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Spectre: exploring the relationship between players and narratives in digital games

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Spectre: exploring the relationship between players and narratives in digital games

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Content SPECTRE: EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PLAYERS AND NARRATIVES IN DIGITAL GAMES by Harris James Antonisse A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF FINE ARTS (INTERACTIVE MEDIA) May 2009 Copyright 2009 Jamie Antonisse ii Dedication To Nellie Jordan, Opa Antonisse, and Phil Wheeler. Your memories live on. iii Acknowledgements Spectre has been a group project from the very beginning. Without “Vaguely Spectacular”, the game might still be a ghost of an idea floating around in my head. Every member of the team committed free time, Sundays and evenings to the development of this dream. Though we worked best as a unit, I’d be remiss is I didn’t thank them individually. Asher Vollmer, the lead flash engineer on Spectre, was tireless in bringing the game to life, a dedicated problem solver and first-rate designer beyond his years. Mike Rossmassler, Sam Farmer, Daniel Ponce, Kim Cagney and Stephanie Meyer all contributed their formidable artistic skills to the project, as well as their expertise in design. Chris Baily deserves special mention for flying across the country, twice, to help out Joseph’s journey, and bringing the old Pure West magic with him. Bill Graner’s work in sound gave weight to the team’s visuals and brought them to life. Last and certainly not least I want to thank Sean Bouchard, my co-designer and co-conspirator, who has been there from the beginning, when Spectre was spelled C-A-C-H-E. His endless curiosity, intellect and natural talent for games make it a pleasure to work through any design challenge. To my friends and family who helped me along the way with support, criticism and encouragement, I can’t thank you enough. Peter Van Dyke gave his time to help refine and critique the narrative structure of the game: his razor sharp mind cut through some difficult problems. Ivan Askwith, Victor Piñeiro, Juan Carlos Piñeiro, Adam Hann-Byrd and Martin Van Velsen all lent advice, criticism and good old-fashioned wisdom to the iv process. Peggy, Jim and Mary, my three parents, and my sister Michelle: your support, extending well beyond Spectre, is the underpinning that all else rests on. Also, a special thanks to Belinda Lange for all her love and support in a difficult year. Belinda, you are my best friend, and I can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve given me. Finally, thank you of course, to my advisors: Steve Anderson, Tracy Fullerton and Jacki Morie. Your help, encouragement and advice was invaluable in shaping this game. Many people assisted in the development of Spectre, whether by playtesting or contributing ideas or stopping by with a slice of pizza when the thesis space larder was bare. There’s simply not enough ink in the cartridge to do them all justice. To everyone I’ve left off the list, I can only re-state in the message of the game: this page is just one summary of many, and while your names may not shine here, they are utterly essential to Joseph’s story and to mine. v Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii List of Figures vi Abstract vii Introduction and Overview of the Problem Space 1 Project Description 6 Design Process 9 Significant Influences 14 User Experience Description 18 Evaluation Scenarios 24 Discussion 28 Conclusion 35 Endnotes 36 Bibliography 38 vi List of Figures Figure 1: A screenshot of the text adventure Zork, 2 showcasing IF mechanics. Figure 2: The same screenshot of Zork, with text 3 replaced to reflect the opening level of Super Mario Brothers. Figure 3: Joseph Wheeler, standing in the snow, 6 from the introduction to the mid-year build of Spectre. Figure 4: A scene from Joseph’s life, one of fifteen 8 possible locations that can be discovered in the course of a story. Figure 5: Hush, a game project completed in 10 January 2008. Figure 6: One of the Cache prototypes, a paper game 11 with 192 story cards representing an area of space and time. Figure 7: An action-oriented game segment from 13 a recent build of Spectre. Figure 8: Jonathan Blow’s Braid provided artistic 16 inspiration for Spectre. Figure 9: The opening scene of Spectre 19 (from the winter build). Figure 10: A vignette from the winter build of Spectre. 20 In addition to text, voice is used to relay the events of the memory. Figure 11: Joseph’s eighth memory (out of nine) begins. 22 Figure 12: The “desire” vignette, one of the seven new 25 vignettes tested and evaluated for fun and emotional resonance. Figure 13: Spectre’s story mechanic prototype. 26 vii Abstract In most interactive narratives players physically inhabit the main character, guiding their avatar through a preset story with a marginal amount of flexibility. In Spectre, players use their avatar less literally: their actions direct the flow of a character’s memory as he searches for the nine most important moments in his life. This places the player in the role of director instead of puppeteer: he/she determines the content and tone of a story whose events have long since been locked into place. By taking the causality of events out of players’ hands, and giving them, instead, indirect control over a much larger recombinant story space, games can tell nuanced narratives while still giving participants meaningful agency over their experience. Keywords: interactive narrative, art game, storytelling, interactive fiction, database narrative, platformer, side scroller, game vignette, fabula, sujet. 1 Introduction and Overview of the Problem Space Joseph Wheeler has lived a full life… seventy-three long, strange years lay behind him. With time, however, his memory has thinned, and now he can only remember a few fleeting moments. Spectre is a new interactive narrative that explores this character’s experiences, and uses play to examine the idea that no one “story” can do a person justice. The concept of an interactive narrative is not, by any means, a new one: novelists have flirted with the idea of reconfigurable or branching stories since the early twentieth century 1 . Digital interactive fiction, or IF, was born in the 1970’s 2 . The term refers to text-based games where the player uses written input to solve puzzles and progress through a story. Early IF pieces were, in large part, inspired by and modeled after role-playing games. In a role-playing game, a player assumes the identity of a character within a world fabricated by another storyteller (often called the Dungeon Master, or DM 3 ). The player queries the DM for information about the world, announces their actions, and awaits the DM’s response (which tells them “what they see”). We can see how this model was directly transposed to digital IF by examining the opening lines of the early IF text adventure, Zork: 2 Figure 1: A screenshot of the text adventure Zork, showcasing IF mechanics. This player-system relationship remains largely unchanged through to modern interactive narrative. Players of IF nearly always embody a character within a story. They express their actions through keystrokes or button presses. The computer system, playing the storyteller, adjusts the story environment in response, relaying the next perception of the character. A wide variety of single-player games, whether story-focused or action focused, can be reduced to this interaction paradigm. The player is placed in the “role” of a character, internalizes and expresses the characters actions through key, button, or joystick presses, and the system, acting as the DM, responds by explaining the new relevant state of affairs. 