Interactive Narratives Revisited Ten Years of Research Ernest W. Adams 2005 GAME DEVELOPERS’ CONFERENCE This is an approximate transcript of the text of my lecture at the 2005 GDC. I present it in this form because the nature of the material does not lend itself to the traditional paper format. Also, because the lecture is informal and to some extent ad-libbed, this is not a verbatim document. Introduction Good afternoon. This lecture is “Interactive Narratives Revisited: Ten Years of Research.” I’m Ernest Adams. I’m going to begin by giving you the background of this lecture. Ten years ago at this conference I gave a lecture called “The Challenge of the Interactive Movie.” At that time there was a great deal of excitement about interactive movies. The CD-ROM had recently been invented and there was room for a lot more content in our games, so the notion of making an interactive movie seemed obvious. Interactivity is cool, movies are cool, therefore interactive movies must a fortiori be cool squared. Everybody was talking about convergence, and Trip Hawkins was running around yelling about the New Hollywood, which was going to make his new machine, the 3DO Multiplayer, a colossal worldwide smash megahit. Ahem. Yes. Well, we’ll try not to dwell on that too much. Looking back at the situation at that time, text adventures had already died as a commercial genre, but graphical adventure games were still the biggest, richest, best-looking games around. They had held this position, thanks largely to the work of Sierra On-line, for most of a decade. Some of the hottest games of that period were either adventure games or contained large story elements. I’ll give you a few examples as a reminder. http://www.designersnotebook.com/Lectures/Interactive_Narratives_Revisit If anybody needs convincing about the seriousness of this “interactive movie” stuff at the time, note that Wing Commander III featured Mark Hamill and Malcolm Macdowell, and Under a Killing Moon included no less than James Earl Jones, Margot Kidder, and Brian Keith. One of the conclusions I arrived at, looking at the variety of games that were being called “interactive movies” at the time, was that it’s impossible to tell what an interactive movie is supposed to be by looking at representative samples. So many different kinds of things got called “interactive movies” at the time that they had practically nothing in common. My lecture contained a critique of the whole concept of interactive movies, and in fact I ended up saying that I didn’t believe there was any such thing as an interactive movie at all, a remark which produced prolonged cheering in my largely techie bad-attitude game developer audience. The challenge of the interactive movie, I concluded, was to make decent computer games in spite of the fact that the marketing department will insist on sticking this idiotic label on your box. So I abandoned interactive movies as a design concept, because I couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to be, and looked at interactive narratives from an abstract, theoretical point of view. In that lecture, I identified http://www.designersnotebook.com/Lectures/Interactive_Narratives_Revisit three key problems that I felt made it difficult to create interactive narratives. So the idea behind this lecture is to look back and see how things have changed since I named those problems… to see if, perhaps, any of them have been solved. Before I go any further, though, I need to issue a disclaimer. When I proposed this talk to the selection committee, it was my intention to try and read all the papers on interactive narrative that have been published over the last ten years. Well, five or even three years ago, that would have been easy. Since then, there has been an explosion in research, and I simply haven’t been able to keep up with it all. For example, I know that Chris Crawford has written a new book on the subject, and I haven’t even gotten around to it yet. So I’m sorry to say that this talk is not as comprehensive as I would have liked it to be. It’s necessarily going to be a personal and somewhat haphazard look back. I haven’t had the time to research it in the detail that I would like. Three Problems for Interactive Storytellers These were the problems as I identified them at the time: The Problem of Internal Consistency: How do we make sure a story is logically, emotionally, and narratively coherent when the player is out of our control? What if the player is controlling Superman as his avatar, but wants to do something very unlike Superman: killing people at random, for example? Or, using another example, how could you possibly let a player modify the plot of Casablanca without destroying its emotional power? Casablanca ends the way it must end; if you could simply go back and change it, Rick’s heroic sacrifice becomes meaningless. The Problem of Narrative Flow: How do we make sure the player is prepared for the dramatic climax of the story when it arrives? The Problem of Amnesia: What do we do about the fact that story characters understand the world they live in, but the player is amnesiac about that world? Why does the player have to spend time at the beginning of every game exploring what is supposed to be his own natural environment? I also identified a number of possible solutions to some of these problems, but I decided that most of them weren’t very satisfactory. The Problem of Internal Consistency, solution 1a: Don’t give the avatar enough depth such that the player can violate his nature. In other words, don’t let the player play Superman. Only let the player