Part 3: Parallels in Interactivity, Games and Narrative
The ideal model for storytelling in games will bring together common points of overlap in narrative structure, interactive systems and games. To do this I will examine the role of user choice in interactivity and compare this with the choices and goals made while playing a game. The resulting parallels will show common points that can be integrated into a unified structure.
Interactivity and Player Choice
Crawford’s definition of interactivity is, “A cyclic process between two or more active agents in which each agent alternately listens, thinks, and speaks.” He of course means these terms metaphorically, since in the case of a computer these things are not done literally; they process input and return feedback. This input and feedback process is the core of what is understood as interactivity. He sums it up nicely, “Interactivity depends on the choices available to the user.” Crawford goes on further to suggest that the quality of choice is also highly relevant, “The quality of interaction depends on the richness of choices available to the user.” He breaks down quality and richness in these points:
• “The functional significance of each choice”. This refers to the choices available that will satisfy the player’s expectations, desires and interests. For an MMORPG, this quote is particularly relevant, as Crawford refers to, “those games that offer the player the opportunity to wander all over a huge region—but nothing interesting happens in the huge region…sure, the game offers zillions of choices in terms of where the player might go, but none of those choices is functionally significant.” The opposite problem is created by too many choices, when few of them offer any real practical use. Instead of the illusion of “I can do anything I want to”, we get a reduction by the player to the most relevant options. This happens in character-creation methods all the time, where players label features as “wallpaper.”
• “Perceived completeness: the number of choices in relation to the number of possibilities the user can imagine.” Crawford makes it clear that its not how many choices that are available, it is the number of choices compared to what the user might expect as reasonable options. “If the user has reached the climax of the story and must choose between leaving his girlfriend for the war or shirking his duty, having only two choices doesn’t detract from the power of the interaction; it’s difficult to imagine other reasonable possibilities.” In other words, the designer of an interactive narrative does not have to account for every possible choice, only the most probable of choices expected by the player.
Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman have a general approach to interactivity that emphasizes the anatomy of choice. “An interactive context presents participants with choices. Choices can be micro-choices of moment-to-moment interactivity or macro-choices, which concern the long-term progress of the game experience.” They then break down interactivity according to actions and outcomes. “The basic unit out of which interactive meaning is made is the action > outcome unit. These units are the molecules out of which interactive designers (including game designers) create larger structures of designed interaction.” They offer a five step process for designing interactivity based on cause and effect, or actions and outcomes. “As the game progresses, each new moment of choice is a response to the situation onscreen, which is a result of a previous string of action > outcome units.” There are five stages in this process. They are defined as a series of events that flow back and forth between the game system (internal) and the player (external) events.
1. What happened before the player was given a choice? (internal event)
2. How is the possibility of choice conveyed to the player? (external event)
3. How did the player make the choice? (internal event)
4. What is the result of the choice? How will it affect future choices? (internal event)
5. How is the result of the choice conveyed to the player? (external event)
This breakdown of interactive elements as events offers a useful link to narrative structure. Story uses events as actions and happenings; in an interactive system, a player makes a choice and does something (action) and then examines the system to see how it has changed and how he is now affected (happenings).
Crawford strongly emphasizes the connection with choice and story, “Ultimately, stories concern the choices that character’s make. Indeed, the entire point of many stories is revealed through a key choice the protagonist makes.” He uses the examples of Neo in the Matrix deciding to sacrifice himself; In Star Wars, Luke’s decision to trust the force; in Macbeth, the decision to murder for ambition. “In each of these examples, the entire story builds up to or revolves around a key decision.” In all three of these cases, the choices are limited, but meaningful, and based upon the designed elements in the story that led up to the decision.
Combine this with Crawford’s former examination of the quality and richness of interaction offers an insight into one of the first harmonious elements between plot and interactive storytelling. The designer of an interactive narrative is looking for a few quality, probable choices as opposed to a list of all possible choices. This aligns very well with the earlier notion that probable actions of a plot slowly narrow over time and Aristotle’s concept of verisimilitude. In a designing a non linear story, it is not necessary to create an infinity of endings, only a few relevant and meaningful endings based upon a sum of decisions that have been made available to the player throughout the course of the story.
