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Wil Wheaton at PAX East

So the one piece of regular PAX programming that I really, really wanted to see was Wil Wheaton’s keynote. (My sister met Wheaton at Emerald City ComiCon a few weeks earlier and he mentioned to her that the keynote was going to touch on interactive storytelling, so I was especially curious to see it.) But, alas, like a bazillion other people, I couldn’t get in.

I did recently get to watch it online, though. (PAX East 2010 – Wil Wheaton Keynote from Matt Waldron on Vimeo.)

A lot of the speech is about gamer solidarity, the awesomeness of playing D&D in his childhood, and so on, but at around 40 minutes in, he starts talking about his experience playing Dragon Age: Origins. He tells about being in a situation where he is forced to do something that loses his favorite character from his game party, because of the choices he’s made up to that point about the main character’s development and alignment. And of course the fact that that moment was the product of his own decisions made it that much more powerful.

From there, he goes into a longer riff about the power and inevitable rise of interactive storytelling. Later, he gets a big cheer by mentioning Heavy Rain, and I sympathize, even though in practice I was not happy with a lot of things about the game.

It’s a keynote, not a deep analysis of the concepts of choice and complicity in gaming, but it’s definitely cool to see the narrative aspect of games singled out this way. And encouraging, too, to have a writer who is willing to stand up and speak for what interactive stories can do well. Too often even game-industry writers seem to be focused on the reverse.

Homer in Silicon on Heavy Rain

…to be found here.

Local Groups

I’ve added links for the Seattle and Boston area IF groups, both of which meet roughly monthly (sometimes more often) to discuss IF, share works in progress, and generally cheer one another on. Are there others out there that I should be mentioning?

[ETA: some discussion in comments about getting a Bay Area meet going.]

Linkage

Recent reading:

In the Company of Grues seems to be a very recently-started blog about playing and writing IF, not currently included at Planet-IF.

A three part series (1, 2, 3) on narrative structures used by Echo Bazaar (about which I’ve previously written).

Apropos of recent discussions of adaptive difficulty in IF, there’s an interesting post over at GameSetWatch about challenge levels in mainstream gaming. It mostly focuses on scaling enemy difficulty, but the idea of making a challenge easier after it’s failed the first time is not something we talked about very much at the PAX East panel.

Act 1 of Clockwords is out

Clockwords is a casual wordplay/defense game by Gabob, for which I contributed story content. It’s coming out in acts. Act 1 is now available, with more of the story, more kinds of letters, and various gameplay refinements. For those who played the prologue version, there’s now a more staged structure to the gameplay, and no microtransactions are required. (Yay! I don’t like microtransactions.)

Hard mode is really genuinely hard, too, which leads to more interesting tactical play.

More post-PAX

Some more accounts of IF conversations at PAX East, covering a wide range of things that came up in discussions and panels:

Paul O’Brian
Sam Kabo Ashwell
Iain Merrick
Sarah Morayati
Andrew Plotkin

The question of outreach was especially dominant — how do we get IF to more people, how do we make it easier to pick up and play, and can we earn money from it?

That last point doesn’t feel as pressing to me as the others. I’d like to see a wider audience; I’m not sure that selling is hugely important. I care most about some other forms of IF evangelism. I gave my pocket manifesto more than once at the convention, but here it is again, for those who weren’t there:

IF has a lot to teach about interactive storytelling, and we should be sharing the discoveries of the last 10 or 15 years with mainstream gaming and interactive literature communities. I was much struck — and a little depressed — at GDC to find that many writers talking about their work for commercial games still very much framed the discourse around what storytelling options are not possible in videogame format.

There seemed to be less focus on what can be done with interaction that is unique and effective: the value of player-controlled pacing to manage exposition; the interesting effects to be gotten from the player/protagonist distinction; the pleasure (for the player) of being essentially an improv actor with a set character; the rhetorical capacity of a rule-based system, as explored by Ian Bogost but applied by him mostly to political and advertising games; the narrative possibilities of short games intended to be replayed (as opposed to the lightly-branching long games the commercial sector typically creates).

The good news there is that there’s an active thirst in the commercial game industry for what IF has to offer. My experience at GDC was that a surprising number of developers had heard of us; a lead at one company even told me that they really want to recruit experienced IF authors and would be interested in interviewing anyone I could recommend. (If you want to know more about that one, email me.) The packed and overflowing IF panel at PAX may be another kind of indicator.

I don’t mean this to sound defeatist, and I think there are a lot of ways we could make classic text-based IF more accessible to new players, and that we’d draw in a lot of folks that way. On the other hand, I don’t expect that IF as such will ever be mainstream in the sense that movies are.

On the other hand: I do think we have a potential role to play in the bigger arena of developing interactive storytelling as a field, and the cultural impact of that will be huge.