Quote:Original post by sunandshadow
My own belief that stories are inherently moral comes from six years of studying what people mean when they say stories are satisfying and important. I studied this by looking at educated people's theories of how stories are structured, uneducated people's choice of what myths and fairytales are worth listening to many times, and psychological studies of language and audience emotions and behavior. My concludion is that conflict in a story comes from an argument over goals and/or methods between characters/faction, and the climax of the story comes when that argument is resolved. So the plot structure of a novel is equivalent to the persuasive argument made in a speech or essay, it just gets a lot longer (but also more subtly persuasive) when you encode the argument into the actions of characters and the behavior of the setting. The conclusion of the argument is the moral of the story. That's what I mean when I say that all stories are inherently moral, because every story is an argument and in deciding who wins the author necessarily promotes the belief that that side is right.

I am rather happy that this opinion comes from someone who has spent so much time reading and forming opinions as you. I have conscienciously read almost every post of yours in here since we have worked on your story. And it only got me half convinced.

Let's presume, for the sake of the argument, that you're trying to write a single story, weaving the point of view of, say, six different persons, living a personal life, and coming across eachothers at different intervals, like, say, Magnolia, or Shortcuts by Altman, or something equally close. Both movies told a story (or more accurately, stories) and I have been unable to find an end to said stories, because the movie only presented a tiny part of the overall stories. Let's assume that you deliberately tried to write a moral for each part of these stories.

Now let's assume, still for the sake of the argument, that someone (your editor, maybe...) came across your manuscript, and decided to alter some parts of your manuscripts. What you thought would drive to some moral is now only a chain of action links only related by the actual universe they share. Some parts may even only be related by the ghosts of your past story, and if you are bent on putting a moral ending onto the story, you may have to prune some of these out of it, and weed out your moral ending to allow for those added or modified events to exist at all.

That's what happens with an interactive story. You write as much as your editor, or co-writer, or reader, or player, or whatever, and have less of a final decision on what it becomes.

But what is more frustrating is that, far from being the one to decide when and where it ends, the editor (or player) is the one who takes this decision. Bent on putting a proper ending sequence and a moral on it, you may also be ready to only leave moral choices in your story, therefore leading to a moral lesson instead of an interactive story, and no possibility to continue to play after you decided there would be no story.

A better image of what I imagine Interactive storytelling to be is the movie "Groundhog day", with Bill Murray. You have a world that revolves with or without you, and have some leeway to alter it in some way before it all goes back to the beginning. You are free to kill whoever you want, to kidnap the groundhog, to commit suicide, to help repair tires, to steal money and distribute it, to invite the girl out as many times as you want with no fear of getting wrong, because you know you'll have a chance of getting things better the next time. A story is told, but the story is NOT that of the character you're playing. You're only background, and you have to work your way in order to find a way to get to foreground character. And you have to work even more in order to become the main character. And yet even more in order to give an ending to your story.

That's why I said that moral choies meant very little in interactive stories. because you cannot think of ALL the choices anyone can make, without infusing spontaneously some of your own morals. And since not everyone thinks just like you do, giving a "moral ending" to a story is more or less like a moral lesson. A fable, if you will. "don't do this or this will happen". "You cannot escape yourself." "A good deed doesn't go unpunished". "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." Putting that kind of moral sayings at the end of a story always makes me feel like I've been cheated of something. I'm dying to see a story that doesn't end with hero feverishly kissing the heroin and them riding in the setting sun to live happily everafter, even in Speed... I want to see the Indians win, sometimes. I want to see the Hero die stupidly just because the Evil Warlord conned him, or used against him his Heroic features, like truthfulness or other nice feelings. I'd like the Bastard to say something like "drop your weapon or she's dead.", the Hero thinking for a moment, then doing it, and the Bastard saying "well, I lied. You'll both die anyway. And him killing both. It DOES makes the reader feel cheated of his righteously earned "beautiful ending". But I don't care. I want to know that I did what I thought was right, and I lost anyways. I want to have to go through hard times, have to choose between staying rigidly in my moral standards and dying from it, or becoming a righteous bastard, and chainkilling everyone, then having to face the families of all those I killed to reach my goal, and the legal consequences.
The Good Guy doesn't always win in the end, in reality. So why should I lie to anyone by writing stories that pretend you only need to be honest to be happy and rich, when everyone can tell you you need to be a greedy bastard to be able to bargain more than anyone? Why should I lie to everyone including myself just to write "satisfying endings"?

And why is Scrooge presented as someone repenting before what is about to come because of his actions, when obviously the character is built on trying to make money? Why is Scrooge suddendly changing his mind, and deciding that making isn't as important as making people happy? Because you need a moral ending? Then why can't the moral be "be honest and truthful to yourself, follow your heart and bear the consequences"? WHy can't you find a single story that makes you face the consequences at the end?

