Category: procedural narrative

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.

Thinking about this more, and I ran across an article at gamestudies.org from September of last year, which seeks to quantify the narrative density of a game by how many Polti premises one might recognize during play.

I’m not sure I find this convincing, because it suggests that narrative comes in discrete chunks. What about pacing, development, arc?

But I’ve only had a chance to scan through the article so far, and need to come back to it later.