Quote:Original post by Jotaf
So if it goes on and all there is is a kind of a Sims game, it's not goint to be much fun for most of your intended audience.

I think this is vital. MOST gameplay is cyclic and repeating at the moment to moment level, with the exception being puzzles. You hack, or you jump, our you steer, or you shoot, etc.

So your point would suggest that as soon as an interactive experience becomes cyclic, it can no longer be a story? Because what the OP model is the idea that the traditional story elements (relationships between characters, motive assessment, conspiracies) be cyclic, theoretically with the player being responsible for how well the story is going (i.e., if things keep seesawing, you'll have to try something different).

Quote:
I think that the single most important thing that can bind all of these low-level gameplay "atoms" together is purpose. Interaction is just a set of rules that supports this. Random things like accidents and stuff belonging to that category can happen like in real life with seemingly no apparent purpose. But anything else -must- have purpose. By "purpose" I mean, it is the direct or indirect result of a "sentient" creature (simulated of course) trying to achieve an objective. In your example scenario, the natural question that the player asks is "why?". Why is this happening? If the answer doesn't make sense, the "story" doesn't make sense. The only way to answer this is "because character X wants to do Y" (there could be a chain reaction of events so that a character's action could end up being the cause of whatever is happening now).

As an aside, purpose is sort of suggested a bit ("you all have the same goal, but for different reasons"). The challenge here is that from a first person perspective (in story-terms, NOT gameplay terms) you may not know the purpose of others.

Worse, yet, you may come to the wrong conclusion. Now that is one of the major advantages of a tightly scripted game that limits your freedom but makes certain that you are exactly where you need to be for a revelation or turn of events to count.

Quote:Original post by Kylotan
I don't want to get into a debate over definitions or semantics, but I will say that I think that what is proposed would be a disappointment in story terms for me. Tensions between characters can make a storyline so much more interesting, but you're still missing a major story arc.

Can you explain this a bit (maybe give me some examples of where you've seen this done well in games)?

By major story arc, I think of the standard major story arc we get in most games, which is shades of the hero's journey or kill "teh grate evul!!11" [grin]

For a journey, a major story arc could involve destinations on the map and transformations to characters once they arrive. Maybe Kate's got a high powered rifle that will change the balance of power. Maybe when you come to some ghostly ruins, Max is suddenly back as a villain, etc.

Having said that, I can feel the immense difference between having written fiction and carefully arranged the house of cards to fall just at the right time, and the idea in the OP.

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...the growing tendency towards one major conflict and resolution, is unlikely to arise this way.

In gameplay, conflict and pacing can be controlled by frequency of activity and dwindling resources. Could that be used here? Particularly, consider modeling emotions as resources, so that "growing hatred" or "dawning awe" become triggers for different events, animations and behaviors. (Uh, easier said than done, of course).

Oh, and just a small point of order! SIMS?!?!?!?!!?!?!?!?!? Since when did characters actively plot to murder one another in The Sims!!!??? [lol]

As an aside, I note this as one of the fundamental ways that we as designers are influenced by genre. Now, any game which involves internally modelled individuals who have relationships and react to one another must, I think, be funneled through the lense of The Sims. The danger of this is that the stronger the lense, the more it will morph the expectations of anyone who encounters an idea that looks like it but is not it.

This is understandable. We only create frames of reference for that which we can conceptualize and relate to.

I don't think it can be called a story in the traditional sense, as it has already been said, it misses timing.

However, if the game was able to keep track of the "storyline" and correct it on the way, then it could be something. A slightly different example than yours: There are 8 friends in the wilderness. They have found an ancient treasure, and their purpose is to get out alive and reach the nearest city.
One of them is a murderer, who wants the treasure for himself.
You're the leader, so you have the (presumably) only weapon, with only one bullet. Things go on as you described, freeform(alliances,disputes,collecting clues and things...). But every once and a while, a character gets murdered with a knife(thus revealing the fact that the murderer also has a weapon), leading to new story rearrangments(forming new alliances, breaking old ones, re-evaluation of elements...). If you manage to stay alive(by being careful, make the right alliances...), you reach the climax, where only 3 of you remain alive. Based on the conclusions you've made, you shoot one of them. After that, you search the body and find indisputable evidence of whether or not he's the killer. If you were right, then you win. If you were wrong, you are alone, unarmed with the murderer, and you die.

I used that simplistic example because getting a character out of the picture is perhaps the easiest way for the game AI to "steer" the story. It could be other more complex things though, like if your conclusions are way off, a situation is dynamically created with purpose to give you clues that will lead you to the desirable place.

Essentially, it is a story because conflict exists.

Plot is an essential, inseparable component of story, imo, and in my experience developing stories over the years. What I think you are really driving at is a morph of plot into gameplay, thus the story is "play." The elements are still there, just in another form.

I think I am going to stowaway on the mothership...

Adventuredesign

hey Wavinator, I was just thinking about this earlier today, remember that old AI thread?
One of the methods I had considered was predicate logic. Build a model of the starting state with relationships and etc, and then when the player (or an event or something) changes the state, re-check the model and fix the rules to keep them consistent.
Well, just today a teacher shot down that approach. Turns out that checking a model for consistency is an NP problem :(

On topic: Yes I'd say it is a story, and I'd be very interested in it. Of course you'd need to manage tension along the road (which I believe can be done) and you gotta have a proper satisfactory ending (which I believe will prove hard to implement).
About relationships taking the cake: if your plot is interesting, it won't. Will you spend your time chattering with Kate if there's a murderer among your group? Plus, the NPCs themselves should lose interest in chitchat the longer you keep at it, forcing you to move.
The difficult bits are the climax (feature film style)or climaxes (if you're going for TV/book style story rythm).
I imagine two approaches:
a) the tension metrics, where you measure the tension of any given moment and try to drive it where you want it to be, which may be any curve you prefer (some books use a sine-like curve that drops off rather sharply at the end of each chapter, for example).
b) a story entity. an incorporeal AI that possesess your characters and makes them *DO THINGS*. Okay that's a funny way to put it, but you could have an independent entity that shoves characters into the story. They'd go out of their normal ways when this happens. Sometimes flipping out, sometimes being heroic or whatever, just to keep things interesting.

About correcting the player's mistakes and always deliver the ending:
I believe this is a good approach, of course there should be a threshold for how awful a leader you can be before the game stops holding your hand and lets bad things happen. Think of this like the Prince of Persia walking on ledges. It felt a bit scary, and you had to balance... but you weren't really going to fall if your balance went off... you'd just fall to the side and hang, then jump back on.

Wavinator is this a random idea or are you considering it for your space game? sounds neat if you can pull it off. Just avoid predicate logic XD