control someone without a personality. Objection: this is hardly good storytelling! Bland, neutral protagonists are not a hallmark of great literature. The Problem of Internal Consistency, solution 1b: Create a story so bland that there are no emotions or activities that can be inconsistent. Objection: Ditto. It’s not good storytelling. The Problem of Internal Consistency, solution 2: Don’t give the player any actions to perform that will allow her to violate the avatar’s nature. In short, limit the interactivity. Objection: this is hardly good gameplay! Placing limits on the player so that she cannot interfere with our nice story is not what players come to games for. The Problem of Narrative Flow, solution 1: Limit the player’s interactivity so she can’t really get off the path. Tell a linear story, or force the player by some means or other to stay on the right path. Objection: Again, limited http://www.designersnotebook.com/Lectures/Interactive_Narratives_Revisit interactivity are not what games are for, and I argued that players don’t like being chivvied along a fixed path. The Problem of Narrative Flow, solution 2: Let time go on around the player, and if she’s not ready for the dramatic climax when it comes, too bad. Objection: This turns all such games into a race against time. The player loses repeatedly and has to reload all the time. The Problem of Narrative Flow, solution 3: Tie advances in the plot to advancement by the player. This is the classic adventure game approach. The game only moves forward as the player does, so the player is guaranteed to be ready for the dramatic climax when it arrives. Objection: This feels mechanical. You can tell that nothing is happening unless you make it happen. There’s no sense of urgency. The Problem of Amnesia, solution 1: Make games in which the protagonist character has amnesia. Objection: This is not a major genre of literature. The number of books and movies about a character who has amnesia is vanishingly small. This solution is at best a poor workaround. The Problem of Amnesia, solution 2: Tell stories of a type in which it is reasonable that the protagonist does not know what is going on. Two classic types are heroic quests and mysteries. Not surprisingly, many games, especially adventure games, fall into these categories. Objection: Although this solution works, it limits the kinds of stories we can tell rather sharply. So because none of these solutions really work well, I came to the conclusion that there’s an inverse relationship between interactivity and narrative. The more control you exercise as the author, the less freedom you give the player, and vice versa. You can’t really maximize both. At best you can seek to strike a satisfactory balance between them. I ended that lecture with what might almost be considered an anti -narrative manifesto. I gave a pean of praise to the wonders of interactivity, and then I concluded: “It’s not our job to tell stories. It’s our job to create worlds in which stories can happen. To build playgrounds for the mind.” The Road We’ve Travelled So that was the state of things in 1995, as I saw them. I now want to take a look at some of the things we’ve done since then, starting with the game industry itself. The most obvious change is that stories have begun to creep into other genres, and in fact those genres are enlivened and enriched by them. Role-Playing Games RPGs have had stories for a long time, but the earliest ones weren’t very good. They started with randomly- generated dungeons and completely trivial storylines, and the introduction of richer stories has been smooth and gradual. The Final Fantasy series is well-respected for its stories, although in my opinion, Planescape: Torment http://www.designersnotebook.com/Lectures/Interactive_Narratives_Revisit is probably the best example to date in terms of the quality of the writing. Shooting Games Since 1995 we’ve invented the rail-shooter: Metal Gear Solid, Half-life, and so on. In some respects these are the most successful because they map the linear story onto the physical space. However, the type of story they’re able to tell is quite restricted. It’s consistent and flows properly, but it is necessarily about, well, shooting things. To paraphrase another saying, if all you have is a BFG9000, then everything looks like a cacodemon. Action Games One of our most important achievements has been to invented the action- adventure, a genre somewhere between the mindless frenzy of the traditional action game, and the slow, deliberate puzzle-solving of the traditional adventure game. Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine is an early example of an action-adventure, abandoning the classic point-and-click approach of the earlier LucasArts Indiana Jones games. Like RPGs, action games started with completely trivial stories, but have gradually been including more and more story material. This is partly due to the growth of storage space on our mediums, and also partly due to a desire to appeal to larger markets. Old-time hardcore gamers still button through the http://www.designersnotebook.com/Lectures/Interactive_Narratives_Revisit story aspects as fast as they can so they can get straight into the killin’, and many of them decry or sneer at the introduction of stories in action games. They also complain that action games are getting too easy. But old-time hardcore gamers are a dwindling percentage of the overall market. As time goes on, they will be reduced to a niche. Strategy Games We have begun to add stories to strategy games to bind the missions together, with varying success. Warcraft