Category: theory

Readings, News

A new post from the Echo Bazaar folk, on choices in games — including what they call the “reflective” choice, which invites the player to think about why he’s doing something, or act expressively, without necessarily expecting the game to pick up on that. We’ve seen that in IF in a few places. Certain portions at the beginning of Blue Lacuna do this thing of collecting responses from the player without using them to affect the world model — but they certainly affect the experience of playing and the meaning of the story.

PAX Prime is going to feature an IF panel and its own IF suite! (That’s Seattle, Sept. 3-5.) But tickets are selling quickly. If you want to go, you may want to make your plans soon.

“Designing Morality in Games”

There’s an interesting post on designing games with moral choice (and moral ambiguity) over at Gamasutra, which looks at the Bioshock games especially and speculates about the value of moving away from super-simplistic black-and-white good and evil, which is a pet peeve of mine as well.

Something the article doesn’t touch on much, though, is why we are including these moral choices in the first place – something I think we need to know in order to decide what sorts of structure and context should be provided. Are we making a rhetorical point about something we believe? Are we telling the story of how a particular character in a particular context wrestled with moral decision-making? Are we pushing the player to explore his beliefs about a difficult situation (a la The Baron or Fate)?

Moods in conversation

Question from Conrad Cook:

I’m wondering how you mesh variable tracking with conversation.
You’ve mentioned _Alabaster_ tracks a lot of variables, and I can
conceptualize how that would be reflected in, for example, the
artwork. But I’ve been wrestling for a while with how to use the
conversation to move the NPC’s variables, and how to have those
variables be reflected in the course of the conversation, and so far
I’m not winning that wrestling match.

Alabaster’s source is available, so it’s possible just to look at what’s going on there — but possibly more difficult to suss out exactly what the plan is throughout the source. A technical discussion follows.

Continue reading “Moods in conversation”

Blogs of the Round Table: Denouement

Blogs of the Round Table is a group that writes on various game design issues, each month working from a new prompt provided by Corvus Elrod. This month the prompt is on a topic that’s come up several times for me, and that I’m thinking about again as I rework the ending of my WIP:

How can the denouement be incorporated into gameplay? In literary forms, it is most often the events that take place after the plot’s climax that form your lasting opinion of the story. A well constructed denouement acts almost as a payoff, where protagonists and antagonists alike realize and adjust to the consequences of their actions…

But the denouement is most neglected in video games where it is often relegated to a short congratulatory cut scene, or at most–a slide show of consequences. This month’s topic challenges you to explore how the denouement can be expressed as gameplay.

Continue reading “Blogs of the Round Table: Denouement”

Drama Management with Anchorhead-based Test Case

Manu Sharma, Santi Ontañón, Manish Mehta, and Ashwin Ram are publishing some research into drama management using a simplified version of Anchorhead (with a choose-your-own-adventure interface rather than a text parser).

The full paper is worth a read (though fairly technical), but the gist is that they proceeded by taking a series of cases from players, determining which players liked which subplots. They then designed a drama manager that would compare the current player’s behavior against its cases, determine which subplots this player was likely to be most interested in, and hint the player in the direction of those subplots. The result appears to be a better experience especially for non-gamers, though some players (especially the more experienced ones) disliked being over-hinted in the direction of things they would enjoy.

When no confident predictions can be made from player predictions, the drama management model falls back on author-defined rules about what to present when.

I have a bunch of minor quibbles with particulars of the study, but found the conclusions intriguing.

Continue reading “Drama Management with Anchorhead-based Test Case”