Bardic Gaming
by The Prince of Cats on Dec.07, 2009, under Computer RPGs, Interactive Storytelling
As a bard, one single tale can be made to fit a wide variety of different uses. Certain elements can be built up or glossed over depending on your audience and the message that you are trying to convey.
This goes beyond stories having multiple interpretations and actually hinges on changing the story to suit your purpose; you reduce a tale to its skeleton and then flesh it out in such a way that it conforms to your vision.
As a writer, it is typical to build the story to meet the structure of the medium and suit your own strengths, but the story is fixed in both of these cases, with the same events being told in the same way. As a games designer, you can often drop in multiple endings or optional side-quests, but you are essentially just writing static chapters which you can swap in and out.
This is a far cry from a bardic tale, where the same story can be told a hundred ways to reinforce a hundred different moral truths or to better suit your audience. The tale of Romeo and Juliet, for instance, could be told as a bawdy commentary on the rashness of youthful love or a sombre account of how true love requires great sacrifice. Alternatively, you could go with Shakespeare’s version and put it all in.
The point is that a game requires that the developers make a single choice from the list and stick to it, but is this the only way? Can we not give the player a choice of tales and let them pick one? Since games are so interactive, why not let them change their minds as the game progresses?
As long as Verona looks the same way and Romeo does not suddenly change gender or species, we are not looking at any new art-assets. The dialogue might be problematic, but only if you decide to give the whole game VO.
Perhaps the trick is not to shoehorn this adaptive narrative into a game, but to create the game and the games story around it. Minimise or even remove dialogue and you suddenly remove a large stumbling block. Without any dialogue, it suddenly gets easier to localise too. The onus is suddenly on the writer and the narrative designer, rather than the artists. The central narrative, the skeleton if you will, is just a series of narrative checkpoints, with the player taking an equal role to the writer in choosing their path.
It sounds a little complicated, but does it sound that new?
No… The more I think about it, the more I see that it has already started. Left 4 Dead was the first step in this direction and suddenly I get the feeling that it will not be the last…
December 7th, 2009 on 9:37 pm
I’d argue that the visual artist would probably make Verona (to use your example) look significantly different if the game was a bawdy romp or a sombre tragedy. I’d certainly paint it differently, anyway, and, while my work in the computer graphics field is limited and over a decade behind the times, I’d imagine a video game graphic artist would think in the same way. I would imagine that having to create a visual environment that would work for both moods would result in something rather bland.
December 8th, 2009 on 1:07 pm
I don’t think I am following you; you seem to be describing a typical multi-player online game where you are free to do what you want but can kill things and follow quests if you want to. Elite or Eve are also games where the setting is provided but you can be a trader or pirate of adventurer or nothing as the fancy takes you. Did I miss your point?
Twitter: AnthonyHJ
December 8th, 2009 on 9:06 pm
I barely follow myself some days.
I am talking less of the MMO-style scattergun approach, throwing enough quests at the player that they can ignore half of them and still pick up the central plot, and more of inferred narrative.
In most typical games, the player is given a quest and then gets told what everything means and what to do next. What I was thinking is that the average person will usually put their own meaning to an ambiguous action.
If a woman gives a knowing smile to her daughter’s secret suitor at a party, it can mean a dozen things depending on who sees it. Her husband might take it to mean that she also knows about their daughter’s trysts, while her daughter might take it as a sign that she has worked it out and approves.
To the man himself, her lover, it might simply mean “my husband does not suspect a thing”…
Context often defines meaning, so by holding back the meaning and creating deliberate ambiguity, you are letting the player define reality based on their perspective. You need not even have a ‘true’ answer if the player’s assumptions are interesting enough…
I doubt it would work in reality, but it was a random thought that I wanted to explore.
December 9th, 2009 on 9:51 am
Hmmm. I think you need real humans to make that work
Even if you had the second life engine and subtle enough facial expressions it would still be difficult. Of course you have actually played the sort of game you are discussing, albeit in text based form, ie Vampire The Masquerade, White Wolf etc.