3 To show the breadth of games that utilize this paradigm, let’s take the example of Super Mario Bros, an early two-dimensional platformer. At first glance, the differences between Mario and Zork may be more apparent than the similarities. Super Mario Bros is largely graphical, using very little text. Whereas Zork was controlled with a keyboard, Super Mario Bros makes use of a control pad. Zork takes on an implied first-person experience, while a player sees Mario in front of him on a television. However, if one changes Mario’s mode of input and output, looking at the player/game dynamic through a different lens, the results look surprisingly similar: Figure 2: The same screenshot of Zork, with text replaced to reflect the opening level of Super Mario Brothers. 4 Clearly, by transposing a graphical world to text descriptions and controller output to written commands, the game becomes a creature quite different from Super Mario Bros… and yet this IF experience accurately describes the relationship between the player and the story system. The player, personifying Mario, uses their input to tell the system what Mario does. The system responds with an updated description of the world surrounding Mario. Many single-player games are told, from beginning to end, in this form. Through this interaction paradigm, players have been exposed to a wide variety of unique and engaging experiences. They have embodied acrobatic plumbers and whip-toting vampire hunters. They have expressed actions through text, joysticks and gestural motion. They have explored game narratives through written words, rich graphics, and dynamic sound systems. However, this paradigm of interaction, if perpetuated as an unquestioned assumption, creates a practical limit to the kinds of stories narrative games can tell. The central character of these role-playing stories are invariably puppets, controlled by the player. While this opens up great possibilities, it also creates major roadblocks for story designers in terms of vocabulary, story structure, and content depth 4 . One might ask what alternative there is to a role-playing interaction paradigm. To attempt to answer this question requires the use of some terms from narrative theory. 5 Narrative theory describes the telling of traditional stories by dividing a given tale into two components: sujet and fabula 5 . Though precise definitions vary, fabula is generally defined as the “plot”, or the nature of events and the order in which they are understood to happen. Sujet, the other major narrative component, is the “telling” of the story, the quite-possibly-different ordering and selection of events from this plot to form a tale. In the prevailing role-playing paradigm, a player is primarily modulating the fabula. His/her job is to determine the active characters’ next moves, and subsequent events follow those activities 6 . Since the fabula is being constructed (within parameters) based on player actions, the sujet is often limited to a relatively straightforward accounting 7 . After all, if the player is ostensibly controlling the plot, a jump backwards in time cannot “explain” their later actions, nor can it have major direct consequences for the fabula. Players are accustomed to this particular fabula/sujet configuration. By adjusting it, however, and giving players less control over the fabula and more over the sujet of a narrative, designers may be able to create new paradigms for player/game interactions. Such explorations could pave the way for different sorts of experiences, and new relationships between players and their stories. 6 Project Description Spectre was designed to explore new possible paradigms for story-based gameplay. Whereas player action usually modulates the plot, or fabula, of a story, here the player is a participant helping to tell a recollection of a life now past, using his/her motions to manipulate the selection, order and tone of events. One of the advantages of this form is its ability to focus on a character in great depth. Spectre’s narrative is the interactive equivalent of a retrospective biography, focusing on the fictional person of Joseph Wheeler. Figure 3: Joseph Wheeler, standing in the snow, from the introduction to the mid-year build of Spectre. 7 As the seventy-five year old Joseph wanders out into the snowfall one night, he chances upon a strange young woman who reminds him of someone from his past. Soon enough, he is telling her about nine memories that shaped his life. As the player, you travel through Joseph Wheeler's memory and discover those nine moments for yourself, choosing, through your actions, how your life will be remembered. The player navigates Joseph's consciousness, turning from an old man to a child and back again, and discovering specific events that left an impression on him. Each memory is a different playable vignette, a short experience connected to a piece of text and voice narration. Some of these are painful, nagging memories that the player might try to avoid; some are moments of beauty or wonder. Many will hint at larger stories and events in Joseph’s life that can only be uncovered through skill and determination. No matter the path, the player has only nine levels in each play-through before Joseph must end his tale. Ultimately, Joseph's story will depend on which memories the player brings to the surface. Different stories will highlight different facets of his life and personality, leaving the player with a compelling, if never entirely complete, impression of the man, his place in the world, and what he sees when he stares upward into the endlessly falling snow. In this game, players control the flow of memory, using two-dimensional platforming mechanics to play through nine of Joseph’s stories in search of an interesting and coherent tale. If the player is able to follow a narrative thread, they are rewarded with a last bit of conversation concluding the story. If the player loses their way and cannot find a story-path, Joseph ends his tale in confusion. 