Re: Yes, another monologue˙˙˙


Wed, 1 Mar 1995 22:27:29 GMT

> I have been working on an Arabian-Nights-like city for some time. The
>hard part is to build in a plot, in my case a conspiracy and a murder to
>be solved, while still allowing the player free choice to move and
>explore. It is like a movie composed of tiny individual scenes, but where
>the player might not encounter them in the order in which I plan them. I
>think this is the trickiest part of designing hypermedia - the author
>loses control over the flow of information to the reader. The individual
>scenes have to stand on their own, and there has to be a lot of redundancy
>built into the information you can get from different characters. Any
>advice or comments?

First, forgive me if this discussion has long since passed me by; my
newsfeed seems to be about a week behind right now. Anyway...

A possible solution comes to mind based on some experiences with standard
(non-computer) role-playing games. First, let me tell briefly what I'll
call the "Tale of Two Gamemasters".

A gaming group I was in had two gamemasters, who took turns running games.
They both created detailed maps and background for their adventures, but in
execution there was a noticeable difference. With one of them (call him
"A"), we never seemed to go too long without encountering some clue or
adversary, though he didn't give things away unless the characters
legitimately discovered them, and we could usually count on having some
sort of dramatic progression to each evening of the game (which ran one
night a week for several weeks.) With the other (call him "B"), we would
sometimes have long stretches where we were exploring places that turned
out to be unimportant, and sometimes found our objectives only by
brute-force searching.

The "secret" of gamemaster "A" was that he didn't actually have everything
in a fixed location. If the characters were in an area where there seemed
to be several choices, one of which led to further adventure, and if we'd
made anything like a reasonable effort to find the right way, the one we
chose would lead there. We had the enjoyable illusion of having a
completely free choice, but without the meaningless wandering that too
often characterizes simulations.

I think a similar concept might work for fitting plot into a rich simulated
environment. Basically, I'm thinking that you would have a "plot
landscape" that would not have to connect in a fixed way to the simulated
physical landscape. As a simple example, to get the player-character
involved in a murder investigation, if you wandered past a dark alley, an
informant might whisper to you out of the dark, but if you wandered into
the Casbah, he might tug at your sleeve in a crowd.

Now obviously, you'd want to have some flexibility, so the player does not
feel that his actions don't make any difference. But I think that if you
think of the plot elements as sequences of things that can happen to the
player, rather than things that relate to a "location" in the traditional
interactive fiction sense, it should be possible to construct something
that is neither a walk-through nor a random collection of events.

I would imagine that some of the basic elements of a plot landscape would
be:

1) Sequence - there are certain events that can't happen until a trigger
event occurs. This can be used to help keep the plot from running away
without the player. For dramatic purposes, it is probably worth
artificially constraining some events until the player is involved in them,
even if real people might be inclined to progress on their own.

2) Time - it should take different amounts of time to do different things,
such as travel different places, have a fistfight, etc., rather than the
usual one-action, one-turn setup. This may be less necessary for some
plot types, but action and suspense plots frequently involve needing to do
something "before it's too late", while dealing with obstacles that cause
delay.

3) Characters - The characters involved in an event or scene are more
important than the location.

4) Information - Rather than progressing from "room" to "room", or
physically searching areas, the player character should be guided to
possible plot events by information from other characters, papers, etc.
Most important, these pieces of information do not have to be fixed at the
beginning of the game/story; they can be determined in relation to the
player's actions.

I'm speaking in fairly vague theoretical terms here, of course. I'm not
saying any of this will be easy to implement, but I think it will be a lot
easier to create plot elements that interact to create a reasonable,
interesting story that it would be to create characters that interact to
create a reasonable, interesting story. The first step is to stop thinking
of the options as either a fairly fixed story that the player "solves"
(classic IF) or a fairly fixed world that the character blunders through
(pure simulation), and instead create a flexible story that interacts with
the player-character's actions.

-- Jim

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Edwards-Hewitt jim@visix.com Visix Software Inc.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------