Category: theory
Hall and Baird on Polti again
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.
More on the emergent narrative issue
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.
Sims 3 (Mobile version)
Lately I’ve been thinking more about emergent narrative — in particular, the idea that a sandbox-style game can produce elements that the player then weaves together into a story that he finds satisfying. The story isn’t really a product of the game, and it’s not necessarily true that anyone else playing the game would perceive the same story. The onus is on the player to determine which of the many otherwise insignificant events contribute to the narrative.
I’m pretty skeptical about this idea. Or rather: I can see that some such thing does happen, in that lots of (say) Sims users construct elaborate stories with their characters, and share movies and narratives. But in general this is not what I would call interactive storytelling; it seems more like handing the user a really complicated dollhouse that happens to have built-in tools for recording and editing the best scenes.
Still, I thought I ought to put a bit more research into this topic before I dismiss the possibilities. It’s been a while since I had (and got tired of the grinding aspects of) the original Sims, so I tried downloading Sims 3 for my iPhone.
Alas, I find it a dead bore.
Two From the List
I’ve been playing with a few things on the enormous to-be-played list from a few days ago, though of course there are so many things on there that it will take quite some time to get through.
Braid: I have now finished. It’s of course a masterpiece in the game-play area, and doesn’t need me to say so. I usually have a really hard time getting through platformers, since I don’t have the right combination of patience and skill. As advertised, Braid minimizes the amount of frustration involved in playing a platformer while offering a diverse range of genuinely interesting puzzles; and while there were still a handful of these that were too finicky and that I would have been happy to skip, nonetheless it was the best time I’ve ever had with the format.
As far as storytelling goes, it’s a bit more confused: there is some really intriguing material in the final level, in which the meaning of events is revised and reinterpreted in a way that naturally connects to the gameplay itself; and even before that point, many elements of the game are framed so that the play is metaphorically significant.
But what I get out of all that is not really a story (good luck finding two people who even agree on what happens in Braid) so much as a series of meditations on some of the common problems in relationships and self-definition. Some of it’s thought-provoking, some a little on the obvious side. Admittedly I usually find this kind of content under ask.metafilter’s human relations tag rather than in a game, and I’m generally encouraged when a game branches out to incorporate new material. So hooray for that.
Nettestadt Troll was recommended to me as an example of good Ren’Py work, and I’m afraid I didn’t get nearly as far with that. The premise is uncomfortable to start with: girl gets abducted and raped but discovers she kind of likes it and/or falls in love with her captor. This is a fantasy to be found in many forms of literature from Menander to a certain genre of 1970s romance novel, but it’s something that would need to be handled with a fair amount of psychological sensitivity in order to be a story I want to read. Otherwise, what you have is basically porn for a specific audience.
I wasn’t crazy about the art or the prose quality, either, and the pacing left me kind of bored during the first few chapters; as for the world-building, it’s extremely vague and careless, featuring both alchemists and telegrams, feudal hierarchies and shops with “receptionists”.
I did stick with it for a while, though, in case this was a case of poor writing craft combined with a strong storytelling sensibility. Unfortunately, once there started to be choices to make, they were often on the level of random and incidental choice: e.g., what dish do I make for my supper while waiting for the troll to come home and rape me again? It’s a bit less inane than Dream Day Wedding, but the choose-your-own whatever aspects display the same lack of significant agency that I complained about there.
Conversation Methodologies
My latest Homer in Silicon column is a bit of a departure from the norm: instead of offering a critique of a game or set of games, I discuss conversation modeling methods, in an attempt to share some interactive fiction theory with a wider audience and to encourage more discussion about conversation modeling in general.
ETA: there is some further discussion of the ideas at TIGSource.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 