8 Spectre is situated between two forms of Interactive Media. Mechanically, it has the properties of an exploratory 2-D platformer, using an interface and perspective similar to games such as Super Mario Brothers and Prince of Persia. In content, structure and goals, however Spectre is an interactive narrative, drawing on the traditions of hypertext fiction and database cinema. The game uses the former (exploratory platforming) as the player’s choice mechanic to generate the specific story of a recombinant narrative. Figure 4: A scene from Joseph’s life, one of fifteen possible locations that can be discovered in the course of a story. In short, Spectre can be described as a recombinant narrative platformer. Depending on the players’ goals and performance they will connect with a different suite of levels on each play-through. Through this process of choosing and progressing through their nine levels they will hear a part of a character’s life story. The emotional arc of this tale, its contents, and its cohesion will depend on their own performance. 9 Design Process From the beginning, the central design goal of this project has been to create a platformer that tells a story. For the development team, this meant making a compelling story that complements engaging play to form an experience that is greater than the sum of its parts. A corollary (or parallel) design goal is to give each player a narrative experience that is short, satisfying, and unique to his or her actions. Even though they are experiencing his life secondhand, the user should be able to sympathize and identify with the character of Joseph Wheeler enough to help him tell his tale. As an experiment in play-focused storytelling, Spectre is a progression of a larger body of work in interactive narrative, developed throughout my course of study. Two earlier explorations of this problem space were especially informative in the development of this project. Hush, a short-form rhythm game that depicts the events of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, was a project designed to induce an emotional response in its players. The gameplay is extremely simple and non-representational: you sing a lullaby to your sleeping child by pressing keys in a steady rhythm as horrific events unfold around you. This “non- interaction” proved to be effective in drawing players into the game 8 , partially through the strong emotional hook of mother-child, partially through the tension of split attention. 10 Figure 5: Hush, a game project completed in January 2008. The ability to connect emotionally with an audience or player is of central importance in a story experience. The development of Hush made it clear that a complicated control vocabulary was not required for this connection: simple actions, combined with resonant themes, could make for powerful experiences. In Hush, however, the depth of this experience was limited. The game placed you in a “movie” of an event. Aside from controlling the proximity of a lone soldier, patrolling the screen in search of your character, your lullaby is powerless to change the portrayal of events. Most aspects of the story are controlled for you, and while this may be powerful once, it provides little incentive to return to experience, and little that is personal in your play. The Cache, a dedicated experiment into new interactive paradigms, is the direct ancestor of Spectre. This project postulated a richly developed story which took place in the past. The users have access to a stretch of time and space where disparate events are 11 completely modeled out… in theory, every detail is discoverable and consistent. Users in this space are essentially “directors” of the story. Instead of controlling the events in play, they are detectives, telling/discovering the tale by moving through space and time as an observer and searching for a narrative thread. In our established terms, the player controls the sujet instead of the fabula of the tale. Figure 6: One of the Cache prototypes, a paper game with 192 story cards representing an area of space and time. Several gameplay prototypes were constructed to test out this idea. While some of these playtests sparked interest and curiosity, players seemed to have difficulty forming a strong emotional connection to the events 9 . While the ability to construct rich, complex and varied narratives was there, our abstract system of control, and abstract understanding of the fabula, didn’t seem to be the right proper means of accessing these 12 narratives. If the players were not embodying a character and controlling their actions, they needed some other way to be motivated, and some context for their activity. Spectre continues the experimentation into the complex relationship between “player” and “game”. The project continues the notion of a sujet-focused interaction paradigm with a game that was less about exploration of space, and more about the exploration of character. Many of the design and aesthetic decisions in the game aim to connect the players to Spectre on a personal level. Through the game, the player should be exploring and experiencing a story as opposed to deliberating over their next move. By giving users control of the story’s flow through the simple, familiar and direct actions of running and jumping, Spectre aims to make participation an easy and enjoyable prospect. The platforming mechanics inspire active exploration, and frame the abstraction of Joseph’s memory as a tangible physical space. 13 Figure 7: An action-oriented game segment from a recent build of Spectre. The use of a physical, instead of textual, control scheme for this narrative adventure serves two purposes: first, it sets clear parameters of activity for the user, second, it makes the experience less of an intellectual exercise and more of a visceral, physical one. The game further emphasizes the immediate moment by limiting and setting the length of the overall experience, and reducing the traditional puzzle “barriers” of platformers and interactive fiction to choice-points instead of roadblocks. 