-TimK

This is part 2 of “Anatomy of a Story Game”.

This week, we’ll complete the basic story design and discuss some implementation issues in various media.

A story state-diagram

A state diagram is something used in software engineering to design a state machine. We’re going to use one to design an interactive story. That’s a lot of 25-cent verbiage, but the concept is simple. We’re simply going to draw out the possible plots of our story.

Story state-diagram (PDF file)

In part 1, I wrote out a flash-fiction story. As a very short story, it has only a few opportunities for interactivity, but it does have a few. I started by writing the story in sections, similarly to the way you might write summaries of the sections of a novel on index cards so that you can arrange them visually and see the story flow, so that you can plan your novel.

In this case, we’re doing something similar, based on the same idea, but with a slightly different use of the idea. I’ve written out each of the player-events in the story (or summaries of them) and arranged them into a state diagram.

This state diagram represents an abstract view of the story. It does not necessarily correspond one-to-one with entities in the virtual world or narrative. Events, for example, include only things that the player does that actually move the story forward. Other things the player may do in a game, such as traveling back and forth through the game’s virtual world, do not necessarily generate story events and may not appear on this diagram. This state diagram is only an organizational tool to help us visualize the story.

States

In the diagram, each rounded rectangle is a state. A state is as if you were watching the story on a video tape and you hit the pause button. That frozen point in the plot is the state described inside each rounded rectangle. This is the point at which the player must decide what to do next, in order to progress the plot.

In our story, since it’s being written as a hypertext “choose your own adventure” type of story, the states themselves have no physical form. They simply represent the point to which you’ve read, where you’ve put the bookmark before deciding what to do next.

In interactive fiction and graphical adventure games, the player navigates through a virtual world, interacting with that world, manipulating objects in that world. In this kind of game, a story state may represent the state of various objects or characters in the world. For example, in a Myst-style puzzle-solving game, you might have a locked door. Before you discover the lock combination, the door is closed. That’s one state: “closed door.” After you unlock the door and open it, you’ve moved the story to a new state: “open door.”

Events

Each arrow in the diagram is a player event, something the player can do to push the plot along. Using the video-tape metaphor, this is the time during which we’re actually playing the tape, inbetween pauses, inbetween states. Events move the story from one state to the next.

In a hypertext interactive story, events correspond to passages that the user can read. These are the sections of narrative that I previously wrote. And you can see that the arrows are labelled with the headings of the narrative passages from part 1.

In interactive fiction and graphical adventure games, events usually correspond to cut-scenes. In the locked-door example above, when we unlock the door, we might watch a cut-scene showing the door open, after which time whenever we visit the room with the door, it will remain open.

Choices

During the plot, our character Martin (and thus the player) may face choices. Depending on which path he chooses, the plot will take a different path.

For example, after he asks Jane about the missing book, and Jane feels as though he’s accusing her, he can choose to state his accusation straight-out, or he can choose to backpedal. This story is so simple, each choice represents only a small diversion. But you could make the difference much more involved.

Concurrent states

Immediately after the introduction, denoted by the arrow coming from the “start” of the diagram, the story splits into two story threads. In one thread, Martin questions the guests from his dinner party in order to clue in on who might have misplaced or stolen his book. In the other thread, he searches his apartment, in case someone just misplaced the book, maybe put it on the wrong shelf or something.

These two threads happen independently, as shown in the diagram. At any time, both plot threads will be in force, and one state from each will be active. These are called concurrent states.

Again, this is a very simply story, with only two major sections, each of which has only two concurrent states. Typically, an adventure game will have at least three sections, each with at least three concurrent states, plus a “boss” sequence at the end (which this story also has).

Choices based on state

In the second part of the story, after Martin tries to trap Jane, the story goes one of two ways, depending on whether Martin had previously found the book. Whether Martin had found the book is part of the other story thread. So one concurrent state can effect choices made from other states.

This happens more than is actually shown on the diagram. I’ve simplified the diagram to make it more manageable. For example, in the first part of the story, when Martin talks to Jane, Pat, and Dory, he might have slightly different conversations depending on whether he had searched his apartment first and failed to find the book. This will affect the narrative, but not where the arrows point. If we were to draw this on the state diagram, it would be represented by a pair of arrows, each going between the same two states, but each with a different condition on it.

If you write such a story as a book or a simple web page, the number of pages you need to write quickly balloons, because each page could have multiple versions, depending on how many concurrent states you need to take into account. (The number of possible variations is 2^n-t, where n is the number of rounded rectangles in the other story threads and t is the number of other story threads. So if you had three threads total, each with three states, each thread has 2 “other threads,” which each have 3 states, and the number of variations is 2^6-2=16 possible variations.)

Fortunately, if you can write any software at all, you can get the computer to handle the variations by generating them on-the-fly. This is what I will do with this story. I’m still finishing up the implementation, but I’ll post it later this week.

What are story games, and how do they differ from other games? What about adventure games and interactive fiction? What are some of the issues that arise when writing story games?

This is the first part of two episodes that explain story games and how to write them.

What is a story game?

A story game is a game in which the stoy drives the game, rather than the gameplay driving the game. In general, if you can take the story out of the game without losing the game, it’s not a story game. But if the story is so tightly integrated into the game that you’d have to change the shape of the gameplay in order to take the story out, that’s a story game.

To design a story game, tell a story, but let the player cause story events. Make the story interactive. Traditionally, this is done with an external conflict. The things that the character needs to do to resolve the external conflict, turn these into puzzles for the player to solve. This is why adventure games are commonly detective or science-fiction stories.

Adventure games usually don’t have strong character-based stories, though there’s no conceptual reason why they can’t. In future episodes, I’d like to explore variations that make for strong character-based story games.