Fournicolas, I think you are not working from the same definition of interactive story as me. In my vision of an interactive story game there are either a finite number of endings pre-created by the autho to express different moral endings (which may be combined modularly, if one is is a character ending and one is a political ending for example, but all of these endings occur at the same point in the plot, such that the game plot is always the same length OR there are a finite number of end-conditions, the game gives the option to end, continue, or restart whenever the player accomplishes one, and each has one or two specific endings associated with it. So in my definition of interactive story the player cannot choose when the game ends.

[Edited by - sunandshadow on August 15, 2006 2:01:20 PM]

elander - Well, in general I don't like quests as the basis for gameplay. I prefer the 'present a game event, give the player an array of options for responding to it' model more like those old choose your own adventure books. But that aside, here are what I think are some good definitions:

An interactive story is any story in which the story responds to the player's choices. The story must give the illusion of responding in a meaningful way to the player's actions, such that the game and player are having a conversation. One not-so-obvious fact about interactive stories is that limiting the player's possible actions and making sure the atory can respond to all of them creates a better play experience than giving the player lots of options and only responding to a chosen few of them. So randomness is bad for interactivity.

A dynamic story is one which turns out differently each time it is told. It does not technically have to be interactive - it could be something as simple as a story which allowed the player to enter their name or pick the gender of the viewpoint character, or simply randomly chose at each point where the plot should go next. A dynamic plot on the other hand is one which has multiple branches - either multiple endings, or multiple middles uniting to the same ending. These are represented by a flowchart like your diagram, but with all the boxes being events in one plot through which the player must travel one path or another, whereas in your example each box is its own mini-plot and the game contains many of them, none of which are mandatory.

My apologies, I overgeneralized. I should not have just said "randomness is bad", I should have said that truly random randomness with disregards thematic and moral value of the object chosen is bad, but more controlled randomness, where a story-generation engine makes a choice among several equivalent options can be good for replayability. For example you could randomly decide whether the damsel in distress should be a daughter, niece, or granddaughter of the person asking for her to be rescued. But, I still think that the idea of generating quests is in itself bad. A quest is one of the weakest possible things one could build a story segment around.

Have you read the thread in the design forum archives where I described how I would go about creating a story generation engine for an interactive story game called Island? Here's the link.

At any rate I would say RPGs are not and should not be about telling the story of a world because that makes players feel unimportant and ignored, which totally defeats the purpose of an interactive story being responsive to the player. RPGs should be about telling the story of the player's experiences and learning within the world. If you are familiar with Dramatica theory the story of the world is only the OS or external throughline, whereas I am trying to say the external story is only given meaningfulness by how it effects the emotions and lives of specific characters.

Quote:

Quote:A dynamic plot on the other hand is one which has multiple branches - either multiple endings, or multiple middles uniting to the same ending. These are represented by a flowchart like your diagram, but with all the boxes being events in one plot through which the player must travel one path or another, whereas in your example each box is its own mini-plot and the game contains many of them, none of which are mandatory.

If i understand correctly what you are refering to is mutual exclusion for quest conditions and that all quests must be connected. There are some mistakes on the graph in relation to the game. There should have been more conditional transitions (green arrows) between the isolated quests and all quests are pre-requisites (one way or the other) of the final quest.

Mutual exclusion is kind of the opposite way of looking at it - I mean that the player must take at least one of an array of options (but may take more than one if they are modular or stackable or whatever you want to call it.) Also, since I don't think I said it clearly before, let me point out that the problem with your example chart is that it does not show one plot and the choices made within that plot, it instead shows the relationship between several mini-plots aka quests. I'm trying to talk about a case where a game or an episode of game has one coherent plot and the player makes choices within that plot to reach one of several different endings with different morals. A game which has unity of plot, one of the major virtues Aristotle said every story should have.

Well what is the definition of a quest? A quest is a character making a journey to obtain, alter, or destroy an object or group of objects. So all quests are stories about objects, which makes them emotionally weak because objects don't evoke people's emotions very well. Then you have the journey itself - in traditional heroic monomyths the journey is where most of the story happens: if there is an adventuring party the characters are trapped together, which is good for brewing arguments and romances; if the journey is making the party run out of supplies or their boat is taking on water you could have increasing desperation and suspense about whether they will make it to their destination before they are doomed; usually the characters must endure some sort of test, which might give insight into their inner strengths and weaknesses or cause them to learn a lesson. But when a quest is generated in an RPG the journey is usually reduced to mere wading through random monster encounters, and nothing thematically meaningful happens - the story is backgrounded, and the player loses the emotional investment and immersion in the story which they had built up.

Even if an RPG does the quest plot as brilliantly as possible, it is still only one type of plot, and limited in the themes which it is appropriate to explore. Players get bored of experiencing the same plot over and over again, especially because they are probably sick of seeing quest plots done badly in all the other RPGs they have played before yours. And some players, particularly women, are just not interested in heroes slaying monsters and getting rewarded with treasure. So I think it's very important to choose a more broad, flexible type of plot to generate.