14 Significant Influences Thematically, Spectre is a game steeped in nostalgia for a life gone by: the story it tells is about moments across the emotional spectrum, from joy to sadness through the wealth of complex emotions between. The inspiration for this thematic content was largely personal: last year, on Independence Day, my grandmother Nellie Jordan passed away after a long decline into dementia. She had lived with our family since I was thirteen years old, and over time she told me hundreds of stories about her childhood and young adulthood. As time went on, these stories changed: they became isolated and confused. In the end, these stories were realer to Nellie than her own diminished state: she couldn’t keep clear how old she was, or whether the people she loved were present or gone. Through to the end, however, Nellie maintained a fierce conviction in the miracle of her life, and in the nearly unbelievable scope of 90 years, lived day by day. In listening to her stories it became increasingly apparent that, while summaries are our only recourse in describing someone once they’re gone, summaries do no justice to the immense richness of a human life. This is a difficult proposition to convey in the age of the sound byte, but Spectre is an attempt to do so. A traditional narrative, as a static encapsulation of ideas, felt unsuitable for presenting and reaffirming the irreducibility of our days. Spectre works to present the concept by presenting a life story to a user as a series of choices, both clear and oblique, choices that are exclusive, always leaving something unsaid. Spectre owes a major debt of gratitude to the recent developments in the “art games” genre. These games have opened up new meanings and thematic territories for 15 gameplay mechanics that are often taken for granted as juvenile or “retro”. Two games are especially worthy of mention in this context. Passage uses a navigational metaphor to describe the flow of time, from birth to death. The game’s use of an extremely compressed time-span to evoke the sense of passing time heavily influenced the initial design of Spectre. In addition, Passage provided an inspiration in its use of abstract mechanics not simply as player tools, but as artifacts that could convey meaning. Horizontal and vertical distance are dealt with and scored differently, conveying a message about breadth versus depth of experience that users could learn in the course of play. While Spectre does not use navigation to represent the flow of time in the same way, and its gameplay metaphors cover different ground than those of Passage, the treatment was a major influence on the game, especially in the formative stages of development. Braid is another “art game” that received critical attention for marrying traditional mechanics and nostalgic gameplay with an unusual theme. Like Braid, Spectre uses two dimensional scrolling platformer controls derived from the tradition of Super Mario Brothers, and carries its players through a non-traditional journey using an “8 bit” game language to convey its message. Spectre is also informed by Braid’s use of story: Braid uses text to allude to numerous events that exists outside the realm of direct play. Though the player’s relationship to this text-based game narrative is oblique, Braid served as a crucial piece of prior art for the development of Spectre’s narrative model. Finally, the aesthetic treatment of Braid, combining cartoonish and impressionistic 16 elements, provided excellent reference material for visuals throughout the development process. Figure 8: Jonathan Blow’s Braid provided artistic inspiration for Spectre. In both Passage and Braid, the courage of the designers was an inspiration for Spectre. Both projects used traditional mechanics to explore meaningful themes from outside typical gamespace. Spectre continues in this tradition through its nontraditional marriage of platforming and character study/biopic. There were many other projects across a variety of media that influenced the development of Spectre. The Graveyard, a recent interactive piece about old age, provided inspiration in its setting and nostalgic tone. Super Mario Brothers and Prince of Persia have already been mentioned, but the short-form gaming of WarioWare, the mind- 17 space travel of Psychonauts, and the customizable outcomes of GrowRPG also inspired ideas for game mechanics. Movies such as Citizen Kane provided thematic inspiration and ideas for new storytelling structure. Interactive fiction and hypertext, especially Adam Cadre’s Photopia, Victor Gijsbers’s The Baron, and Robert Coover’s Briar Rose, were important prior art that helped in the development of sujet-based interactions. Finally, Spectre drew inspiration from small physical curiosities, “trinket boxes” which contain a small meaningful variation in their message on each opening: specifically, magic eight balls and fortune cookies. Despite their simplicity, these are two of the most commonplace and successful interactive entertainment objects in our culture: they work by providing a slightly unpredictable experience within a set form. They are horoscopes, flavoring the user’s day. In focusing on replayability and uniqueness of story, Spectre aims to recreate this personal experience, where people can find individual significance in the particular constellation of the work on each short playthrough. 18 User Experience Description The audience for Spectre is adult light-to-mid level gamers interested in non-traditional and emotional interactive experiences. Some amount of sophistication is assumed by the content and the nontraditional, non-literal player/game interaction. To some, Spectre may be a curiosity: to others, perhaps a cathartic moment. Through the game, the actions the player takes are extremely simple, the bare bones of platforming. They can move their silhouette avatar backwards and forwards and leap through the air. Whenever they are in command of Joseph Wheeler’s memory, the user can count on this control scheme. As the game opens, the player watches a very short cinematic that introduces the central character, Joseph Wheeler. We see flashes of his memories, in bright colors, contrasted against the serene evening snowfall in which he finds himself tonight. The wind rushes underneath it all, a soft, persistent sound. There is only a little detail in Joseph Wheeler’s face, a few highlights picked out against the night sky. But as the cinematic continues, zooming out, he becomes a shadow, a silhouette with one salient detail: the rounded eyes of his spectacles. 19 Figure 9: The opening scene of Spectre (from the winter build). Throughout the game, every character we see will be a stylized silhouette, with slightly exaggerated but semi-realistic proportions. Each one of them will have one or two character-specific details (perhaps a tie, a belt, or the white teeth of a smile). Joseph is the only character, throughout the entire game, who has eyes. When you start a game, Joseph Wheeler begins a conversation with a young woman about the falling snow. He quickly segues into the central concept of the game: that in this moment of clarity, he can see the nine memories that he believes define his life. As the young woman asks him about these moments, the player begins the game. The controllable game begins on a stage framed as a dusty photograph of this same snow- covered hill. We are within Joseph’s mind, guiding him as he discovers the first memory in his sequence. These memories are represented as curious glows on the stage. 