What’s the difference between an adventure game and a story game? Some adventure gamers will tell you that the puzzles are central to an adventure game. Others will tell you the story is central. Many games appeal to both of these perspectives by offering strong puzzle-based gameplay with a tightly integrated, driving story. But by “story game,” I mean to refer to any story-driven game, whether it has puzzle elements or not, and whether or not it has other gameplay elements.

At pinheadgames.com, you can play good, short, graphical story-based Flash adventure games, on-line for free. In particular, check out The Goat in the Grey Fedora, a humorous detective story in a film-noir style.

Plot branches

… or, a maze of twisty passages, all alike.

You have to give the player choices as to which plot-branch to take the story down. Otherwise, he feels led around by the nose, and this can destroy the illusion of reality. However, you really only have to make the player believe he’s choosing which way the story goes. He may just be choosing the order in which events are told, but not how they come together. Sanitarium did this pretty well.

These plot-branches can multiply exponentially, like rabbits. This can make the stories very complex. But we can manage this complexity by writing the story as multiple story threads. Each story thread proceeds independently as events affect it. However, story threads can spawn, join, and feed into other story threads. So they are independent, but related.

Think of how you might plot a novel. One common method is to write a summary of each part of each subplot on an index card, then lay out the index cards in story threads, so you can see how they go together. This is the same thing we do when designing a story game, except that we also take into account alternate storylines, where the player chooses one path or another, but not both.

Some story games have multiple alternative endings. I prefer a story with one good ending, rather than a story with multiple not-so-good endings. I first noticed this playing The Pandora Directive, which has a number of endings, depending on what you make the hero do and say. Whenever I played it, I’d Google for a walkthrough, a cheat, that would tell me at the critical stages exactly what I should do to get the ending I wanted. I did not consider this cheating, since I was not playing for the gameplay, but rather for the story.

The player is your co-author

A story games greatest strength is also its greatest liability. The player is taking part, indirectly, in the writing process.

As the author of the game, you must anticipate what the player will be thinking and what he will want to do, and you have to give him the ability to do it, or at least to try them, within the rules of the game. Otherwise, the player will feel like the environment is unrealistic, and the game will interfere with his suspension of disbelief.

Also, the player will tend to make mistakes beginning writers make. He’ll want all protagonists to be copies of himself. And he’ll go out of his way not to hurt the protagonist. Of course, writers know that you have to put your characters through hell, no matter how much you love them, in order for them to triumph over it. But the player isn’t going to want to do this, unless you give him a compelling reason or force hell on the character.

A sample story game

This is the beginning of a design to a sample story game, a mystery. I’m starting with rough story snippets, each of which corresponds to one of the index cards you might use to plot a novel. This doesn’t represent the whole story, and they aren’t all arranged in order. Also, some of these need to be tweaked, depending on which alternative the player chose earlier in the story.

Next week, I’ll enhance the design. I also hope to post a JavaScript or HTML version of the game, like an electronic “choose your own adventure” novel, just to demonstrate how this can work.

Part 2

Here is Part 2.

The reason avid gamers say games aren’t movies is because they don’t want them to be. For them, the story is just an add-on to the gameplay. That’s fine if you’re into gameplay. But some of us prefer something more meaningful, more engaging.

I’ve never loved a game that only offered me gameplay. In fact, I’ve loved games that offered only mediocre gameplay. Because gameplay is not where it’s at. The core of a great game is its story, and the gameplay is only there to serve the story, to draw me further into the story. This is the legacy of the story game.

Unfortunately, storytelling is largely a lost art in games. There may be one or two last geniuses, like Tim Schafer, who understand that a story game revolves around its story and are able to put this idea into practice. First-class gameplay is a great asset, as it helps to build the story, just like first-class cinematography does in film, but neither will make up for a deficient story. Actually, a great story game has first-class cinematography, too.

Great games have more in common with movies than these gamers of limited vision would have us admit. But there is so much we can do to build stories using games, so much we haven’t tried, so many variations we have not yet perfected. Psychonauts is just one step in the journey between the traditional story-adventure and a new breed of story game, full of creativity and variation. Interactive fiction authors have been working on many of these ideas, too, as story games are literature.

I see a revival. Bring back the story game!

Someone told me that a great game can lack a story. He cited Tetris as one such great game. But for me, Tetris was not a great game. It was a fun game, true. I remember in college spending hours playing it, until I saw blocks fall from the sky and almost panicked because I couldn’t stack them up in time. All night long, throughout my dreams, I would play Tetris, stacking blocks, lining the up, nice and neat, like Monk. But that lasted only a day or two. Then I went away and never thought of it again. Oh, occasionally, I still do play Tetris, or solitaire, or breakout, or Mario Kart, or Crash Bandicoot, or some other fun game. But I don’t reminisce about falling blocks or any of those other things. I do reminisce about being Manny Calavera, or Tex Murphy, or Ben of the Polecats. And I dream of doing it again someday soon.

On the other side, when I read on one of the adventure boards a post gushing that The Longest Journey was the greatest game ever, I felt a burning inside. I pulled together some reviews of mine from 6 years ago and posted that it was okay, but not one of the best, because it has some fundamental story flaws. I expected as usual that no one would understand where I was coming from. But to my surprise, post after post appeared saying, basically, that The Longest Journey was a good game, but not anywhere near as good as Grim Fandango.

(I do not, by the way, reminisce about being April Ryan. But I do reminisce about escaping from exile in Myst III.)

There’s something deep within the human psyche that desires to experience pain and triumph, and it can do so through stories. A great story is addictive. But that’s another post.

-TimK