Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling (13 page)

The difference lies in the intended experience. The game designer doesn’t specify what path the player takes to get to the victory condition, only the rules by which the player can attempt to do so. The gameworld is an orderly place with free will for the player. That’s because the designer’s control is exercised through the
rules
of the gameworld rather than the
events
of the gameworld. Therein lies the resolution of the dilemma of plot versus interactivity. A plot specifies events, not rules.

Therefore, the pessimists are correct: Plot and interactivity are incompatible. However, there’s something higher, more abstract than plot. Call it “metaplot,” if you like. It’s something like a plot, only it’s specified by rules, not events. And there’s no clash between interactivity and this kind of metaplot.

I’ll be expanding on these concepts in
Chapter 5
, “Abstraction,” after I have explained some points about abstraction.

The conclusion you must draw from these considerations is that interactive storytelling is a whole ‘nuther ball game, a horse of a different color, a rare bird, a queer duck. You cannot apply tried and true expertise (from games or from stories) to this unprecedented medium. You’re navigating through uncharted waters, and the rules of thumb that work so well in familiar waters simply don’t work here.

So it’s back to basics—all the way back to the absolute fundamentals and working your way forward from there. The most fundamental rule is Crawford’s First
Rule of Software Design: Ask “What does the user DO?” So ask yourself “What should the user of an interactive storyworld be able to do?”

When you frame the question in that way, the answer is obvious: The user should be able to make lots of dramatically interesting decisions. Conversely, the user should not have to make boring decisions, such as when to go to the bathroom.

Three problems arise automatically from this answer:

How do you generate enough interesting decisions?

How do you pare away the boring decisions?

How do you keep the storyworld interesting?

Consider the earlier example with Luke Skywalker: He made a total of only six dramatically significant decisions in the movie, and none is a particularly interesting decision because it’s implausible that Luke would have made any other choices.

This is a gigantic problem because stories as we know them are designed this way. At each step in the storyline, the character’s decisions must be so natural, so obvious, that the audience believes them. If a character violates the audience’s expectations, the story loses credibility. For this reason, storytellers bend over backward to create circumstances that make a character’s decisions believable.

For example, in
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
, Queen Amidala violates Qui-Gon Jin’s instructions not to contact Naboo because she’s concerned about the fate of her people, but, more important, the storyteller has contrived a series of disagreements between her and Qui-Gon Jin that serve to undermine her willingness to obey his orders. In doing so, she gives away their location to the Sith Lord, who sends Darth Maul to capture her. This otherwise idiotic decision on her part had to be justified, so the storyteller contrived not one but three cases in which, with increasing rancor, she disagreed with Qui-Gon’s decisions.

Even if you could design algorithms that successfully create plot elements to justify otherwise unbelievable character decisions, you would be ill-advised to use this method, for it would rob the player of any sense of free will. Would you
really enjoy playing the role of Luke Skywalker when all your major decisions are forced on you by circumstances?

This discussion leads to one of the most important design factors in interactive storytelling. This lesson is difficult to accept because it contradicts one of the fundamental rules of conventional storytelling. The interactive storyworld must present the player with decisions that hang on a razor’s edge, decisions that could readily go either way; the conventional story must give its characters decisions that can be made in only one way.

You will immediately recognize Lesson #12 if you’re familiar with information theory. This lesson amounts to nothing more than a dictum that the user be able to communicate significant information content to the software. If all decisions are heavily slanted in one direction, users don’t get the opportunity to communicate much information reflecting their wishes. “You can have any color you want so long as it’s black” is just another way of saying you have no choice, and “You may choose to fail to shoot down the enemy tie fighters” is a choice that isn’t plausible because taking this choice ends the story right then and there.