In Fundamentals of Game Design, Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings present a method for organizing a game in a “hierarchy of challenges”. The challenges break down into three levels: atomic challenges, sub-missions and missions. The term atomic is used in reference to the smallest unit of game-play—the moment to moment interaction the player experiences. “During play, the player focuses most of her attention on the atomic challenges immediately facing her, but the other, higher level challenges will always be in the back of her mind. Her awareness of the higher-level challenges creates anticipation that plays an important role both in entertaining her and guiding her to victory.” Driving all of the missions, sub-missions and atomic challenges are goals, with the long term goal always in the player’s mind, what Adams and Rollings call the ultimate goal─ completion.
In Crawford’s work in interactive storytelling, he also uses the term atomic to break events into their smallest form; what he refers to as the atoms of storytelling. He calls the atoms of storytelling substory. “A substory is a single dramatic step; it’s an event or change. It can be described in a sentence that specifies an event…this event can be tiny (“James sidestepped the descending sword swing and swung to his right”) or big (“James killed Thomas in a swordfight”).” Thus, missions and sub missions are the story events of a game.
Parallel’s can be drawn between Chatman’s breakdown of events into actions and happenings, and various game-play dynamics. Actions should viewed in terms of the first half of the Action > Outcome sequence in the form of missions, sub missions and atomic challenges. Happenings are those Outcomes that are generated from the character’s decisions, and can show up in the form of quest rewards, storygates, or even in a change in situation to a more or less dangerous one. In this way, The Action > Outcome sequence may be used to mimic the cause and effect principle in plot.
Kernels and Satellites can also play a role. Chatman’s statement that kernels involve “...branching points which force movement into one of two (or more) possible paths” seem to indicate that kernels best parallel decision points in a nonlinear story graph. Every player must experience them, and in traditional narrative they would probably be key points where writer’s presented the audience with the important decision made by the characters. In nonlinear interactive narrative, they are decision points for the player. For the bulk of game-play that does not revolve around critical decision-making, satellites seem more appropriate. Chatman says, “Satellites entail no choice, but are solely the workings-out of the choices made at the kernels. They necessarily imply the existence of kernels, but not vice versa” These “minor plot events that are not crucial to the story” are very similar to the multitude of possible game-play options that a player might enjoy, but that are not critical decision points of the game. Satellites lie along the paths that connect decision points in nonlinear structures. Though they do not need to be experienced, clever design of plot satellites will probably be the difference in what makes a believable and immersive story in a game. They offer a great opportunity for a designer to add depth to the game that does not have to be forced on the player, something that will appeal to the types of players who like story and those who just want to get on with the action.
Satellites have a useful though subtle application for games. In a story, the satellites imply to the audience many possible endings for the story, but in truth there will be only one. The possibilities become more and more limited until the possible becomes the probable and the probable becomes the fixed ending. In an interactive narrative model, this can be a strength—these imply multiple endings by unreliable satellites can actually be real possible endings. This then makes all satellites that point to any possible ending reliable relative to that ending. This can be very powerful, for it means that everything the player saw that pointed to one ending could be correct for them in their own version of the story.
David Freeman proposes a way to take advantage of this concept with a technique that he calls “idea mapping”, in which he suggests “taking the character through a variety of viewpoints, usually inconsistent ones, during the game”. He gives an example of a monster game, where at one point the character would feel the humans are good and the monsters bad, but later this viewpoint would be reversed (monsters good and humans bad) and at another point, make the player think he was a monster. He gives the film example, “…in Bladerunner, where at first we feel that the replicants are inhuman monsters. By the end, however, our opinion has changed and it seems clear that some of the replicants are much more ‘human’ than those trying to destroy them.”
All games consist of various goals the player is trying to accomplish. Most of these goals are created by the designer, though this does not mean that a player cannot make his own goals. It does however, generally mean that the game’s intended rewards will come through completing the goals the designer has put into the game. In first-person shooters the player is after kills and health and pickups; in RPGs they are usually after gear and power items, consumables, or increased skills and abilities. Some goals need to be stated directly, while others should be discovered or even invented by the player. “If you give the player nothing to do except follow explicit instructions, it doesn’t feel like a game; it feels like a test. Part of the fun lies in figuring out—whether through exploration, through events in the story, or by observing the game’s internal economy—what he’s supposed to do.”