20 When Joseph moves across the stage and comes into contact with one of these glowing spaces, he is choosing (voluntarily or involuntarily) one of the nine memories of his story. He is transported into a memory vignette. Each memory vignette is layered with a short three part voiceover story. The first section provides a short blurb of context for the memory. The second part is a longer descriptive passage about the details of the event. The third and final piece is one of two conclusions, handling the same event with different tone and focus. In general, failure to achieve the gameplay goal of the vignette will lead to a more pessimistic ending, while success will create a more positive, optimistic end. Figure 10: A vignette from the winter build of Spectre. In addition to text, voice is used to relay the events of the memory. 21 The gameplay in these vignettes varies, falling into one of seven game types. Each of these games has a simple goal (for example, reach the top of the screen) and a unique gameplay consideration to flavor the execution of the task (for example, the platforms that form your path upwards are slowly falling). Each of the seven vignettes has a different emotional theme. These themes are reflected in the backgrounds (all done in a blurred, color-filtered semi-realistic style), the music (small textural overtures) and the gameplay (which varies, but revolves with rare exception around small-form evocative navigational experiences, such as falling, climbing, and flying). It will take a player approximately thirty seconds to complete a vignette, at which point they will return to the overworld memory space, searching for the next bit of the story. Depending on their actions in the previous vignette, the space may have changed: new vignettes will be glowing, and new sections of the overworld will open for exploration. Each section of the overworld will move the character to different points in time, changing his age (which modifies the player’s appearance and adjusts his jump height and walk speed). As they move through the space and encounter memories, one by one, the player will have an opportunity to follow different stories: new memories that are related to what they’ve already experienced will glow golden on the stage, while unrelated memories will be colder and darker. This creates a unique and shifting pattern of “goals” and “enemies” on each playthrough, personalizing each experience. 22 In addition, memories hidden deeper within the space will have more difficult attendant games. A player can choose to either challenge themselves by plumbing the depths of adulthood or stay within the more idyllic childhood memories. Figure 11: Joseph’s eighth memory (out of nine) begins. However, the player only has nine memories to explore. When they have gone through their allotment of nine vignettes their game comes to an end, regardless of the number of successes or failures experienced. Joseph and the young woman have a concluding conversation at the end of every playthrough. If the player managed to navigate and dig into a particular subject through their choice of vignettes, the ending will reward the player with a finishing revelation 23 about that theme. However if the player simply moved from unrelated memory to memory, Joseph will reflect the confusion of the story told. Motivated players will find, through these endings, the truth about Joseph’s situation. He is losing his memory, and the young woman taking care of him is his middle-aged daughter, though he is often unaware of this fact. Every snowy night, she walks out with him to listen to his ever-changing story, understanding with each passing snowfall another small slice of his life. Whether the player discovered this or not, at the end of their play session they are always invited to go back and play/listen to another night in Joseph’s life. 24 Evaluation Scenarios The first iteration of Spectre was developed by a team of seven graduate students and one outside artist through a process of brainstorming, internal testing of components, and subsequent revision. The first finished product was tested informally with approximately 30 users, with critiques and informal interviews following a play session. Based on notes gathered from this feedback, Spectre has undergone major revisions, with more formal playtesting at each stage of redevelopment. The revision process was separated into discrete sections: vignette mechanics, narrative vignette integration, and story/overworld redesign. After the initial prototype, the vignettes were redesigned to align with seven emotional themes. After being refined and evaluated by the team, each of the seven digital vignettes were updated and tested by users of various play skill 10 . After the play, these playtesters were given a survey to rate their enjoyment and interest, describe the emotions they experienced during play, and note aspects of each experience they especially liked and disliked. 25 Figure 12: The “desire” vignette, one of the seven new vignettes tested and evaluated for fun and emotional resonance. This information, which gave the team a sense of how the smallest kernel of gameplay was being experienced by new users, was used to make adjustments to the vignettes. As a second step of vignette testing, the game-units were paired with verbal stories. Each of the games was paired with verbal story and re-tested, first by oral “reading” over play- throughs, then by integrating recorded audio into the game. Based on a testing session focused on comprehension and enjoyment of story, the team found that most of our games were enhanced by the addition of story content in this form 11 . Finally, significant revisions to the story structure were made for the final game. This included expanding the memories from 55 isolated recollections to 112 moments linked together in a full, consistent character biography. The aforementioned “glow” mechanic 26 was developed and incorportated into the redesign to give players a clear goal and a concrete means to follow specific themes through their story. The glow system and new narrative were tested via a paper prototype. This prototype used a physical map of memories with “glow patterns” updated by hand. Each story segment chosen was read aloud. In order to focus on the story system, the digital vignettes were excluded from this test, and all gameplay activity was simulated with dice rolls. Figure 13: Spectre’s story mechanic prototype. After playing this prototype with the stated goal of “finding a complete story”, the playtesters were asked questions about their enjoyment, comprehension, and