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A New Stab at Interactive Fiction
pamar writes "Dr Dobbs Journal interviews Chris Crawford, the noted game designer, about a new direction for interactive fiction. In the interview, he talks of his new stab at Interactive Fiction, and mentions Storytron, his new company which he hopes will make interactive fiction easier to write, not only for games, but for complex social interactions in general."
Quite a creative venture, but who knows how it'll end.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Here's the question though. Is fiction really ment to be interactive? Or is fiction the journey the author leads you on?
.. will still be not allowing the player to think out of the box. You're still going to have a finite number of solutions to a problem.
There is still the problem of brittleness which this verb based approach WILL suffer from. Each verb represents a concept and unless you allow concepts to overlap (probably using fuzzy logic) you will end up with situations where the mapping of the user input does not match the preprogrammed verbs properly. Basically he's programming points on a line where the computer knows what to do instead of creating a smooth continuum where the computer can compute the probability of what you meant. Then as the number of verbs grow the complexity of the system increases exponentially so you need some sort of culling algorithm (maybe as simple as a list of synonyms) to reduce the choices to something that more closely fits the preprogrammed responses.
People smarter than you and I have been working on open-ended AI for a long time and there's still no solution yet so I wouldn't get my hopes up too high for this program.
Shh.
The limitations of these languages have generally always been with the developer not in the chosen language, so I'm a little unclear how this will make inherently more immersive games. I'm not even sure it looks easier to use (this is a little unfair as I'm judging on screenshots), but the language 'Inform' has made leaps forward in this area with a natrual language system. Or designers can use 3rd party GUI tools to assist with construction in many of the IF languages. I'm skeptical of how this will compete with the games developed with other languages and made freely accessiable in the IF archive.
It appears that in the article he is using the term "Interactive Storytelling" to mean what is more commonly called "Interactive Fiction".
Basically.. it's text based adventure games. They stopped being commercially produced about 20 years ago. However, due to the ease of creating them, there are many freeware games out there. If you're really interested in seeing what the big deal is about, I'd suggest giving Zork a spin -- it has aged rather gracefully.
The article is frustratingly vague, but it basically seems to be about making it easier to produce better interactive fiction. While IF is currently easy to put out, it tends to be pretty bad due to horrid language parsing.
This doesn't compete with Inform, TADS, or any of the narrative languages, at least in a meaningful way. As best I can tell, this approach doesn't even allow for a traditional guided narrative at all.
You have an initial setup (there's your bit of narrative). You have Stages, Verbs, Actors with Inclinations (personality), and Roles (which are sets of reactions).
You, the player, and the Actors can all perform Verbs. Performing a Verb on an Actor causes a reaction, defined by a Role assigned to the Actor. Actors semi-autonomously react, within their Roles, by performing Verbs on you and the other Actors. The Verbs they pick are constrained by the Role, and weighted by the Actor's Inclinations. Actors also choose to wander between Stages according to Inclinations, which increases or decreases the possibility that two actors meet. The important bit is that all of this is cyclic. If I do something to Actor A, Actor A may react by doing something to Actor B, who in turn reacts...etc. Or Actor B may just have -witnessed- what I did to Actor A, and then goes off and gossips to Actor C, who...etc.
So, basically, any story is emergent. You define Actors, Stages, Verbs, Inclinations, and Roles, so as to guide the Storyworld towards a particular type of theme, but from there, you (the architect) don't have very granular control. I suppose you could program an Actor as the MoverAndShaker, whose agenda (through some pretty absolute Inclinations and Roles) is basically to wander through the Storyworld and provoke people in the direction you want.
In any case, note that this type of storytelling can be very successful. Facade works much this way.
It's a really interesting setup. In its current form, I'm not sure how successful it be for game-authoring, if only because the game interface seems to be Actors' talking heads plus a diagrammed language. It's pretty obscure for any sort of casual player. But as a core technology and an authoring system, I think there are terrific possibilities for this. I'd be especially interested in a hybrid between this and traditional guided narrative.
Front-page news: yet another pretentious, masturbatory work-product from Chris Crawford, founder and charter member of the "Yeah, but what have you done since 1989?" school of game design.
Buried in Games section: news of the 2006 Interactive Fiction Competition, where real games are available for downloading, playing, and scoring, with a $400 first prize at stake.
Assuming the 2006 Competition follows the usual pattern, many of these IF games will suck. Some will be OK. One or two will be extremely well-done. And one or two may, in the Infocom tradition, be the kind you remember for the rest of your life. What they will all have in common is that they're actual games, not just Crawfordian theoretical sequels to earlier theories.
The basic problem with interactive fiction is the interactive part... :-)
A player is extremely unlikely to make the choices and take the actions that lead to a compelling story.
They won't make the mistakes that lead to King Lear or Hamlet to their tragic ends.
They won't make the choices that take Luke Skywalker to defeating the death star (not if they have real choices that affect the storyline)
A good story takes the reader through a series of psychological stages resulting from the characters making choices a player is unlikely to make. (they just look up the "right" answer on the net...)
I would be more convinced if Crawford had a single example: mockup, text, an animated video - anything - that demonstrated how a working game would play in a (even a 15-minute) gaming session.