Can goals be used to integrate narrative into game play? Neil Sorens, CEO of Dancing Robot Studios, offers some excellent insight into this question, “The Sims 2…an example of a game that has made some progress in the area of story creation, is also notable for another positive trend in sandbox games: an assortment of concrete goals (aspirations) to achieve. These goals, which are noticeably absent or unstated/unrecognized in many older sandbox games such as the original The Sims and Sim City, are beneficial for multiple reasons, as intuition or any basic game design book will tell you.” Sorens suggests, “Of particular value in the discussion of story formation is the application of goals to the formation of dramatic structure. If designed with this structure in mind, goals can form the pillars of a sandbox game's dynamically generated stories: incitement, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement.” Salen and Zimmerman also point out this connection, “One fundamental building block of narrative game design is the goal of a game. Goals not only help players judge their progress through a game (how close they are to winning) but also guide players in understanding the significance of their actions within a narrative context… The goal describes the nature of player interaction within a narrative context, making the interaction meaningful.”
Thus, the ideal form of narrative in games is a story driven by goals. These goals form the basis for plot kernels and satellites. The goals are then defined by missions, submissions and atomic challenges. Therefore in order to integrate story structure and game, story must be in alignment with goals. There are certainly aesthetic values to story in game (to create immersion, to help the artists create an environment which tells the story and is believable) but what is key here is that the narrative’s integration into the game’s mechanics and dynamics, not just aesthetics. The result is that the story does not seem patched onto the game, but integrated deeply within it, and if done well the story may almost seem invisible. In fact, games that often win story awards seem to follow this principle better than those that do not (such as Bio Shock and Half Life2), and the irony is that many players are left saying “story, what story?” Ken Levine, lead designer of Bio Shock, had this to say, "What are you going about in Bio Shock—act 1, find the sub and get out. Well, the sub gets blown up. So you go find and kill Ryan…If you stop Indiana Jones in any scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and ask him what he's doing, it's 'Looking for the Ark'." This is goal driven narrative. It is interesting to note what Levine has to say about game story in general, because I think it hits at the heart of the problem of the common misunderstanding of the proper use of discourse in games— “I'm not really a fan of game story. The first big secret is, the bad news is for storytellers is that nobody cares about your stupid story... no matter how detailed or lovingly you craft it.” This apparent paradox comes from a designer who really understood that narrative has to be integrated into a game in an invisible sense. He trusted his own instincts and threw out the notion that other forms of discourse from film and traditional narrative must be imposed into game (“Levine thinks that non-interactive cut scenes are dead.” ).
The story ideally will be used to inform the player of something about his goals, or better yet, be crafted in such a way as to help the player define his own goals. An example is in Half Life 2, where the player has no weapon and must suffer through an oppressive, bleak, alien controlled setting. By the time the player gets a gun, he understands entirely what he wants to do. He has seen the tower, understood that there is an underground resistance movement who will help. These are satellites that direct the player towards the kernels and the story ending. In Half Life 2 however, the story is basically linear and does not contain multiple endings or even multiple paths to the same ending, other than failure to complete the overall goal.
By drawing several key parallels between the structure and components of games, interactivity and narrative, a foundation is laid for integration into a unified system. The Events occur in story to create plots in the form of actions and happenings; interactivity deals with internal and external events; finally, games have events in the form of missions, sub-missions, atomic challenges and rewards. All three use existents in various forms such as characters, props, settings and story-worlds. Finally, goals in games tie all these events together and give them purpose. The following table illustrates the parallels in all structures:
| Narrative principle | Interactivity principle | Game Goals |
| Events | Substory, Internal and External Events | Missions and Sub Missions |
| Actions (character as effector) | Closely balanced decisions, Choice molecules | Atomic Challenges |
| Happenings | Choices available to the user, Current state of system | Quest Rewards |
| Existents | Objects | Objects |
| Characters | Actors | Player, NPC |
| Setting | Story-world, Interactive System | Game World |
| Substance of Content | Context | Game models and props |