Have now had a chance to read more thoroughly the article I mentioned last post, Improving Computer Game Narrative Using Polti Ratios, by Richard Hall, Kirsty Baird.
The idea of the article is that the amount of drama in a game can be arithmetically calculated by counting the number of different Polti situations one can recognize in the game, then calibrating against the total number of events and the number of major and minor characters required to bring these events about. They further use these calculations to argue that games with no characters (“unembodied” games) may not reasonably be interpretable as stories. They propose that games in production should be improved by restructuring the story to include more Polti situations and to decrease the number of characters.
I’m in general pretty skeptical of anything that claims to be a recipe for narrative construction, but some are still more plausible than others. This one strikes me as especially doubtful, since the natural limit of the proposed equations is a story in which all 36 Polti situations are included in a tale with just two characters and a minimum of distinct events. A sense of fitness in the narrative development, thematic coherence, etc., do not enter into the equations.
The authors offer a sample revision of a game which does demonstrate concern for thematic coherence in that they eliminate a certain number of Polti situations at the outset, and they do arrange the game to convey a specific message; which looks like an acknowledgement that good narrative is characterized by something other than an optimization of their proposed equations, but they do not account for this theoretically. Nor does the article attempt to distinguish between narrative, story, and plot, though these terms are often treated as distinct in other game/narrative literature.
The most interesting part of the article to my mind is the part that suggests that story depends on how many situations the player recognizes:
We’re going to… initially propose the theory that if people can explain what is going on in terms of at least one of Polti’s units then the object that they are engaged with can be labelled a story.
Even this is a little vague, but let’s assume that by “people” we mean “the player”. This would suggest that a game’s emergent behavior begins to appear as emergent narrative iff the player can recognize the action as corresponding to some fundamental narrative element. But the article raises an important question at the end:
Do people in general (with an understanding of Polti’s units) detect exactly the same units in the same story?
This becomes even more pointed with something like The Sims in which the interaction of characters might be construed to be “about” any of a number of things: one can observe the apparent emotional content, but there’s no verbal dialogue. (This may become more complex and richer in Sims 3; I’ll come back to this point when I’ve had a chance to play the PC version rather than just the cut-down iPhone edition.)
Anyway: the point is that emergent behavior might be construed by the player as corresponding to different narrative elements depending on the kind of arc the player already thinks he’s building. (See: Alice and Kev.) On the other hand, the game has no way of “knowing” which situations the player is recognizing as narratively significant and thus no way of trying to produce episodes that follow (thematically or causally) on those the player has already recognized.
I wonder whether the process of narrative building would tend toward more coherent structures if the player’s interpretation were actually polled and then used to refine the character behavior model.
Whether Polti’s situations are remotely useful for this purpose, I’m not sure. But that’s a separate point.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
Thirty-six? I prefer Foster-Harris’s assertion that there are but three distinct plots – the happy ending, the unhappy ending, and the “literary plot” in which “the whole plot is done backwards and the story winds up in futility and unhappiness.”
I’ve not seen Alice and Kev before. It’s interesting stuff, very sad yet very funny in places. “This is someone Kev met in the park. Kev implied this person’s mother was a llama.”
I wonder whether taking the player’s interpretation of events into account in this kind of game might seem too heavy-handed? In a game where the player is used to guiding the plot themselves, it would take some care to find the right balance between pleasantly surprising her with plot twists that reinforce her interpretation, and annoying her by removing too much of her agency.
Properly integrating these game-led events would take some care too. Open-world games like Grand Theft Auto are terrible for wrenching you out of the narrative you’ve created for yourself by throwing you into a cut-scene or on-rails mission.
This is interesting article Emily, thanks for reviewing.
Hmm…yes, how do we measure meaning? Or even harder, resonance? Just having some of Polti points included in your story, like vanilla extract in a recipe, obviously does not ensure any kind of chord-striking with the reader/user.
I think at this point the metric shifts from a question of quality of structure to quality of style, which doesn’t seem to be addressed in the Polti measurement system. It’s the classic pulp fiction trap, which gamers and game-creators, and, it seems, game researchers have a weakness for (imho); just fill the story with “cool stuff that happens” and you have a meaningful story.
To me, it’s wired into the primordial soup of gaming. PONG, Tetris, Pac-Man…are all, in a way just Cool Stuff, bright shiny objects, purely designed to entertain and distract, and not explicitly designed provide us with truth about the human condition.
Oops. Sorry for making the previosu post a reply to a comment. A commenting faux pas!
Foster-Harris’s system, in my view, is simply designed to do different things than Polti’s 36 Dramatic Situations. When we come across a different set of tools, rather than replace what we’ve got, I’d rather add on.
You can find Polti’s book free online; it’s worth a look. I’m not sure how practical the Hall / Baird application of Polti is, but they’ve got an ingenious idea. In contrast, to measure “how much story” we have in a game, F-H would have to measure how much emotional conflict you have at any given point — difficult even conceptually.
Conrad.
“a story in which all 36 Polti situations are included in a tale with just two characters and a minimum of distinct events”
Yes! You’ll have a masterwork if you just add to that the restriction that you have at least 300 or more words at every long description such as GET KEY, OPEN DOOR.
It’s actually not physically possible to include all 36 Polti situations in a tale with only two characters, because many of the situations involve three or more characters.
Or am I taking this too seriously?
It seems to me that in a lot of these situations one of the three characters is an instigating element that could safely be left off-stage, since the other two characters are fighting about, but not with, the third.
But you may be right.