Storytelling in a new media world:@ from broadcast to immersion

Dan PinchbeckDepartment of Creative TechnologiesUniversity of Portsmouth

16th March 2006

How do we increase interactivity withoutcompromising the stories we want to tell?

How do we enable audiences to interact with andeven control the stories whilst protecting the core features and the authorial voice?>

Are interactivity and narrative, as has beensuggested, incompatible?

Do we need new forms of storytelling, or new types of story?

ModelsOf narrative and story structure in interactive environments

TechniquesFor maintaining narrative integrity in highly interactive scenarios

ConceptsOr, what is a story anyway?

Models

Linear broadcast

Flow broken – choice of options,correct option re-engages story

Block and Resolve

AVI: Footage from BBCi’s Pyramids – illustration ofblock & resolve interactivity

Branching Structure

AVI: from Deus Ex (Ion Storm 2000): Branch is set-up in non-interactive cutscene. Play then continues up to 2-option branch. Action is stopped again whilst the player chooses an option. Action then continues according to ]the selected branch.

Non-interactive cut-scene progresses story

Interactive, goal-based episode with single exit point

String of Pearls

AVI: From Myst V: End of Ages (Cyanworlds, 2004) – a typical string of pearls cut-scene. Action stops whilst the story is pushed forwards. Typically, this also includes setting up the goals of the following section of action.

More interactivity

Less interactivity

Funnel (or pyramid)

Funnel interactive episodes embedded within string-of-pearls

Often used in combination with branches or enclosed modular branches

Corridor of Affect

Narrative is more or less linear, with no major branches

No cut-scenes and funnel sub-goals with embedded sub-branchescreate illusion of high impact upon overall story

AVI: A narrative sequence from Half Life 2 (Valve, 2004). The player is retains control over movement and observation, so there is no breakfrom the experience of play, whilst the segments serves the same purposeas a non-interactive cut-scene.

Techniques

1. Distributed Narrative

Uses multi–sensory devices, embedded in landscapeand action to build overall narrative:

Devices can be passive, active, dynamic…

Mix of agents, audio, architecture, objects, abstract transmissions.

Central idea is to create sense of immersion instory without disrupting the experience of play.

AVI: Examples of distributed narrative devices from Doom 3 (id 2004). These include a cut-scene; integrated video screens within the action; ‘live’ radiotransmissions during play; in-game avatars; and the PDA device containingemails, video and audio.

AVI: Overlaid radio transmissions in Deus Ex, enabling narrative to bedelivered without disrupting play and manipulating the player’s actionsin real time.

2. Reactive environments

Establish overall narrative as set of conditionsand control deviations from these conditions, i.e. it doesn’t matter how it happens as long as it happens!

Give system power to intervene in action to prevent disruptive events (intervene or accommodate)

Story comprised of elements that can be re–arranged if necessary.

Emergent Narrative Theory (Louchart & Aylett)

Low level (System / procedural constraints)

High Level (Conceptual constraints / management)

User actions

Liquid Narrative(Young)

User actions

Database ofStory elements

Discourse Generator

Intervene

Accomodate

3. Understand player psychology better

How do players ‘read’ the environment?

How are they likely to behave in a givensituation?

Use dramatic techniques, empathy and schema topredict and manipulate behaviour – in otherwords, manage the expectations and outcomesof interactivity.

ICT SEE project

PUSH

PUSH

PUSH

PUSH

PUSH

PUSH

PUSHPULL

PULL

PULL

(Corroborative Detail – Coercive Narrative – Emotional Score)

UoP Obs. Behaviour study

AVI: The sequence from Half Life 2 where players are instructed to ‘pile stuff up’ by an NPC, and subsequently missed a ladder in plain view.

Still image: from Half Life 2, showing different narrative devices, as part of thediscussion about where players appear to get their narrative from(if anywhere…)

Concepts

Stories are codified sequences of events thatyield meaning.

The telling is split from the told (discourseand events)

Fundamentally, it’s the predetermined meaning orExit–state that really counts

So what’s changed?

Environmental and distributed

Robust and dynamic

Supported by complex architecture

Designed from client–end backwards

Expanded Storytelling?

“While writing this chapter in Denmark, I had the chance to visit the great domed cathedral in the old capital city of Roskilde, where seven centuries of Danish royalty lie buried. Standing in the ancient church it became suddenly clear that it is nota building in the modern sense at all. The Domkirke is a many layered storytelling domain…”

Bernard Baars, In the Theater of Consciousness 1997