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[email protected]+44-1252-665215
I’m a member of
A New Vision for Interactive Stories
Ernest W. Adams
The core experience of trying to understand interactive narrative:
You are in a maze oftwisty little passages,
all different!
Three Traditional Assumptions
“Our goal is to create a sandbox that allows maximum freedom.”
“Interactive stories shouldn’t be games.”
“The player shouldn’t have tothink about any rules.”
Façade
www.interactivestory.net
A Bizarre Façade Playscript
(Audrey [the player’s character] knocks on the front door.)
(Trip opens the front door.)
TRIP: Audrey!!
AUDREY: Trip, I’ve been shot!
TRIP: Hi, it’s so great to see you!
AUDREY: Help me!
TRIP: Uh, well, come on in… Uh, I’ll… I’ll go get Grace.
AUDREY: There was a man with a gun.
TRIP and GRACE: (Unintelligible arguing)
AUDREY: HELP! I’m going to die.
GRACE: Hi! How are you? I’m so happy to see you after so long!
AUDREY: For God’s sake, I’m bleeding… (etc.)
Ken Perlin’s Law:
“The cost of an event in aninteractive story must bedirectly proportional to
its improbability.”
Holy $#∫†!!
Façade is a role-playing game!
(But it’s not a dungeon crawl.)
Laws We May Impose
Physical Laws No materializing chickens.
Social Laws Inappropriate behavior gets you locked up.
Dramatic Laws Bad role-playing can cause the story to
end. A war game doesn’t let you be a bad general. Nothing entitles you to be a bad role-player.
NARRATIVEINTERACTIVITY
ROLE- PLAYING
Branching Narratives
Branching Narratives
CHARACTER LIVES CHARACTER DIES
I the guy.
Situations
People
function murder(victim,murderers,relatives);
murder(King,Claudius & Gertrude,Hamlet);
Summary
Credibility is the currency of all narrative.
Role-playing mediates the tension between interactivity and narrative.
Treating interactive narratives as role-playing creates a contract between the designer and the player, such that: The designer promises to provide a credible,
coherent story if and only if… The player promises to behave in credible,
coherent ways.
Summary
The combination of human-written, embedded, but character-agnostic situations, plus a character simulator, offers: More flexibility than hard-coded narratives
and characters. More interesting dramatic possibilities than
a pure social simulator. … and it merits further study.
Conclusion
No other form of interactiveentertainment tries to be all
things to all players.
Why should interactive stories have to shoulder that
burden?
It’s time to stop apologizing for
not working miracles,and get on with the job.
[email protected]+44-1252-665215
I’m a member of
A New Vision for Interactive Stories
Ernest W. Adams