I don't even want a working system at this point - show me a walkthrough so we can get an idea of what game play would be. (it would be nice it that doesn't require the strong AI problem to be solved first as well:-)
Sort of. I'm sort of distilling this from his whole "comparisons with existing technologies" riff on the Overview, but here goes:
Interactive Fiction is primarily Fiction--that is, a semi-fixed story. It has multiple detours (and perhaps even multiple endings) based on choices you make, but a start, middle, and finish was envisioned before you got there. The primary craft in Interactive Fiction is to hide that from the player, such that they believe they have a large effect on what's going on. In fact, you've artfully constrained the number of possibilities, via the verb and object list usually, such that they actually have a relatively small effect. With some exceptions, the plot resolution is the primary attraction, providing a carrot to draw you through the interactions. In especially well-crafted ones, the interactions themselves are equally entertaining.
Interactive Storytelling is primarily Interactive, with a largely un-fixed story. You and the computer interact to make the story together (the Storytelling part). The craft in Interactive Storytelling is in defining and weighting the dramatic elements (Actors, Stages, Inclinations, etc.) such that the stories that emerge will be interesting more often than not. The primary attraction is in the spontaneity of the interaction, as well as exploring the range of stories that can emerge from different interactions. To use a science-fiction reference, it's like a very limited version of a Holodeck vacation.
If the box is big enough, then you don't need to think outside it to have truly interesting experiences. Chris is building a bigger box...
Isn't an interactive story basically a 1 player RPG? I mean interactive fiction is basically an RPG but with more depth to the written narrative. Isn't it?
And the thing that keeps tabletop RPGs alive is the games master. or DM or whatever the particular set of rules call him or her. That's your storytron right there: a human mind that can generate new narrative on the fly in response to the 'reader's initiative.
Unless storytron is an AI that can take the best from human GMs, human authors and Game Engines, then it's nothing to write home about. Otherwise, the key to interactive fiction lies in using the existing techniques available ('foldback') in the best way. The same way a good game designer will make the player feel that he's using his initiative when really he's being subtly guided, or in giving the player short bursts of freedom while the overarching story is on rails.
1. First, there are always skeptics and naysayers who have disparaging things to say about the Storytron technology. Some of this is due to the fact that my often harsh criticisms of the games biz have antagonized many people. That's OK -- but I just want to advise other readers that some portion of the negative comments are a response to my comments about the games industry, not a response to the Storytron technology itself.
2. Second, I remind everybody that Storytron technology is exceedingly complex, largely because narrative is exceedingly complex. I have spent years trying to trim it down to the absolute minimum required to do the job, but that absolute minimum is still overwhelming to beginners.
3. I'm always surprised by the comments along the lines of "How does this differ from Technology X?" All I can say in answer to such questions is "read the documentation". Storytron technology is so utterly different from role-playing, MUDs, interactive fiction, and other technologies that it's difficult to know how to begin to answer such a question. It's rather like somebody asking you the difference between a spreadsheet and a word processor. Well, yes, they do both allow you to set fonts. They both allow you to create tables. They both allow you to print out documents. But they are so completely different in form and purpose that it's a waste of time trying to come up with a list of differences. The easiest way to differentiate Storytron from the other stuff is to cite its purpose: to provide genuine, honest-to-gum interactive storytelling. (See next point)
4. A common question (already offered here) is, "What is interactive storytelling, anyway?" If you attempt to answer this question by comparing it to other forms, you get confusion. Interactive storytelling cannot be described as "just like a game, only..." or "kinda like interactive fiction, except..." This approach always yields even more confusion. I haven't spent 14 years re-inventing the wheel -- this thing really is profoundly different from other stuff out there. The closest to it is Facade -- and Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas will be quick to point out the many, many differences between Storytron and Facade.
It's not a story, it's storytelling, and the difference between the two is profound -- and confusing. A story is noun or data; storytelling is verb or process. That's why there's not a plot in it; only stories can have plots. Storytelling does not intrinsically include plot. Think of it this way: the difference between story and storytelling is analogous to the difference between a cake and cooking. A cake can have texture, but cooking doesn't have texture. Texture is a consequence of cooking, but not a component of cooking. In the same way, plot is a consequence of storytelling, but not a component of storytelling.
So what is it? As we have built it, interactive storytelling puts the player in the role of protagonist in a dramatically rich environment, and then permits the player to interact with other actors in a dramatically rich fashion. The size of the verb vocabulary is what makes it so different; Storytron can provide thousands of verbs. No more just picking things up, using them, destroying them, and so forth. Most of the verbs provide interaction with PEOPLE, not THINGS. We already have about 80 verbs (few of which are fleshed out, though) and intend to have hundreds by the time we release the technology.
Anyway, if you want to learn more, go to the website.
He rambles on about how modern games are just copies of old games, and that everything being done in game design today is irrelevant. No one in the game industry respects him anymore. He's alienated himself from the entire industry by going a different direction and insulting those not on his path. I have no problem with him persuing interactive storytelling, but I have a big problem with him calling all games that aren't interactive stories worthless, or "irrelevant." He did a great thing by creating the GDC, but got kicked out when he started to redefine games as limited to "interactive stories."
You should check out some more modern games. The form has come a long way in the almost 30 years since Zork.
http://www.brasslantern.org/
http://www.ifcomp.org