understanding of the unifying “theme” they were following. Results from this test were generally positive: the most frequent suggestions were for changes to the concluding “fail 27 case” where the user cannot follow a story, which has been adjusted to be more forgiving and positive. The completed revision of Spectre will be tested more extensively in the following months, once draft art is in place for the overworld. In these ongoing tests, particular attention will be paid to the players’ sense of immersion, clear understanding of the goals, and personal connection and interest in the story told. 28 Discussion: Further examination of the role-playing interaction paradigm and its alternatives. The role-playing paradigm that dominates interactive storytelling has been used to produce many great games. No one could argue that it has not been successful, and few, if any, would claim that the paradigm is incapable of producing interesting narrative experiences. However, the act of role-playing between a human player and a computer DM does create some practical limitations for storytelling. There are several potential stumbling blocks for those who attempt to create an interactive narrative using the role- playing paradigm. The discussion below will focus on three of these problems in detail. First, there is the issue of content versus quality of narrative. How can you create a compelling story with rich themes and characters while still allowing for player choices to create distinct possibilities? In most narrative fairy tales and myths, the nuanced progression of a main character’s activity in their environment lies at the core of the story 12 . While agency over events may increase a players’ presence and immersion in a tale, it does so at the potential cost of narrative relevance. How does a writer construct a Hero’s Journey where the protagonist can Refuse the Call over and over… or even shoot the Messenger? If we are honest about the alchemical and meticulous process that goes into making a truly compelling tale, we must also admit that the authors of such tales choose their course of events deliberately. The advent of character choices between “the lady or the tiger” 13 may unwittingly provide players with an uninformed decision between a strong story and a weak one. 29 A second problem, related to the first, is the issue of a branching narrative’s “content explosion”. If you do give players meaningful choices throughout a narrative game (as opposed to simply railroading them down a single path) and honor their choices with a division of content, you require double the content for each new choice you provide, which quickly leads to an exponential increase in the amount of assets to be produced 14 . As a corollary, there is an ever-shrinking percent of the total content in each user experience. The quality of any given part of the story, as a contributor to the whole, is seemingly less valuable. Last is the issue of the appropriate user vocabulary. How can the player’s desired actions be translated into the gamespace? To put this question more simply… what can you do, and what happens when you do it? Different types of user interface have been tried, each with unique affordances and limitations 15 . Controller-based video games map different discrete actions to buttons on a controller, strictly limiting the player’s vocabulary for interacting with their world to a set of discrete actions such as run, jump and shoot. A text interface, on the other hand, means that a player has a potentially infinite set of “verbs” available to them at any given time. However, this is limited practically by the designer’s ability to respond to and dynamically understand a player’s communications, leading to the frustrating “learn the language/guess the sentence” gameplay of text games. The example of the text adventure illustrates the problem of the interactive narrative in miniature: when potentially infinite possibilities come up against practical limitations, the result is often frustration on the part of the user. 30 None of these three issues are insurmountable, but they each present major narrative hurdles as designers move from a static understanding of story to a dynamic, play- centered understanding. However, the modulation of fabula through the user’s embodiment of character is at the root of our problems as stated above. In a game with a sujet-based interaction, these endemic difficulties take on a very different shape. To focus this discussion in specifics instead of broad speculation, Spectre’s interaction paradigm will be explained in more detail as a potential solution to these three problems. The game makes use of an area/path model of interactive narrative. The area of potential play is the full biography of Joseph Wheeler, a sprawling collection of memories that contains more content than you could (or would want to) absorb in one sitting. If the tree of a branching narrative is a divided collection of potential realities, our area is a deep collection of moments within a single reality. There is no single narrative to this space, much as there is no singular narrative in any life story… there is instead a rich tapestry of interconnected events. It’s important to note once more, however, that none of these events are contradictory. The events are not “choices” for the character. They are complementary recollections, all of which come from one pre- determined past. In each game session of Spectre, the player interacts with the system to uncover the desired sequence of events, blazing a path through the overarching area of story, following a thread of the tapestry (or jumping between them). They use the central world 31 to find the memories of interest. The levels are stored as XML data, and each successive level played changes the landscape that can be accessed next. This allows the designer to control the flow of the events for some narrative coherence while still ensuring the player has a variety of options before them. If we examine the first problem, the advantages of the area-path model are obvious: this mode allows the development of a carefully crafted narrative space consistent with the rules of good storytelling, because the events are designed and set beforehand with no variation. Of course, care must still be taken to ensure that the story events of the world are perceived by the player in a meaningful order, and in the best case, different orderings and constellations of events will lead to different meanings for the player. But in character development and creation of potent, charged situations, a writer’s structural tools and instincts are restored to full power by the construction of a solid, unalterable fabula. This formulation, in which the user directs the narrative that is being related by the system, also provides a solution to the content explosion problem created by meaningful choices in role-playing narratives. While it is true that a sujet-based interaction requires the development of content outside the core path, this content reinforces the whole experience instead of splitting the fabula in two. The area/path model of game exploration means that there’s no reason to have exclusively split paths: the development of player choices does not mean exponential work, and just as importantly each addition to content is complementary to more than a single choice. 