I was reading Michael Mateas’ and Andrew Stern’s Writing Façade: A Case Study in Procedural Authorship, and came across this quote:
As the granularity of the atomic pieces of story content (e.g., dialogue, emotion and gestural expression) becomes very small, and the procedures to sequence and combine them into a coherent narrative performance become primary to the realization of the experience for the player, the author’s activity shifts from that of a writer of prose into a writer of procedures; that is, into becoming a programmer.
It reminded me of a lecture by the folks at Extra Credits when they were on youtube talking about Video Games and Storytelling:
Particularly interesting is a passage at 4:17, that says:
…writing for an interactive medium is very different from writing for passive media, like novels or film. Writing a linear story for an audience to watch or read is one thing, but managing to write a story for your audience to participate in is another thing entirely. Especially if the audience is stubborn and wants to experience the story on their own terms rather than yours.
It says a lot, especially towards tools. They are significantly harder to create for a story that has no pre-defined structure, and Mathias and Stern express this in their research. A writer simply doesn’t know how to do this. They need a tool to create and link story points, define their importance, link them to other parts of the plot, and many other things that define a well built narrative. Programmers need to help in this front, and code an easy to use, simple program to allow the writers to do this. But it’s not that easy.
Also, they have a great video on Video Games and Choice:
At 2:51, they had this to say:
[Choices] tend to be much harder to fit into games, because giving players too many options expands the size of the game very quickly.
The designers weren’t going to program an entirely different game where you sit around in town all day, sipping coffee and hitting on the local women while reading in the newspaper about what the king’s second choice of hero was up to. You see how just one single choice can lead to an immense workload? Choice can complicate things very quickly.
It’s exponencial. Matheas and Stern state the very same:
Within an encyclopedic design approach, the only way to increase interactivity is to author extraordinary amounts of content by brute force. This strategy has been borne out to be impractical; even the most successful Choose Your Own Adventure books or their digital equivalents, where the plot may vary significantly in response to reader’s choices and be well-formed, necessarily offer an unsatisfyingly short series of infrequent, binary choices in order to avoid a combinatorial explosion of explicitly rendered (pre-written) plot directions. In such an approach, the limited and cumbersome nature of a nonprocedural, encyclopedic approach is exposed.
I wonder how I will tackle these issues once it’s my turn.
I will post the mindmap with notes from this paper soon.