Lesson #12 presents one of the most important conceptual shifts the storybuilder must make in moving from conventional stories to interactive storyworlds. A storyteller creates a conventional story by striving hard to create a sequence of entirely reasonable decisions that lead to an interesting and perhaps unexpected conclusion. The storybuilder, however, must banish such thinking and instead concentrate on decisions that could plausibly go either way. This concept is totally new in storytelling, so alien that it could excite suspicion or rejection. If you review the logic of the preceding paragraphs, however, you’ll find that it’s an inevitable conclusion.

Oftentimes the focal point of a story is a fundamental decision or change that a character must make. Darth Vader looks back and forth between the Emperor and Luke, trying to decide whether loyalty to the Emperor outweighs love for his son. The entire story builds up to that one decision. A storyworld must be equipped with dozens or even hundreds of such decisions. Many of these razor’s-edge
choices will have less dramatic import than Vader’s decision, but they must still carry some dramatic import if they are to be interesting to the player.

Clearly, the task of creating so many decisions is a gigantic one; stitching them together into a coherent whole is an even bigger task. Because these tasks are clearly the most difficult ones a storybuilder must face, they become the focus of the creative efforts in building a storyworld.

The negative side of this effort is eliminating dramatically uninteresting decisions. Actually, this task is easy to implement: You simply bundle them together as inevitable outcomes. Suppose, for example, that the villain gets the drop on the protagonist and cries “Drop your gun!” The protagonist can choose between dropping his gun or offering some kind of resistance. If the protagonist chooses to drop his gun, you don’t need to follow that decision with verbs for the villain to command “Turn around and march to the dungeon!” and the protagonist to decide whether to comply. Having made the decision to surrender to the villain, these subsequent events are essentially moot. The storyworld need merely announce something like “The villain marches you to the dungeon, where he has imprisoned his other captives. You see this and that. Then the villain says some villainous words, and you decide to choose [Door A], [Door B], or [Door C].

In other words, you simply bundle together all the consequent events as part of the reaction to the protagonist’s decision, jumping the story ahead to the next interesting decision. You do
not
saddle the player with endless trivial decisions about where his feet should be or whether he’ll have one lump of sugar with his tea or two. There’s no reason that an interactive storyworld can’t have long chunks of noninteractive exposition—so long as those chunks are necessary to set up the context for the next stage of interaction.

Indeed, if the story is well designed, those long chunks of noninteractive exposition shouldn’t be necessary. In a well-written story, the gap between the protagonist dropping his gun and finding himself in the dungeon should be minimized
(unless, of course, the storyteller wants to introduce some interesting tidbit of information during the trip to the dungeon).

Here lies the real meat of the storybuilder’s task in interactive storytelling, and the essential task is to envision a dramatic
storyworld
, not a
storyline
. If you perceive your creation as a storyline, you are doomed to failure. If you have a story to tell, you should tell it by traditional means: cinema, literature, or theater. If you want to build an interactive storyworld, you must banish all notions of plot and storyline from your head and instead think in terms of a storyworld: a universe of dramatic possibilities, revolving around a central theme and exploring all the variations on that theme.

This topic cries out for an example. Consider, in the broadest terms, a storyworld about the Arthurian legends. It’s a promising foundation to work on because a large and varied collection of stories already exists within this body of literature. If you start off thinking in terms of a single story, such as
Romeo and Juliet
or
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, your efforts are doomed because a single storyline dominates your thoughts. But the Arthurian legends offer all manner of different stories; it’s impossible to think of these legends in terms of a single storyline. Yes, some dominant threads should show up in any interactive Arthurian storyworld: the love triangle involving Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot; the search for the Grail; the conflict with Mordred. But none of these primary themes must come out in any predetermined fashion, and the stories have other subthemes as well. It’s still possible to have a worthy Arthurian storyworld without any love triangle or one in which Mordred reconciles with Arthur. This is the key to creating interactive storyworlds: multiple but connected themes. An interactive story-world must present the possibility of romance, betrayal, battle, spiritual growth, and many other possibilities. Only in this way can the player explore a dramatically interesting universe. If the storyworld is confined to a single theme, such as a love triangle, it can develop and conclude in only a few ways.