Tobold's Blog
Monday, July 26, 2010
 
Interactive storytelling

In Bioshock 1 the story starts with you arriving at a strange location, and receiving a request for help by radio, which gets you involved in the story. Later it turns out *SPOILER WARNING* that the guy who asked you for help was actually mind-controlling you with the key-phrase "would you kindly", and your character didn't have any choice whether to follow his request or not. I found that a brilliant plot element, because for once there was an explanation for something we actually experience in many games with a story: We don't get many choices which would really influence the story. Most of the time the main story elements are telling you what to do, and your choices are either to follow the story, or to stop playing. In Bioshock you only get to make a single decision (save or harvest the little sisters), and that decision doesn't change anything in the gameplay, it only affects the game over cutscene. Other games, like Dragon Age: Origins, give you only the decision to make in which order to do the various chapters of the story, and allow you some minor decisions which only affect the chapter you are in, and that in a minor way. Why don't games allow us more decisions that actually affect how the story progresses?

Imagine an interactive story where at the start you are asked to make a first decision, which controls in which of two completely separate and independent branches of the story you end up. Then, a while later, each of the branches would have another decision, again splitting up the story in different branches. It is easy to see that quickly you would get a lot of different possible stories, for example with 10 binary decisions you'd get 1,024 different stories. If all of these were completely different from each other, the game would have immense replay value, but every time you play it through you only see 0.1% of the game. Thus from the point of view of the developers of the game, such a system would be extremely inefficient. You'd need to program a thousand times more code than a linear game, and players certainly wouldn't be willing to pay a thousand times more.

Thus if the ideal decision tree looks like a tree with many branches, the real decision tree of existing games looks like a tree that has been severely pruned by an overactive gardener with a chainsaw. For example a story told by a quest series in a MMORPG only gives you at each step the decision to either accept or reject the next quest. If you reject any of the steps, the story simply stops, and you get no further reward. That being the obviously worse option, people just click accept, often without even reading the quest text. As the story is completely linear and doesn't allow any decisions by the players, the players rationally decide that they don't even need to know the story, but just need the short version of "kill 10 foozles" displayed in their quest tracker.

So if programming a story with lots of decision trees is ineffective, how can we possible arrive at games with interactive story-telling? The answer can be found in the stories that player actually tell about virtual worlds, for example on blogs. Nobody blogs about having helped NPC Farmer Brown with his problem of wolves eating his chickens by killing 10 wolves. Instead players blog about their interaction with other players, good or bad, from generous help from strangers to horrible pickup groups with ninja-looters. The more player interaction a game allows, the more interesting the stories that are told about it, which is why sandbox PvP games produce the most interesting (albeit often least pleasant) stories.

The current design of PvE in MMORPGs is completely static. 5 minutes after killing the wolves for Farmer Brown, the wolves are back, and Farmer Brown gives the same quest to the next player. Thus players have no impact on the virtual world, and their "decision" of whether to help Farmer Brown against the wolves is completely irrelevant and changes nothing. To allow interactive storytelling to happen, decisions need to have consequences. But of course we can't make a game where the decision of the first player to kill the wolves has the consequence that there are no more wolves for the other players to kill, because then there would be no game to play for the other players. The solution therefore must be some sort of dynamic situation with several possible states, for example a state in which farmland is small and beleaguered, and another state in which wildlife has been beaten back and farmland is large. When the wildlife side is strong, Farmer Brown would ask players to kill wolves, but if farmland is strong some druid NPC in the forest would give players quests to plant magical fast-growing trees on the farmland to grow the wildlife again. There could be many dynamic equilibria in such a game, and the decisions of players to help one side or another would actually have an effect on the virtual world, and thus be more memorable. Interactive stories would basically tell themselves, without each possibility having had to be individually programmed.

I do believe that MMORPGs as a genre are moving towards more dynamic PvE worlds, which will allow PvE stories to happen. Warhammer Online made a first step in that direction with public quests, and Guild Wars 2 announced to push that concept further, towards a virtual world which changes, and where the current state of the virtual world determines what adventures there are to do for the players.

The other half of the development is more possibilities for positive player interactions in PvE games. Giving players the possibility to positively affect each others gameplay in a PvE game, instead of the negative interaction already possible in PvP games, makes stories happen. Earlier games actually had some good systems, like the vassal and liege system of Asheron's Call, but those have not received sufficient credit and attention. If done well, systems which reward veteran players for helping new players not only create better player-to-player interaction and stories, but also vastly improve the new player experience of older games, and thus improve new player retention.

