Interstitial Stories

The initial proposal had posited a series of custom stories, each one tracing some incident during the course of the journey. While I ended up abandoning the journey concept, I retained the concept of the custom stories and developed it into a new idea I called interstitial stories. These are stories with variable parameters that can be used in different contexts. They are not at all the same as cut scenes, which are fixed mini-stories inserted at designated points in a game.

Interstitial stories can be used almost anywhere; cut scenes obey a precise schedule. Interstitial stories serve a number of useful purposes:

  • Providing color with little dirt

  • Enhancing character development

  • Giving the player a different set of challenges

  • Providing feedback

LESSON 63

Evaluate each contemplated feature by its color/dirt ratio.

You probably don't recognize my use of the terms "color" and "dirt"; they're obscure terms from old wargame designs, but they're so useful to game designers today that I still invoke them.

Color is the sense of realism or completeness that improves the sense of immersion. Games people love to add color to their games. "Look, the splashing blood can even get into your gun and make it slippery and harder to use! What realism!" The problem with color is that it always brings a certain amount of dirt with it.

Dirt is created by special rules that the player must commit to memory. Sure, it's more realistic to have the blood splash into your gun and gook it up, but now the player has to remember to stand back from exploding monsters. So the question that game designers must always ask themselves is this: "Does this feature add enough color to make it worth the dirt?" This is what makes interstitial stories such a good feature; they provide tons of color while imposing zero dirt. The color comes from the fact that you're not constrained by the graphical limitations of your game; you can present interstitial stories in text, which can describe anything. There's no dirt because the interstitial story is a one-shot affair. The player experiences the story, makes his response, and then forgets it.

Figure 23.5 shows the screen display for a sample interstitial story.

23.5. Interstitial story.

graphics/23fig05.gif

And here is the source file for this interstitial story:

As you pass by the perishables warehouse, you hear an odd noise emanating from within. Now alert, you can sense eeyal-talk going on inside, and you can immediately tell from the sophistication of the conversation that the speakers must be acolytes. You quietly enter the warehouse and creep about. You catch sight of them down a narrow corridor. It is % and another person whom you can't see, engaged in an animated conversation. You can't pick out their facial expressions or gestures, so the eeyal you're picking up doesn't make much sense. When you hear your name mentioned, you decide that you must find out what they're saying, so you start to creep even closer. You climb on top of some crates and try to crawl over the top, but one crate is weak and breaks underneath you. You, the crate, and some assorted vegetables land together in a heap. You jump up just as % arrives. The other person has run away; you still don't know who it was. % demands to know what you were doing sneaking around spying on $. You reply: \

\

"Er, sorry, I was just investigating a noise. I'll be going now."

D2+dT4-tP% shakes ^ head skeptically and lets you go.

\

"I know you were talking about me. What were you plotting?"

T4-t50E-BD4-dA6-aP% grows furious, shouts at you, and stalks off.

20D-BD4+dP% laughs and says, "You fool, we weren't plotting anything!"

P% says, "Oh, dear, we weren't plotting anything!"

\

"I'm sorry. I couldn't help but overhear my name, and I was curious."

D2+d40-BP% looks unconvinced. "Sure", @ says, and @ walks away.

P% yells, "Get out of here!"

\

"How dare you use that tone of voice with me!"

T4-tD8-dA4-aE40-BP% looks chastised and retreats without saying a word.

P% shouts at you angrily and stalks off.

\

The special symbols such as %, @, and $ are substitution variables that direct the program to substitute the name of another character or his/her appropriate pronouns. This allowed me to use a story with any character. The four paragraphs following the main paragraph are the menu options available to the player. Each of these, in turn, has several possible responses by the other character. The odd text string at the beginning of each response is a calculation of the likelihood that the character will choose that response as well as a calculation of how the player's decision has altered the character's attitude towards the player. The individual characters might be read as keystrokes for a RPN calculator. (If you don't know what an RPN calculator is, don't worry; it's a technical detail that technical people will appreciate and non-technical people really won't care about.) For example, the first such text string is D2+dT4-t. The first four characters (D2+d) mean this:

Load the dominance that the character feels for the player into the accumulator. Now load the number 2. Add. Store the accumulator into the dominance that the character feels for the player.

In other words, add 2 to the character's feeling of dominance over the player. The next command, "T4-t," subtracts 4 from the trust that the character feels for the player.

This primitive system allowed me to program simple calculations directly into each story file, without altering the program code itself.

I also used the stories to provide feedback to the player, and I myself was the character who delivered the feedback. Here's an example, used when the player fails to get down to business with another character:

Suddenly the door flies open. In charges Chris Crawford. "No, no, no! That's not the way I intended you to play this game at all! You've got to mix it up more intensely with the characters! You, %, I taught you better than that! Come on, now, show some FEELING! And you, player, what do you think you're doing anyway? Just kinda messing around in a half-witted way? You're acting like this is some sorta game or some thing! You clod! Don't you realize that this is ART?" He pauses, glaring at the two of you. You both look down at the floor; % scrapes the floor with ^ foot. "All right, people! One more time, with FEELING!" He stalks out, slamming the door behind him. So, are you going to be good? \

\

"Yes, I promise to be good and play well."

" PThank you."

\

"What's going on here?"

" PThat depends on what you want to be going on here."

\

"This guy is really screwy."

" PYou think I'm screwy? I've got your money!"

\

"Go to hell, Crawford!"

" C4PA cloud passes over the sun. The earth shudders."

\

Please note that the final option, in which the player curses me, generates a response "C4." This calculation modifies a key game variable that, in effect, makes it harder for the player to win the game. So there!

In the end, I was able to cook up only some 40-odd interstitial stories. All in all, they definitely improved the game. A few players were a little put off by my appearance in the game, but the great majority took it in the spirit of good fun.

I recommend use of interstitial stories with several restrictions.

  • First, they must not be used at fixed points in the game, like cut scenes. If your purpose is to interweave a fixed story through a game with cut scenes, then you have missed the point of interstitial stories, which are standalone anecdotes. They can be told at different points in the story with different characters. Of course, you are free to narrow their range of applicability to take advantage of context. For example, I wrote several interstitial stories that might appear only after the player had lost in mental combat. Indeed, there were very few interstitial stories that could be told at any time during the game; almost all had some sort of special contextual restrictions.

  • Second, I believe that each interstitial story must be made flexible to apply to a variety of settings, and that this requires the use of text variables such as those I used in Siboot. You can cook up any system you want, so long as you do have a system.

  • Third, interstitial stories must be interactive. Merely dumping some cute little anecdote on the player is a waste of everybody's time; set up some sort of conflict and let the user make a choice. That choice, in turn, must be meaningful; it must affect the outcome of the game. Otherwise, your interstitial story is not genuinely interactive.

LESSON 64

Use interstitial stories to add color and flavor to the game with little dirt.



Chris Crawford on Game Design
Chris Crawford on Game Design
ISBN: 0131460994
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 248

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