Rubes commented on my post about participatory storytelling yesterday:
It’s almost like those 3D stereograms, the color patterns that contain 3D images. You know there’s something there, but you can’t see it; you can stare and stare at it but only after you’ve looked at it longer than you thought necessary does an image finally come into focus. I’ve been staring at interactive storytelling for some time now, and I’m pretty sure something is there, but it’s just not coming into focus.
Thanks for you feedback, Rubes. It helps me know where I need to clarify when I have (multiple) someone(s) to talk to.
I think it’s important to remember that there are varying levels of feedback in a participatory storytelling system. It’s even possible to have a level of it with books. Take Rowling’s Potter series, for example. It is clear that the fan response to the early books, the creation of the movies, and the fan response to the movies all influenced her later books. Not the plot necessarily, but certainly her writing style and expository choices.
For a more convoluted example, dig into the Star Wars franchise and calculate how many of the creative people now responsible for producing official Star Wars stories watched the original movie as a pre-teen. If that’s not a participatory storytelling juggernaut, I don’t know what is.
As far as video games go, consider MMO balancing, game patches and content add-on packs. Consider fan mods that become official products. Consider game sequels, particularly game sequels developed by different studios. These are all part of a participatory storytelling model.
Of course, it’s a largely unintentional implementation of the model. The storyteller, in most cases, did not set out to start a two-way conversation with the audience. They intended a one way conversation in which the audience was a passive recipient. But audiences, particularly audiences energized by a compelling fabula, aren’t passive–they are extraordinarily active. Eventually, like our our inevitable discovery of zero point gravity, they begin to force the water back upriver.
But what if a storyteller set out to have a conversation? What if they treated their plot, not as a sacrosanct structure that predetermined outcome, but a modular structure with an unclear ending? What if the story elements weren’t finite elements used to place interstitial cut scenes (in engine, or out), but assets of the engine itself, like a 3d model or audio effect?
Ted: No one has talked to the angry fisherman in months.
Carol: Let’s give him a rifle and a death in the family to avenge.
Consider the type of player metrics offered by companies such as Darius Kazemi’s Orbus Gameworks and that other company… the one with the digital distribution platform–oh right, Valve. These metrics show more than just what hardware your audience is using, they show you where players aren’t going in your world, where player’s die, where players stop to go AFK, etc. Our technology is rapidly reaching the point where game engines will be built to allow dynamic alteration of assets based upon such feedback. If your story components are assets and you’re collecting live metrics about your audience’s choices as they progress through the game… what do you think you’ll have? That’s right–participatory storytelling.
August 22, 2008 at 8:29 am
SiN Episodes featured some sophisticated statistics tracking. In the first episode it was mainly used to adjust the difficult level of the game, but the type of data they tracked included not only combat based elements but also ratings for exploration and pacing.
Before the project was abandoned these statistics were going to be used to aid the design of future episodes.
August 22, 2008 at 8:36 am
Yeah, I find myself quite drawn to aspect of Steam as a distribution platform. I only wish it were truly cross platform.
August 22, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Hmm. Still staring, although the image might be a wee bit clearer.
What I’m reading here, if I understand it correctly, is a description of a form of participatory storytelling that exists at an altitude somewhat higher than the individual story. To use your graphical representation of your model, you portray arrows going to and from each level of the storyteller-story-telling-audience model, but what I’m hearing here is more of a straight line through the four levels from storyteller to audience, and then back again all the way back to storyteller; at that point, the process begins again. So in large part, it sounds like an audience experiences the story (fabula), and the participation comes afterward.
The part where the storyteller sets out to have a conversation is where it starts to break down for me. In that case, the participation occurs during the story, or at least before the story ends. It’s that “interactive storytelling” that confuses me, at least with respect to video games. And this is the kind of thing people seem to be targeting; rather than creating a linear, inevitable experience for players, the idea is to invite and incorporate player participation.
Sounds great, but that’s where I lose the image and have to start staring again.
August 22, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Okay, I think I hear what you’re saying. Let me ramble a bit in response.
First of all, my model exists independently of any particular technology. It therefore must be constructed so that a “pure cycle” model is described as well as a more dynamic model.
What I mean by “pure cycle” model is the type of participatory storytelling possible with traditional media. All of my examples above are “pure cycle” models. A storyteller does their thing, the audience response, outside the medium chosen for the telling, and the storyteller revises in the next iteration or offering.
In a fully dynamic model, the feedback is all submitted within the medium of the telling and adaptations are made by the storyteller within the medium of the telling. No examples of the fully dynamic model exist that I know of–barring sitting down to a RPG session with a GM/storyteller who plays as fast and loose as I do.
What does already exist, I believe, is what you and others refer to as “interactive storytelling.” As far as I’m concerned, interactive storytelling is the sort of gameplay experience you find in Fallout, Knight of the Old Republic, Fable, and Civilization. That is to say, variable ending tellings that afford the audience the ability to interact with a collection of static elements to build any number of pre-determined outcomes.
