Part 1: What is StoryGUIDE?
The integration of story into video games has become a somewhat controversial topic in the video game industry. Too much story and players get bored or frustrated with gameplay that is constantly being interrupted; not enough story and the game becomes a dry exercise in mechanics. Certainly, a model that aids game designers in properly integrating story into games with predictable results would be quite useful. But where to begin? As with all things which have been translated to the digital world, it is useful to seek out examples in the analog world and create or refer to analog prototypes. Almost every video game has a parallel in the analog world whose mechanics have been closely examined and tested, whether the designers are aware of these foundations or not. Most game designers are aware of the roots in tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, and the ‘tabletop’ environment is often seen as the Holy Grail of interactive storytelling, for it allows a truly open ended story that can change at any time in response to the decisions and actions of the players. Yet it is this very open-ended quality that has made discerning any real computer based model for interactive story-telling a daunting and nearly elusive task.
There is however another area of interactive storytelling that has been curiously overlooked in any detail by authors seeking a workable model—the genre of Live Action Role-Playing games (LARPs for short). This is probably due to its perceived lack of mainstream success and the fact that it represents such a niche market that no one seriously considers it worth examination. Yet it is in LARPs that interactive storytellers have been systematically hammering away at the problems of combining story and game for over 30 years . There are now hundreds of organizations played internationally, with thousands of participants. Many of them run multiple chapters, such as NERO International (New England Roleplaying Organization) which had over 50 chapters recorded in 2005.
LARPs are in many ways the analog predecessor to Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). The closest models seen in the digital world were MUDs (multi-user dungeons) as far back as the first MUD created in 1978 by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at Essex University . When MMORPGs first appeared, it seemed only a logical and anticipated next step to those already involved in LARPs and MUDs. The results, though exciting, were somewhat disappointing on the narrative level for those LARP players who were used to the more developed, interactive and adaptive storyworld. I myself watched as the online games like Everquest wrestled with all the same problems that LARPs had been dealing with for years: player versus player combat, ‘griefing’ and ‘respawning’ problems, the dynamics of player economies, game-wide scheduled events, and group isolated questing (now called “instances”). If any of these designers had studied LARPs (and Kudos to those who did), they may have saved themselves a lot of time and money instead of completely re-inventing the wheel.
So what is it that makes a LARP interactive storytelling model better than a tabletop model for examination? The answer is that in a tabletop game, the story is run for only a small group under the authorship and control of a Game Master—a single person who may very easily change the story with little logistical implication, save perhaps for a good weekend of writing. Some Game Masters never even go that far, running an entirely improvised, open ended story. LARPs are run by groups of people, called Plot Committees, Storytellers, Entertainers and other similar names. These groups quickly learned that any consistent, internally-logical and extensible story required coordination and communication in order to execute. This led to individual games generating their own models for storytelling on a massive level, in some cases for well over 100 players. For my own company, Legynds, I developed a method I called Storyline Charting. It is this method that served as inspiration for the design model I call StoryGUIDE.