If these things happen, MMORPGs developing dynamic worlds influenced by the players, and improving player-to-player interactions, we might arrive at a point where those "massively multiplayer" games really deserve that label and don't play like massively parallel singleplayer games. And interaction between players will make interesting stories appear, without the need for mind-control.
Comments:
Imagine an interactive story where at the start you are asked to make a first decision, which controls in which of two completely separate and independent branches of the story you end up.

It's been done by the brilliant Masq. You can finish the game in 10 minutes. But I've replayed it at least 10 times and every time I replayed it I got a different game and ending.

Creating those ten minutes is very expensive. But it's another way of playing which favors replayability.
 
Isn't Guild Wars 2 more or less trying to do something like this?

I don't know how well they will pull it off, but its one of the few MMOGs I'm bothering to watch right not because of it. We'll see.
 
This is one of the things Alpha Protocol did well.

Unfortunatly the rest isn't that great, but the way the interaction and story was told, and how your actions affected the way the game was played was a welcome change.

It's ok, if the story keeps going as long as you have the feeling that your actions mattered, and made some kind of difference/impact on the world
 
Although I never played it I think Heavy Rain tried to do something more interesting with decision making and create a live, flexible and changing storyline. By accounts it was pretty good.

I don't think we'd ever be able to see something like that in a MMO though, not until we get much better AI anyway. However, I'm not sure it's necessary. After all, we - the players - can perform all of the actions we need. What would be ideal is a way to combine something like a sandbox MMO with real GameMasters who are able to shape lore and story depending on people's actions.
 
Wow Tobold you are limited in thought process. But hey! I'll give you points for trying!

'Decisions'? What are these in games?
You fail to completely understand gaming.
Mario, you can finish the level as little mario. But it was never your decision. It was based on your failure and how you played. Gaming was never about obvious A or B decision like Bioshock tried (and failed at). It was about TRUE interactivity... Something you obviously cannot grasp.

'consequences' for killing wolves?
No, real depth is far more then a simple concept like that. While your factor is a part of it, how about something much more? The NPC ends up ganking you while you are doing it? HA HA! Or one that has actually lied to you about it?
'consequences' for what you do have already been thought up tobold. Why mention ideas/concepts that have existed already for so long?

While I think your motive is correct, your lack of understanding is amazing. Or maybe you just didn't explain yourself correctly?

Fact is, MMORPGs have always tried for what you are asking... Just that all have failed (or given up).

@ Carra
Masq is not truly interactive. A system CAN and WILL be create that will give massive unlimited replay value. The simple fact is, that everyone is going about it the wrong way.

Example Tobold's post. The general idea that I get from him is that he thinks this should be created in a certain setting... e.g. a game mimicking Bioshock. Or from the sounds of it, Alpha Protocol tried it and failed.

No, to obtain this type of system a whole new game style needs to be established. When that does, it will offer interativity like never before, and this goes for replayability as well.
 
"Nobody blogs about having helped NPC Farmer Brown with his problem of wolves eating his chickens by killing 10 wolves."

Guess I been doin' it wrong all these years. Bugger. Ah well, too lates fer ta change now.
 
Fake Gevlon, fake Nils, and now fake Samus?! Woo! I've really made it big time if I'm getting impersonated!
 
Nice post, it's something I've been hoping for in a game for quite some time. I think the real secret is to let the players make the world. So create an 'instance' of a game and let players just play it until they decide to quit or a goal is reached.
 
You say yourself in this post that stories in MMOs are created by players interacting with one another. This "multi-branching the leveling process" that you propose seems to _not_ make the game more interesting, but more solo-ish and exclusionary. It's not about the questing or the PVP match or the raid loot, it's about who you do it with.
 
Colony Wars for PS1 had a branching story system like this, it was awesome. As I recall, you would actually see your progress charted visually at the end of the game, as well as all of the other story branches that you didn't access.
 
This comment has been removed by the author.
 
First things first, you can't have a meaningful discussion of interactive storytelling without first looking at the Interactive Fiction community, that is, where text adventure games retired to.

They often manage to have deeply meaningful decisions, with widely branching (but also often reconverging) storylines. If you want to get a sense for how far anyone's figured out how to take things, they're the ones to look to.

A much less ambitious place to look, but in an actual MMORPG, is the new Star Wars MMO, which gives many quests where you have more then one way of completing it. Although these will likely usually break down to: Lie, persuade or kill. But even still, that gives far more meaningful choices then World of Warcraft gives.
 
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