interactive storytelling
DESCRIPTION
Interactive Storytelling Presentation for RPG class at UTDTRANSCRIPT
COLLABORATIVE STORYTELLING
OR
“How to gamejack for fun and profit!”
The term was allegedly coined by veteran game designer Chris Crawford, a main proponent and developer and creator of “storytron.com” who defines interactive storytelling as:
"a form of interactive entertainment in which the player plays the role of the protagonist in a dramatically rich environment."
INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING
(NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH…)
INTERACTIVE FICTION
Democracy: Fiction or Non-Fiction?
How reliable are the masses?
"Ask 100 people to answer a question or solve a problem and the average answer will often be at least as good as the answer of the smartest member. With most things, the average is mediocrity," but, "with decision-making, it’s often excellence... as if we’ve been programmed to be collectively smart."
-James Surowiecki“The Wisdom of Crowds”
THEN: Fireside Stories The lost art of the Bard…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L7VTH8ii_8
[Greek] poems followed a strict meter – dactylic hexameter – 18 syllables per line with special stress. They were highly formulaic, including epithets (“gray-eyed goddess Athena”), familiar scenes (banquets, funerals), and traditional stories (the Trojan War). What literary scholars discovered is that these rigid structures permitted Homer and other bards the ability to deliver epic poetry in dactylic hexameter while composing in real time during a recital performance! Even as these formulae enabled composition, they also constrained innovation; as a result, these formulae effectively ensured that the content of the poems changed only minimally across generations.
http://wisdomtools.com/documents/HCII2005-Siegel-final4.pdf
NOW: Self-Publishing
http://www.thisisby.us/
http://www.webook.com/
http://www.lulu.com/
RPGs
Role Play
or “Roll” Play?
Shared Authoring
“Y.A.R.N”: http://cheats.gamespy.com/web-games/yarn-gamespy/
http://www.woodenboat.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-48628.html
http://rootclip.com/
“Secrets of Interactive Storytelling” By Ernest W. Adams
(No longer available online – retrieved via google cache from www.next-gen.biz
Granularity refers to the frequency with which a game switches back and forth between interactive material and narrative, non-interactive material. A game like StarCraft has large granularity. You play a whole mission, lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to a couple of hours, before you get any more story.
STRONGLY RELATED: http://www.designersnotebook.com/Lectures/Interactive_Narratives_Revisit/body_interactive_narratives_revisit.htm
Linear Stories
Story with either with large granularity (StarCraft) or small granularity (Half-Life). The story is on a rail. Nothing the player does can change the future. He can end the game prematurely by losing, but that’s all. The story only has one ending.
“Secrets of Interactive Storytelling” By Ernest W. Adams
Branching Stories In these, the player's decisions, or sometimes his
skill at overcoming challenges, determines how the plot line branches. The more frequently this occurs, and the more options he has at each branch point, the more material the designer has to create. The story can have multiple endings. The classic example was Wing Commander III, a large-granularity game whose plot lines branched depending on how well you did at the combat missions you flew.
“Secrets of Interactive Storytelling” By Ernest W. Adams
Foldback / Multilinear Stories
The story branches out for a while, but eventually it returns to an inevitable event that the player has to pass through no matter what. Then it branches again, before folding back to another inevitable event. This is the traditional adventure game structure, and they usually have only one ending.
“Secrets of Interactive Storytelling” By Ernest W. Adams
Linear Stories W/ Optional Side Quests
The RPG solution. The overall quest is linear, but in the meantime the player has the option to take a ton of side quests—subplots, if you like—to build up his stats enough to let him take on the main challenge. He can usually abandon a side quest without penalty if he wants to.
“Secrets of Interactive Storytelling” By Ernest W. Adams
Emergent StoriesThis means stories that arise out of the core mechanics of the game, without any narrative (non-interactive) elements or formal organization. The story is supposed to "just happen."
Unfortunately, there aren’t many examples of this. People point to The Sims, but I see The Sims as more of a story-generation tool than a story-telling game. Players like to make up stories about their Sims, but the players don’t really feel as if they’re participating as a character themselves. The only game I’ve ever seen that felt as if it really generated emergent stories was one called King of Dragon Pass, which used a database of characters and a database of character-agnostic situations to generate a story-like sequence of events. It would mix and match the characters and the situations to produce new outcomes.
“Secrets of Interactive Storytelling” By Ernest W. Adams
(AND IN CONCLUSION…)
EMERGENT PROPERTIES
Along with “Collaborative Storytelling,” is one of Dave Szulborski’s proposed “Elements of ARG,” it can be defined as:
“The secondary or unexpected attributes beyond game’s main stated intent. While not technically an element of traditional games, emergent properties are still important in all good games and game design.”