A fully dynamic participatory storytelling experience will certainly involve a very interactive medium, but the impact of audience choice will run much deeper than what people are shooting for with interactive storytelling.
If you’re imagining this as a single player experience–stop it. It won’t work. Well,there are ways it might work, but I’m not ready to talk about them at this point. In part, because I don’t have the programming chops to do anything other than blow smoke on the topic and in part because it’s more important to me that the underlying principles and concepts of my model are sound before we start dealing with full realized digital solutions based upon my theories.
August 22, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Okay, I’m totally following now.
“If you’re imagining this as a single player experience–stop it. It won’t work. Well,there are ways it might work, but I’m not ready to talk about them at this point.”
That’s pretty much my problem right there. I’m coming at this with an interest almost entirely in single-player games, and I’ve never quite been able to resolve how this applies to that form — at least, beyond the current design of picking and choosing from among a series of pre-determined elements.
I’m really interested in hearing about your ideas about that, though I guess I’ll have to wait.
August 22, 2008 at 5:27 pm
I was also coming at the this from the perspective of a single-player experience, though I agree that the core ideas should be translatable.
August 22, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Single player and community aren’t two ideas that mesh particularly well. What you need to do is provide an experience that has the benefits of a single player game, while leveraging the strengths of a community game.
Hm… when I phrase it that way it seems to lose a lot of the gorilla dust and man-behind-the-curtain-ism that’s kept me from talking about it much in a public space up until now. I’ll be taking the weekend to collect some thoughts. We’ll see where this goes next.
But the next post is going to be (in honor of Justin) a post on the benefits of suboptimal gameplay!
August 22, 2008 at 5:45 pm
I guess I look to community based participatory storytelling as a “proof of concept” for the single player variety. I want both but I imagine it happening first as in a community based form, simply because it allows the storyteller to remain “online” during the entire experience.
Maybe I’m just a misanthrope but I tend towards single players experiences in my games, and my stories. But I look at the digital medium and the current level of interactive storytelling and can’t help thinking there’s so much more potential there.
Sometimes you need people to come at it from different directions, the solution is likely not what either of them expect.
August 23, 2008 at 12:43 am
Justin Keverne: «But I look at the digital medium and the current level of interactive storytelling and can’t help thinking there’s so much more potential there.»
My favorite whipping horse here is Graphical MMOs. MMOs have the greatest opportunities for participatory story-telling and yet Graphical MMOs thus far have only taken a small swath of the available landscape and have only shown a handful of big story-telling moments (things like the Assassinations of Lord British). Just about all of the Graphical MMOs owe their gameplay mechanics and balance to Diku, which was one variant text MUD among many, and Graphical MMOs haven’t really shown much willingness to explore outside of the Diku-space. But there are an amazing spectrum of text worlds, and many are still running today, or at least some spiritual descendant, and some of these have generated fascinating stories. I was/am a fan of the MUSH/MUCK variation which pushed for less mechanical RPG mechanics and more social storytelling. There are Pern MUSHes that have extrapolated beyond the points that Anne McCaffrey seems afraid or unwilling to explore. You can spend months reading the player generated sagas of internecine warfare and backstabbing and intricately complex family trees generated by the various Amber-inspired MUSHes.
Graphical MMOs by comparison are pale shadows of what storytelling can do when players are given the tools of control. It almost seems as if graphical MMO developers are somewhat afraid of giving players any real control… and yet the MMO is the precise space where intricate interactions with your audience to tell amazing stories is not only possible but almost deliciously easy. But then, tread-mills are easy to create than amusement parks…
Several people keep mentioning a preference for single player gaming experiences, but I’m of the belief that we shall see amazing new layers of story experience come directly from (and perhaps only from) multi-player experiences, but we’re not there yet.
August 23, 2008 at 5:35 am
@Max: Have you looked much into Eve Online? It’s a world almost completely build on player controled corporations and alliances. It has resulted in occurances of corporate espionage, large scale inter-system warfare, crime, and assassination for hire.
The developers, CCP Games basically created a virtal world with consistent rules and all behaviour has emmerged solely through player actions.
August 23, 2008 at 1:38 pm
I’ve followed Eve some, Justin. (Although I’ve not actually played it much and the gameplay doesn’t seem quite my thing…) I think it does have some of the best stories of recent MMOs, but it’s an economics sandbox and not a narrative sandbox. The stories come from high level economic plans and actions, as could be expected in any well-shaped economic sandbox, but at the low level Eve sometimes lacks compelling tales and narrative drive, from what I’ve seen. Eve is perhaps the best current example of a developer thinking outside the Diku box, but it still is a long way from where multi-player storytelling might go…
August 26, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Darius, after reading Justin’s comment about SiN, emailed Ken Harward about SiN’s use of metrics and is posting Ken’s answers at Orbus Gameworks.
Metric and Dynamic Difficulty in Ritual’s SiN Episodes, Part 1
Thanks, Darius!
August 27, 2008 at 9:33 am
Hey, *I’m* the one who’s grateful — I have now extended my metrics knowledge.