32 This leads into the third problem: the mode of interaction. Role-playing activities are well-understood in video games: designers are used to players pushing, pulling, running, jumping and shooting their way through stories. To find the core vocabulary of player activity when the sujet is being changed, designers will need to think less literally. Essentially, the user’s activity in sujet-based narrative is a conversation with the system: they are asking the system to tell them about some things at the expense of others. Their actions, whatever they are, will affect the telling and tone of the story. A designer simply needs to choose a “verb”, an action the user takes to query the system. If a game allows the user to directly query the system/database, it runs the risk of ending up as a sophisticated ELIZA 16 , with all its attendant problems of language parsing and the designer/player divide. In Spectre, our team came to believe that the verbs players use in this storytelling should be as direct as possible. One inspiration for this is GrowRPG, where a simple click of a mouse on an area of a cube is a trigger to produce a story event. If you limit the vocabulary of the user to something small but satisfying, such as a click, it seems to lessen the cognitive dissonance between what the user expects to be able to accomplish and what they actually can. However, there’s something even better than making interactions consistent: making them inherently fun. If a click could serve as a way of asking “what happens next”, any relatively simple control scheme can surely serve the same purpose. We wanted the story choices to be a by-product of a natural, intuitive system of play. To this end we have chosen a well-tested and versatile game paradigm, the 2D platformer, as our baseline. 33 With this mechanic, the “area of inquiry” becomes a physical space. We did not want the act of choosing this path to be over-deliberate or overwrought, as it is in the traditional interactive fiction or Choose Your Own Adventure books. In most decision-based interactive narrative, tension comes from the opaque relationship between choices and their outcomes. In a sujet-based narrative where outcomes are predetermined, this relationship changes: the player is not making choices, they are simply steering. The tension is therefore not between outcomes, but between control and lack of control. To create an element of skill and immediacy for the player’s decision-making in the game, narrative memories in Spectre are triggered by simple contact with a memory-object. Depending on the story you wish to follow, a given memory may indeed be an obstacle to be avoided (since it takes up one of your nine memories but makes no sense in your current tale) or something you wish to reach (if it progresses your story). Events that are related to your tale will glow, while unrelated events will appear darker. Thus, story affects gameplay, turning powerups into enemies and vice versa depending on the players’ interests, and the tension of control is maintained. Exchanging the role-playing model of storytelling for another less common kind of interaction allowed the Spectre team to find a unique solution to three major problems in interactive narrative. Sujet-based narrative is not, however, a panacea for all the issues facing designers. Based of playtesting experience, it appears one of the largest pitfalls for this form of storytelling is a lessened immediacy and sense of purpose for players. 34 Spectre is an interactive story told through gameplay, but because the player does not “embody” a clear and active character in the experience, the goals of play are much more loosely defined. The game runs the danger of losing its players through boredom or frustration if they find themselves worrying about “what to do” in the experience. To ensure that as little time as possible is spent in this manner, design decisions were made based on emotional impact and immediacy. The setting of Spectre also reinforces the importance of telling a clear story through the metastory of Joseph Wheeler’s struggle with his memory. Spectre represents just one of the infinite possibilities for story games to move beyond the role-playing paradigm. It is not a blueprint for these games, or for the use of sujet instead of fabula as a player mechanic: it is an attempt to show that it is possible to engage a player meaningfully in a story without giving them the reigns to the plot. By altering the player-game relationship, designers can see the opportunities and problems of interactive narrative from a new perspective, and create new kinds of experiences. 35 Conclusion Spectre is an attempt to jump away from the direct role-playing paradigm in order to immerse users in a different sort of story. In the traditional paradigm, based loosely off the interactions of role-playing games from Dungeons and Dragons onwards, the system asks the user to create the story through their character’s actions, narrating as the user goes. In a sujet-based model, the user directs the system to tell them a story, much as a child directs a parent to relate a tale from memory: like that child, a user may ask for more details about different parts of the story on different playthroughs. This is not by any means a “better” sort of game, but it is a different sort of game. Like any complex undertaking, Spectre was conceived with more than one purpose in mind. It is a showcase of a new interaction paradigm. It is a personal expression, a memorial to people I’ve lost. It is an opportunity for a team of dedicated students to converge and work together on something original and challenging. Above all, however, Spectre’s goals are literary: the game is focused on experience and connection. Spectre is an attempt to connect with the user emotionally through storytelling, creating a unique and personal story constellation for each participant through the act of play. 36 Endnotes 1 An early example is Jorge Luis Borges’ Garden of the Forking Paths, published in 1941, which postulates a strange book filled with the narrative outcomes of different possible actions. 2 Adventure, created in 1975, is widely credited as the first piece of interactive fiction. 