III also introduced hero characters, and where you have characters you tend to have stories. This represents a cross-genre merging with role-playing games. Vehicle Simulators Interstate 76 was a vehicle simulator with a story. The story was intentionally corny, but effective. In all these cases, story has remained secondary to gameplay. The story provides motivation and reward, but it is not the main thing the player is there for. Adventure Games And then of course there are the traditional adventure games -- the ones that used to be the biggest, richest games on the market. Few of the major publishers build them any more. It’s not as if they’re dead, as many people claim. It’s just that the market for them didn’t grow at the same rate as the market for all the other genres, so as a percentage of the total, they’re pretty small. It was the invention of the 3D accelerator card that caused this huge growth in the other genres. The 3D accelerator means we can provide more adrenaline, and entertainment through adrenaline is easier to achieve than entertainment through either logical challenges (puzzles), or narrative experience. http://www.designersnotebook.com/Lectures/Interactive_Narratives_Revisit So, as we can see from these games, story is compelling -- that’s why we’ve begun introducing it into strategy games and vehicle simulators. We have a desire to use stories in our games; it makes them feel richer. But for the most part it remains a backdrop. It’s not the main point of the game. What About the Problems? And what about the three problems I described back in 1995? Well, for the most part, we’ve avoided facing them. The Problem of Amnesia We’re still making games with a lead character who has amnesia, to try and cover up the problem. We’re also still mostly making mysteries and heroic quests. That’s all well and good -- it gets around the problem -- but we’re never going to fulfill the potential of this medium if we limit ourselves to those two genres of literature. However, I have realized since then that even real stories need an introduction of some kind, even if it requires the reader to work a bit to understand what’s going on. Really well-crafted novels or movies have very subtle introductions in which the introductory material is so cleverly woven into the plot that you don’t notice that you are being introduced to the characters and situations. We have to learn how to craft better introductions. Dumping a lot of expository material on the reader or the player is bad practice in any medium. We need to put the player in environments or situations where they cannot, or don’t feel a need, to pick up everything they see. I think if we spent more time crafting good introductions, rather than just treating it as a nuisance to be dealt with shortly before shipping the game, we wouldn’t have such a problem with player amnesia. The Problem of Narrative Flow Narrative flow is still a problem for us: how do we make sure the player is ready for the dramatic climax when the dramatic climax occurs? For the most part, we’re still using Solution 3: advance the plot in synch with the player’s advances. And it still feels mechanistic, especially when the player arrives “just too late” to prevent something, and no matter how fast they play the game, they’re always “just too late.” To some extent we have also switched to Solution 1, by making the games more linear. Adventure games are now more linear than they once were. Rail-shooters are of course linear. What we do is map physical space onto the plot -- onto time itself -- and then force the player to traverse the physical space. And the shape of that space has become more linear than it used to be. The Problem of Internal Coherency With respect to the Problem of Internal Consistency, we have arrived at a sort of compromise. Let’s consider two types of people: http://www.designersnotebook.com/Lectures/Interactive_Narratives_Revisit Soldiers in the trenches during WWI. A wealthy Peruvian during WWI. On the left we have soldiers in the trenches during World War I. They have a role to play in the war, but no freedom to decide what they will do or how. Their experience is not unlike playing a rail-shooter: all they can do is shoot, and advance if it is safe to do so. On the right we have a wealthy businessman in Peru during World War I. He has complete freedom to choose his actions: the war does not constrain him in any way. On the other hand, he has no power to influence the war, either. His experience is analogous to the sandbox mode of Grand Theft Auto III: you can do what you like, but what you do doesn’t have any effect on the story. One group of people is totally constrained by their circumstances -- the story they’re in. The other person is completely unconstrained, but he’s not in the story at all. In between these two types of people is someone rather special. Someone like a commando, a resistance fighter, or a spy. Someone who is involved in an important situation, but has some freedom (but not total freedom) to choose his own actions. http://www.designersnotebook.com/Lectures/Interactive_Narratives_Revisit Sidney Reilly, “Ace of Spies” These kinds of people make good compromise heroes for storytelling games, because they have a certain amount of freedom, but not unlimited freedom, to influence the situation they’re in. Another thing that I think we have realized is that players don’t really want to violate a character’s essential nature anyway -- at least, not if they’re seriously involved in the story. Sure, if you get to be Superman, the first thing you’re going to do is see if you