Tackling the Problem
| Someday, interactive storytelling will surely flower into the mass market of interactive entertainment that games have failed to achieve. The trick to accomplishing this great goal is to make a break with the past. In both marketing terms and design terms, there is no evolutionary path from games to interactive storytelling. The people who pull this off will start with a completely new technology and approach a completely new market. The design break is easy to conceptualize and immensely difficult to build. What is the fundamental component common to both story and interactivity? Answer: choice. Aristotle placed choice at the core of story; choice reveals character. And choice lies at the heart of interactivity; a user makes a choice with a keyboard or mouse, and the computer responds to that choice.
Verbs are the vehicle of choice in the same way that money is the vehicle of wealth. Whenever we make a choice, we are choosing between verbs. We don't choose between Door #1, Door #2, and Door #3; we choose between going through Door #1, going through Door #2, and going through Door #3. We choose between kissing the girl goodnight or shaking her hand goodnight. We choose between clicking this button or scrolling that window. Here's the killer problem in interactive storytelling: We need thousands of verbs. Open up your favorite novel and count the pages. Now count how many sentences there are on the average page. Multiply the two counts together and you get the total number of sentences in your novel and each and every one of those sentences has a verb. That's how many verbs you need for good storytelling. The problem is ameliorated by the frequent re-use of verbs. The single verb "tell" will appear hundreds of times, often in the form of synonyms such as "explain," "say," "relate," "object," and so on. A novel with tens of thousands of sentences may need only thousands of verbs. Unfortunately, thousands of verbs are still a great many. Can you imagine designing and balancing a system involving such a huge number of verbs? Those verbs don't fall into some simple pattern or system that makes it possible to put them in a simple database. It won't do to prepare a table of each verb's effects on affection, charisma, strength, agility, and so forth; in drama, the effects of different verbs are unique to each verb. Each verb must be custom-programmed.
Any programmer can tell you that any programming problem can be solved with either a code-based approach or a table-driven approach. To use my own terminology, one can use either a process-intensive approach or a data-intensive approach, or any combination of the two. In general, when you have many variations on a single theme, it's more efficient to use a table-driven approach. We see this process in games programs. The big parts, like level maps and weapons characteristics, are all table-driven, while the verbs, being few in number, are always handled with code. Games programmers often build custom tools for manipulating the huge databases required in some games: level editors, map editors, character editors, and so forth. But the verbs themselves are always handled with custom code. This won't work with interactive storytelling, because interactive storytelling demands too many verbs for a customized approach. We must therefore create development environments that combine a database system with a programming system. Think of it as a database manager for verbs with an embedded programming language for interactive storytelling, all highly optimized for the problems specific to interactive storytelling. We'll also need a new class of storyteller: somebody who understands interactivity as well as story, and who does not shirk from the minor programming demanded by the development environment. As you can see, all this will require major breaks with the past. We need new technology, new creative talent, and a new marketplace. It's going to be a tough slog but what revolution wasn't a tough slog? |
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 248