Giving your player true authorial control in a computer game…
by The Prince of Cats on Dec.17, 2009, under Computer RPGs, Interactive Storytelling, MMORPGs, Roleplaying Techniques, Tabletop RPGs
This is a response to a blog post on Gamasutra by a man named Steve Mallory, a designer I know through the ‘net who makes some good points about narrative design; read the original post here…
True authorial control… Now there is a scary phrase to use in front of your producer…
True authorial control is taking your player and asking them what they want to do today, rather than telling them what they are allowed to do. Is that wise?
I do love freedom and control as a player. I still remember setting out across a random (and very dangerous) continent in Everquest just because I could. There was no mechanical reason for it, but they let you do it. It was not story-related, but it is one aspect of the quest for freedom, the desire to forge one’s own path.
As a designer, I kind of agree with the terrified producers that it is scary and yet I love the idea of that challenge. Sandbox game-play is great, it really gives the player some sense of agency, but I agree that sandbox storyline is almost one of the Holy Grails of narrative design. As a designer, as a narrative designer (well, kind of), I am always haunted by one little game…
Dungeons and Dragons.
I am not talking about any of the SSI gold box games, nor Bioware’s amazing contributions, but the original game with the books and the dice. As a player, sitting at a table with a DM and some friends, drinking Mountain Dew that we imported from the USA just to capture the true experience, I was playing in a game with sandbox storyline. We could (and, Gygax help us, often did) completely derail the dungeon master’s stories simply with one little idea that he had not considered, and he would come back the next week with the story completely tailored to our new needs.
Later on, I was the dungeon master. I learned to adapt on the fly, to make new stories, even if I did frantically re-use all of the content I could. I was also briefly a Guide in Everquest, back when they still had UK servers, and I saw first-hand how a computer game could offer authorial control, but manpower is not cheap and we could only work with small groups. Despite this, we had a chance to tell free-form stories and make non-linear experiences. In short, any time I have seen it done, there was a human at the helm and usually one who was struggling a little while thy made the game up on the fly. I have a background in theatre, including some improvisational theatre, so I could just about do it, but could I teach it to a computer? Could I actually give the computer enough data to be able to do that, even if the coders could keep up? I honestly don’t know, but I really want to try now…
Left 4 Dead gave us the idea of The Director as an NPC almost; there are individual zombies, but there is also a simulated intelligence that creates the tension and the drama. Could that be a hint that my dream is possible? After Christmas, I should ask the technical manager… He would probably know how to bring me down to earth…
December 27th, 2009 on 12:56 am
I may be wrong about what exactly you dream here is, but given a big enough database of “building blocks” for random level generation similar to how it was in Hellgate:London for example, but with added status and possible events chosen Randomly from a database limited to few dozen, based on flags/triggers like: party health, items, characters, quests, previous encounters, progress etc.
With big enough number of thous “possibilities” many of them popping out here or there based on random number generation and not, sometimes not even bound to location but time, even if it won’t be the same as “human at the helm” it can come pretty close to creating the same experience for thous experiencing the story, if not even a superior one since computer is capable of holding a lot more information on one given subject and what is more important, notions and opinions of completely different people which could be absolutely alien to one another.
Add to all that some semi-individual NPCs ya’ve mentioned at the very end, and there shouldn’t be anything wrong with “staying in the clouds” instead of coming down to earth… that is forgetting just how mutch cash it’ll require to realize a project of this scale
January 18th, 2010 on 7:05 pm
I am not entirely sure what you are asking for. You have mentioned Everquest and that seems to satisfy your desire for a large detailed world where you are free to go anywhere you want even if there is no purpose I can remember thinking what a waste it was that the Wood Elf city featured so many detailed huts that were just empty. You could go in them but..why?
I am guessing that where you want to diverge from EQ is in the matter of fixed quests and monsters anchored to certain places. Of course in real life monsters probably would be almost as anchored as the ones in EQ ie animals tend to stay within a certain territory they have chosen for themselves so that leaves the quests. Perhaps what you desire is an EQ world where the NPCs have a lot better AI eg maybe the home territory of a Monster overlaps with that of a homesteader and if you happen to stumble across his farm he will ask for your help. No. That would not differ much from the existing situation where you have an NPC farmer whose whole purpose is just to do that. Perhaps the farmer just wants you to marry his daughter and work at his farm for the next 50 years. That would be realistic but hardly exciting as a gameplay component.
It seems to me that there is nothing impossible about what you want; it all comes down to Artificial Intelligence, manpower to create the world and people it and of course space and processing power to run it but you still need rules and limitations. Mallory talks about “once the limitations placed upon the player no longer limit the narrative, when the Master changes from the Limitations of the Player to the Possibilities of the Player” but that is how reality works; the real world has limitations. I don’t think a game that allows you get past a monster by pulling a bazooka out of your sock or becoming 50ft tall and just stepping on him or becoming a creatures of pure energy and deciding the monster is irrelevant would hold peoples interest for long. I also don’t think that being able to sit at home eating popcorn all day would be that interesting. You could decide to be a mugger but what happens when other players decide to be policemen and put you in jail for 10 years? You could do a job but many games already allow you to set up a factory company or shop or get into politics.
Perhaps I need an example to understand what you mean. What do you would want to do in a game that you can’t do now?
Twitter: AnthonyHJ
January 24th, 2010 on 2:52 pm
I think that half of what I want is what so many AIM bots can do; I want to be able to change the subject. If you stayed on topic, mentioned their name and used the key-words they gave you, you could talk to an NPC in Everquest in natural language. Ask them about the weather and they would either give a completely random response or just not answer.
What I mean by authorial control is more than this though. You mention those wooden huts in Kelethin; what if you could convince an NPC to go and live in it, to open a potion shop? It is a silly idea, but an example of the level of control. Or how about cutting down one of the trees which hold Kelethin up? The guards would stop you, probably kill you, before you got started, but the game as it stands does not let you do that.
Moving one step beyond, and a whole leap off on a tangent, I want to be able to script an NPC in such a way that if his farm gets burned down, he might turn to banditry to survive. Maybe he gathers some other like-minded friends who also lost their farms and ends up as a quest that did not exist earlier, based on the player’s choice not to help save his farm. I can hard-code this into the game at present, but I am talking about giving a character enough freedom and initiative to react to the player’s choice rather than a simple pre-scripted response to a simple binary choice. Many events in a game can be emergent, coming out of random chance, but the NPCs’ responses will always be pre-generated.
February 4th, 2010 on 7:09 pm
You need all human characters like you had in Jumpgate. Remember when a bunch of players decided to be pirates and surround a space station and charge traders to enter then another bunch decided to be vigilantes and protect the trader for free?
Twitter: AnthonyHJ
February 5th, 2010 on 12:12 pm
It is worth noting that Netdevil added an NPC ‘enemy’ faction to Jumpgate not long after release. As an emergent narrative device, the Dark Path were an amazing example of player ingenuity and the freedom players had. On the other hand, I am quite sure that a number of players would not have appreciated the fact that a faction of pirates could blockade a major trading hub.
Now EVE, on the other hand…