36 dramatic situations...

use it ?

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Those situations are incredibly useful... they can be applied to a model for generating stories - and therefore the pure nonlinear story game.


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and once again, I ask :
How could we decompose this into easily modifiable, reusable, building blocks ?

Diablo uses a random map generator which pieces together maps by using predefined building blocks (rooms/areas). This way the game manages to have random maps which is still navigateable and looks fairly good.

Maybe this concept could be taken one step further and we could build random stories of similiar "story building blocks".

For example when you first enters a city a "save girl from evil wizard" quest is generated. The game then selects two of the NPCs to play the girl and the wizard and set up their stats, motivations and so on accordingly. Once the game has used this "story building block" the random story generator could then go on and select from a new set of "building blocks" which is compatible with the first one, until all (important) NPCs have a role to play.

Next time you play the game (with a new character) a new stories/quests may be generated and the roles of the same NPCs may be totally different.

Regards

nicba

We all have a lot of courage bringing this sort of thing up on a forum moderated by the Landfish

Stories pieced together randomly like the mazes in a murder-based game?!

It is an interesting conecpt though. I''m still trying to think it through, but having to actually work plus all the alcohol still left in my system from last night is not helping.

Nazr, if the result was any good, I''d play it. I just don''t think it can be done...

Actually, Landfish, the piecing the story together idea is a bit much. I find the idea very facinating, and like talking about it. It's loss of too much control even for me

I am more thinking of doing something like what we were talking about in the Quest Analysis thread. Make the quests very loose as far as what the player can do, but still pre-constructed. As ahw was saying, I am thinking of using a finite state machine to let the quests react to what the player is deciding.

The generating stories from compenents is interesting though. It might be more suitable for an MMOG.





Edited by - Nazrix on September 11, 2000 7:19:17 PM

There actually is an existing formula for generating fairy-tales. I''m sure it would be simple to come up with one for a romance novel (fortunately-unfortunately would be its basis), or a fablieu. But the formula for each of these would be totally different from each of the others, so you would have problems if you wanted the basic type of the story to be flexible.

There is even better, there is a card game (guess what ..in french), with excellent illustrations, called "Il etait une fois" ("once upon a time"). the goal is to build a story, by simply putting down elements of plot and twisting the story to your own will... they even did an extension thanks to its success (Elixir).

youpla :-P

I think there probably is somewhat of a formula for romance novels.

I think Stephen King has a formula too. A guy ends up in quaint, small town. Wierd stuff starts happening. The guy is the only one who knows about it. That''s about it.

Have a look at this page, specially the "plot skeleton" part. I think there is some useful information here!

The types of story ending are useful as well, since they provide an answer to something I''d been thinking about... when do you END a random story?



People might not remember what you said, or what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel.
~ (V)^|) |<é!t|-| ~

Actually, I looked up all this on about.com and guess what ? they have some excellent articles
I discovered some very ones on screen writers, and the techniques, and I actually found some interesting ideas about a 2 goals drama : the hero goes for something, but on his way discover something else that make him chagne his way for another goal, then he hesitates, and finally commit totally to the new task and accomplish it. it''s called 9 act story, and I liked the idea. THere is more, but I only have 24 hours a day to read all this

http://www.teleport.com/~bjscript/windex.htm

More interesting reading... I''m only just starting to grasp the scope of what we''re trying to achieve.

People might not remember what you said, or what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel.
~ (V)^|) |<é!t|-| ~

achieve, achieve ... at least we are brainstorming, and that''s a good beginning. It''s funny, when you try to grasp difficult topic like that how quickly all the topics I thought were useless in class seem to suddenly show up (all the state machine stuff that I liked, but also the data management problems, uukh)

I think that these 39 Archetypal themes actually support my statement that it would be incredibly hard and unrewarding to. If indeed there are only 39 core stories in our conciousness, then that means that the difference between one and another is NOT in the skeleton, but in the details.

The mark of a good story is in the details. The tiny little connections that a computer couldn''t efficiently generate "randomly", because they''re fine tuned to a single plotline. Of course, you could make random details, but that would suck. Here''s why:

Take a mystery, let''s say Agatha Christie. If we were making a mystery GAME, you could conceivably have the culprit change every time, because the mystery wrote itself with each playing. Kinda cool. Each time you played the game, there would be one tiny hole in someone''s logic that incriminates the culprit.