can kill a lot of people; but if you really want to experience the story, then it won’t bother you that Superman isn’t allowed to do these things. The Resurgence of Linearity I said earlier that I think we’ve gone back, somewhat, to telling linear stories. There are multiple ways of approaching the issue of branching stories -- you can create fully-branching storylines, with (possibly) multiple endings; you can create stories that branch less often, and tends to remain within a few distinct plot lines; or you can have what Charles Cecil calls “multilinear” stories, in which the main plot has particular nodes that the player must pass through, but there is a certain amount of freedom in between these nodes. The game industry has largely abandoned the notion its efforts to create fully branching, or even partially- branching interactive narratives. They’re too expensive to make, and it’s not certain that players want or need them anyway. And they still present design and development difficulties. Unfortunately, it’s easy to create stories with logical inconsistencies in them if you have a complicated branching plot. In short, I think the industry hasn’t solved the three problems for interactive storytellers so much as sought workarounds for them. Rather than face them head on, we’ve improved the quality of our storytelling by, in large part, abandoning our efforts to be interactive about it. We have gone, unapologetically, back to basically linear stories. Interactivity earns you progress through the story, but it doesn’t have much effect on the outcome. Why We’ve Had So Much Trouble I now want to take a look at why, I believe, we have had so much trouble with these problems. It begins with what I believe is a failed analogy between narrative and gameplay. http://www.designersnotebook.com/Lectures/Interactive_Narratives_Revisit "Conflict" versus Dramatic Tension Hollywood screenwriters use the term “conflict” to refer to the essential problem of a story. In this formulation, there are three kinds of conflict: interpersonal conflict, conflict between a person and their environment, or simply internal conflicts among a person’s emotions or desires. Unfortunately, games are often seen in terms of “conflict” also -- whether it’s immediate and direct, as in a war game, or more theoretically, as in a conflict of interests between players in an economic simulation. In formal game theory, a “game” is defined as a situation in which there is a conflict of interests. The fact that we use the same words for both encourages us to think that they are analogous, and this leads us into error. I think the Hollywood formulation is too limited. Maybe it works for movies, but I don’t think it works for all literature. I prefer to use a term that I learned in junior high school English class, dramatic tension. Dramatic tension is more general than “conflict” and it avoids this spurious emphasis on the opposition of forces. There is no “conflict” in wondering whether that cute guy is going to ask you to the prom or not, but there is dramatic tension. Gameplay Tension At the same time, there clearly is such a thing as gameplay tension as well. Gameplay tension arises from the player’s immersion in the game, his commitment to advancement, his desire to win. There is gameplay tension in wondering whether the roulette ball is going to drop in slot 17 or not. Even in chess, a game of perfect information with no element of chance, the gameplay tension arises from wondering what your opponent is planning to do, and wondering whether she is smart enough to figure out what you’re you’re planning to do. The Disanalogies Both dramatic and gameplay tension involve a concern for the future, worrying about the unexpected. But there are significant disanologies. First is the repetition disanology. Gameplay tolerates repetition, and narrative does not. When you are playing a game, you are willing to tolerate a certain amount of repetition -- often quite a lot, in a game like Risk -- because you have a vested interest in each maneuver, even if it is identical to an earlier maneuver. In a story, however, no event should ever occur twice, unless there’s some extremely good reason for it, and even then, it would be very unusual. The second disanalogy between gameplay tension and dramatic tension is the randomness disanalogy. Gameplay tolerates random chance, and narrative does not. If you’re playing backgammon, you’re about to lose, and you happen to throw double-sixes and thereby win the game, that’s perfectly acceptable: it’s the action of chance. However, if you wrote the same scene in a story, the reader would consider it a deus ex machina. It’s not acceptable for the hero of a story to be saved by luck. Everything in a story should happen for a reason. This is why traditional adventure games work, better than any other genre of computer game, as stories. If they’re well designed, adventure games contain neither repetition nor randomness. Every puzzle is different from every other puzzle, and every puzzle has a logical, non-random solution. Rail-shooters have this quality too. By forcing you down a rail, the game can guarantee that you never run into the same situation twice. These two disanalogies lie at the heart of the matter. We expect different things from narratives than we do from gameplay. Narratives are not a simple recounting of events. They elide irrelevancies like getting dressed, using the toilet, and eating. Games elide some of these irrelevancies also, and a lot more besides. But narratives also http://www.designersnotebook.com/Lectures/Interactive_Narratives_Revisit