or simulation elements  How can we build games where the game mechanics themselves are story-based?

16. UC SANTA CRUZ Need interaction logics for story Plot structure Tension/Complexity Time Exposition Inciting incident Rising action Crisis Climax Falling action Denouement Characters Personality Emotion Self motivation Change Social relationships Consistency Illusion of life

17. UC SANTA CRUZ Return of the King

18. UC SANTA CRUZ Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

19. UC SANTA CRUZ Taxi Driver?

20. UC SANTA CRUZ Whoops…. Movie: “The film can be seen as a series of his failed attempts to connect, every one of them hopelessly wrong… His utter aloneness is at the center of Taxi Driver… We have all felt as alone as Travis. Most of us are better at dealing with it.” Game: “Travis has some brutal combos for exacting some lethal revenge. If you shoot a bad guy in the knee, you can then follow up with some melee combos resulting in a finishing move.”

21. UC SANTA CRUZ Façade

22. UC SANTA CRUZ Game reinforcement and feedback  Concrete player actions directly manipulate state  Game state is primarily numeric, relatively simple  The score is directly communicated to the player Run, jump, shoot Position, time, score Game state “Score” (summary state) Game

23. UC SANTA CRUZ Façade as social, dramatic game  Abstract player actions (discourse acts) manipulate social state  Game state is heterogenous, multi-leveled, symbolic and numeric  Score is indirectly communicated through dramatic performance Praise, bring up topic, flirt Enriched dramatic performance Game state Head game scores Game Abstraction 1 Abstraction 2

24. UC SANTA CRUZ Façade’s social games  Affinity game  Player must take sides in character disagreements  Hot-button game  Player can push character hot-buttons (e.g. sex, marriage) to provoke responses  Therapy game  Player can increase characters’ understanding of their problems  Tension  Not a game, but dramatic tension increases over time and is influenced by player actions (e.g. pushing character hot-buttons can accelerate the tension)

25. UC SANTA CRUZ Multiple, mixable progressions  Each social game, plus tension, forms a mixable progression  A progression consists of  Units of procedural content (e.g. beats, beat goals)  A narrative sequencer that manages the progression and responds to player interaction  Multiple progressions run simultaneously and can intermix

26. UC SANTA CRUZ The progressions Beat library Beat manager Beat sequencing (overall story + tension) Beat goal sequencing (affinity game) Canonical beat goal sequence Handlers (ABL meta-behaviors) + discourse management Mixin library Handlers + discourse Global mixins (hot button game) Therapy game similar

27. UC SANTA CRUZ The future of interactive storytelling  Current generation games do storytelling via embedded narratives  The future of interactive storytelling are narratives with true player agency  Player actions have deep effect on the story progression  This requires developing interaction logics, and game mechanics that make use these logics, that are based on character and story