Only problem is, without details to govern mood and setting, the story will fall flat on it''s face. You try randomly generating motivation. The stories will FEEL cookie cutter in the gameplay, a simple logic puzzle with no flavor. Who cares?


In order to make random stories work on the level you suggest naz, you''ll have to learn a lot more about what a story is composed of. A simple, non-linear story. Without those componants, how could you possibly classify them in a way that would make a good story from the seperate pieces? No writer on earth is this good.

I''m not saying it can''t be done, I''m saying that I couldn''t do it unless I had several million dollars in budget, plus a team of the best and brightest writers, philosophers and computer-savy folk on the face of the earth.

quote:

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Original post by Landfish

I think that these 39 Archetypal themes actually support my statement that it would be incredibly hard and unrewarding to. If indeed there are only 39 core stories in our conciousness, then that means that the difference between one and another is NOT in the skeleton, but in the details.

---

I think this is actually an excellent argument for the simplicity of modularizing plot skeleton generation.

quote:

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In order to make random stories work on the level you suggest naz, you'll have to learn a lot more about what a story is composed of. A simple, non-linear story. Without those componants, how could you possibly classify them in a way that would make a good story from the seperate pieces? No writer on earth is this good.

I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm saying that I couldn't do it unless I had several million dollars in budget, plus a team of the best and brightest writers, philosophers and computer-savy folk on the face of the earth.

---

Ah, but much of the work has already been done for us. We've never heard about it because the structuralist approach to fiction went out of vogue about 2 decades ago, but the work exists to be collected up and mathematicalized. Anyone looking for a starting place, try here . Vladimir Propp was, as far as I can tell, the first person to start breaking stories down into their component parts.

Much more recently Tomas G. Pavel decided that stories had to be generated by the same kind of transformational generative grammar that every human being uses to generate language. (Pavel, Thomas G. The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renaissance Drama: Theory and History of Literature, Volume Eighteen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.)
(Noam Chomsky invented the concept of transformational generative grammar.)

Also necessary here is the concept of script theory: According to script theory, all memory is organized around primitive categories of personal experience, called “scripts” or, elsewhere, “thematic core concepts”. Specific memories are stored as pointers to scripts, with appropriate specific details appended. Thus, the memory of reading a book would be stored as: (primitive category = I got visual information and put it into long term memory.) + (details = The book was about a white whale; I thought it was really boring.) Scripts allow individuals to make inferences needed for understanding by filling in missing information. Note that only a narrative sequence of events, that is, one event following another related event (e.g. receiving and then storing visual information) can be stored as a script.

In other words, the 36 basic plots are primitive categories.

All this ignores the problem of avoiding cookie-cutterness, but I have the feeling that a complete knowlege of how stories are created would make the solution obvious.

Edited by - sunandshadow on September 12, 2000 11:34:21 PM

S&S, you''re pretty cool.

Landfish - your negativity recently is distressing!

Nobody said anything about not including mood or theme in the generation of stories! You start by picking a mood or theme, or by picking a story skeleton, but both elements have to be performed to know where to go. The "details" can be fleshed out purely randomly, but what fun is that? It could be an interesting experiment, but that would be all. If they are picked according to the mood and theme, they would be much more interesting.


People might not remember what you said, or what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel.
~ (V)^|) |<é!t|-| ~

What I am trying to do by giving you thes poitners, is to make you think deeper. Maybe it''s not the way ou work, and in this case I would apologise. But for me, I jsut can''t do it otherwise (they say it''s because I am a Scorpio).
My belief is that if you can go down to the roots, to a level so deep that it just doesn''t make sense with the product anymore, then we can start from there.
From those simple 36 plot *skeletons* you can build all the meat that you want.
My point is not to emphasize the importance of the writer here, rather to emphasize the fact that we can model plots in a simple, modulable way. A way that would allow putting it into a computer.

My goal is not to generate random plots. I don''t see the point in this, rather I would love to ''code'' a plot using this kind of simple structure, and allow more variety to be grown on those basics. This is what I am trying to deal with in the threads I started here (Quests analysis and another).

I''d like to point out that the link given by MadKeith is even better, as it is more aimed at RPG (but essentially, those RPG plots can be constructed from those 36 Situations).

youpla :-P