3 The term Dungeon Master was the title of the individual controlling the world and setting in the seminal role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons. Different role playing games use different titles for this role. DM is used here as a common point of reference. 4 The affordances and limitations of “role-playing” interactions are discussed in more detail in the Discussion section. 5 These narratological terms were adopted from the Russian Formalists, and are credited to Victor Shklovsky. More information on the origins and uses of these terms can be found in Richard Walsh’s article “Fabula and fictionality in narrative theory,” and Trevor Pateman’s essay “Formalism: Clive Bell and Viktor Shklovsky.” 6 In practice, the fabula is usually strictly determined by the designer, and play is “streamlined” in several ways, including the use of “path blocking” or “try again” mechanics for undesired player choices. The illusion of control is nonetheless important, since literal action is the player’s primary locus of control. 7 While there are certainly exceptions, such as Adam Cadre’s Photopia, both video games and interactive fiction pieces tend to portray a chronological sequence of events. 8 According to usability playtests and feedback. 9 These impressions are aggregate summaries and conclusions based on reports from individual playtesters across several different prototypes. 10 The “play skill” was not self-reported, but marked after the fact based on written information and perceived competence with keyboard controls. Eight playtesters tried each of the seven games, for a total of 56 evaluations. 37 11 There are two important side caveats to this statement: the first is that the stories, in all cases, have been written specifically to complement their attendant vignettes: abstract objects and actions in the vignettes are thematically and metaphorically linked to emotions and incidents within the memory. The second is that the story/gameplay overlay requires a certain elegant simplicity in the mechanics. One particular game, Fear, was a playtest favorite when divorced from the story, but proved too distracting and complex when paired with voiceovers. This particular game was redesigned to fit our model. 12 Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With A Thousand Faces, p. 30. 13 In Frank Stockton’s 1882 short story “The Lady or the Tiger?”, a princess, presiding over her lover’s criminal sentencing is presented with a difficult choice about his fate. The ending was left unfinished as a thought-experiment to the reader. 14 A well-known problem in the field of interactive media, summarized eloquently in David Shaw’s “Aspects of Interactive Storytelling Systems”, p. 27. 15 A lament over the limits of player vocabulary in narrative games is articulated by noted game designer Chris Crawford in his introduction to the Storytron project (found at http://www.storytron.com/overview): “One interacts with guns, alien monsters, tanks and spaceships, but one does not interact with thinking, feeling interactive depictions of dramatic characters. Further, this interaction deals with things that are exterior to storytelling. For example, in a computer game it is very important where, exactly, one places one’s person, but in stories this is so irrelevant that it is rarely even mentioned.” 16 An early AI program specializing in conversation, ELIZA was created by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1965, and was famous for using linguistic tricks to respond to a wide variety of text input without understanding it. 38 Bibliography Blow, Jonathan. Braid. Computer software. Number None, 2008. Borges, Jorge Luis. "The Garden of the Forking Paths." Trans. Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd. Ficciones. Grove Press, 1962. Cadre, Adam. Photopia. Oct. 1998. <http://www.adamcadre.ac/content/photopia.zip>. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press, 1949. Cavazza, Marc, and David Pizzi. "Narratology for Interactive Storytelling: A Critical Introduction." Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment (2006): 72-83. Citizen Kane. Dir. Orson Welles. Film. RKO Pictures, 1941. Crawford, Chris. "Different Approaches in the Quest for Interactive Storytelling." Storytron. <http://www.storytron.com/overview/ov_approaches.html>. Crowther, Will, and Don Woods. Colossal Cave Adventure. Computer software. 1975. Gijsbers, Victor. The Baron. 31 Mar. 2006. <http://lilith.gotdns.org/~victor/writings/0066baron.zip>. The Graveyard. Computer software. Tale of Tales. 2008. <http://tale-of-tales.com/TheGraveyard/>. GrowRPG. Computer software. Eyezmaze. <http://www.eyezmaze.com/grow/RPG/index.html>. Harrigan, Pat, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, eds. Second Person. MIT Press, 2007. 39 Mechner, Jordan. Prince of Persia. Computer software. Broderbund Software, 1989. Pateman, Trevor. "Formalism: Clive Bell and Viktor Shklovsky." Key Concepts: A Guide to Aesthetics, Criticism and the Arts in Education. <www.selectedworks.co.uk/formalism.html>. Reiser, Martin. "Interactive Narratives: A Form of Fiction?" Convergence (1997). Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press, 2004. Shaw, David. "Aspects of Interactive Storytelling Systems." Thesis. University of Melbourne, 2004. <http://users.rsise.anu.edu.au/~davids/docs/Shaw_Masters.pdf>. Walsh, Richard. "Fabula and Fictionality in Narrative Theory." Style (2001). Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, and Nick Montfort, eds. The New Media Reader. MIT Press, 2003. Weizenbaum, Joseph. "ELIZA--A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine." Communications of the ACM 9 (1966): 35-36. Zork. Computer software. Infocom, 1981.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Antonisse, Harris James (author)

Core Title Spectre: exploring the relationship between players and narratives in digital games

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Publication Date 05/08/2009

Defense Date 03/30/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art game,database narrative,fabula,game vignette,interactive fiction,interactive narrative,OAI-PMH Harvest,platformer,side scroller,Storytelling,sujet

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Anderson, Steve (committee chair), Fullerton, Tracy (committee member), Morie, Jacquelyn Ford (committee member)

Creator Email antoniss@usc.edu,hantonisse@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2179

Unique identifier UC1114833

Identifier etd-Antonisse-2744 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-235257 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2179 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Antonisse-2744-0.pdf

Dmrecord 235257

Document Type Thesis

Rights Antonisse, Harris James

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu