Everything all the time: anthological storytelling

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Everything All The Time: Anthological Storytelling
Scott Stephan / @scottstephan
First Submitted: May, 2015
Committee:
Peter Brinson, University of Southern California, IMGD
Richard Lemarchand, University of Southern California, IMGD
Steven Gaynor, Fulbright Company

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Table of Contents
1. Introduction, A Handful of Words About “the thing”, p2
2. Action/Inaction/Reaction: Everything, All The Time, p4
3. Early Works & Inspiration, p8
4. Sound and Vision: On Working & Personal Process, p12
5. An Evolving Object: It Is What It Is, p15
6. As Written: The Content of Everything, All The Time, p17
7. IN CONCLUSION, p22
8. Bibliography, p25

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A Handful of Words About ‘the thing’
At the highest level, I was making a thing. A video game, kind of, or an interactive
entertainment or, in party parlance, “it’s like an interactive book thing for an iPad. It’s a long
story.”. And, indeed, what you’ll have in hand shortly before or after reading this is an
executable piece of entertainment that is varying levels of interactive and tolerable.

But what I made and what you played are two incredibly different objects. What you played is
a media object and what I built was a mirror. I am, by nature, reflective. Maybe too reflective. I
recently ordered new glasses for the first time in several years and when they arrived I had
this complete freak out about how I didn’t look like myself anymore. I couldn’t just put the
glasses on, my gut instinct was to assume that I had committed a grievous personal violation
and I needed a long, mental trial to occur (Verdict: Not guilty!). Point being: I am always
looking for proof of my being, to assess and reasses and internalize the things going on
around me.

Yet, I never set out to make a project that was deliberately so intensely reflective of the last
three years of my life. There were inspirations, sure, but from the very first moment I proposed
the project, I began finding symmetries. My insistence on telling parallel stories, I realized,
tracked all the way back to my earliest days in the program. My interactive project for Andreas
told the story of a relationship from multiple concurrent perspectives. Anamnesis is a story on
top of a story. The best work I wrote for Maureen McHugh’s class was the story of a video
game character and of the aging twentysomething playing him.

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Soon, the story of Aubrey and William began to feel like the story of my life Of choosing
between security and safety, of trying to find personal, moral compromise, of feeling
sometimes small and sometimes powerful.The feeling of reprioritizing and watching my own
passions shift. It was also a reflection of my own fears. The fear that I sometimes give up too
much to be comfortable or that I’m too willing to bury my head in the sand on a hard topic. For
someone who turned 30 during the 3 years of the program, these feel like real, hard things.

So, there’s a lot to discuss about the thing in the coming pages, but I really wanted to take this
first one to say that I think so much of the thesis and what’s really important to me isn’t in
there. It’s in the audacity to try, in the broad belief that I ought to make something because
what I had to say was worth hearing. That’s another universe entirely from the freshly
graduated and miserable Brooklynite hunched in front of a Word doc of aborted poetry. It’s a
cosmic leap from the very real, very awful meltdown in a 2for1 Cambodian bar about just
what was I going to do when I got back home. It feels a hundred lifetimes removed from the
notebook full of ideas ‘for later’.

I keep trying to catch that idea in moments. Here’s a moment: working on theBlu: Encounter
and finding that the audio script didn’t work the way it needed to and just diving in and fixing it.
That took a level of confidence and belonging that I tried and failed to cultivate for a decade.
Here’s another: Deciding to start a company and raise money. Deciding to step up and handle
things like taxes and payroll and marketing. There are dozens of these moments from the last
three years, little teardrops of time that collected so subtly that I hadn’t realized how deep they
ran.

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None of this was possible three years ago. And so when you play or read about the thing ,
what’s interesting and difficult is really the nebula of influence and growth that surrounds it. I
won’t waste too many more words on it, but it has been the single biggest outcome of my
yearlong reflection on process and worldview. Without further ado:

Action/Inaction/Reaction: Everything, All The Time
Everything, All The Time is the story of William Howe, a father and husband and good man
who faces a doublebind when his belief of his own moral good is pitted against his identity as
a provider and protector. It’s also the story of Aubrey Landsdale, a Christian for whom her
religious faith and devotion to the environment are one in the same. Her conflict arises when
she comes to doubt her ability to affect change in the world around her and she begins to
ponder violence as a means to an end. It’s also a story about people and institutions and how
individuals can ever hope to interface with systems that are faceless and functionally infinite.
whose scale and size and complexity outstrip the ability of a single person to fathom, let alone
change or alter.

That story came together in the first week of thesis
prep, in the spring of 2014. I had been playing Silent
Age , a sort of spare and occasionally dull adventure
game for iOS. There was something about playing
as a janitor, a working man, who was thrust into a
larger context that rang with me in a big way. I
admittedly didn’t finish the game, but almost immediately after playing it I started to want to
tell this story about someone very average and someone very extraordinary and how they
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came together. The extraordinary person was always a terrorist, someone with whom the
audience would not immediately identify or see themselves in. Which means that I should
sidebar for a second.

Terrorists/freedom fighters, extreme figures and revolutionaries have always been a topic of
great interest to me. They contain a fascinating interplay
between motivation and perception, between the historical
and current context that always seems to get compressed
into villainy. I’ve always had the Howard Zinn view of history,
this understanding that history is always a matter of
perspective. Fringe figures, then, become incredibly rich
lenses for cultural and historical investigation.

And at the heart of that interest is this idea that aside from a very, very small percentage of
the population, there’s not really any such thing as evil . Very few people act from a place of
malice. They act from sadness and anger and misery. They act from impulse and
desperation. They rarely act from nihilism. The reductive impulse to call someone a ‘terrorist’
and other them into the realm of comic book villainy is par for the course. We can spare no
critical thought for our enemies and, in doing so, miss a potent and timely perspective on the
world around us.

An early, aborted work on this subject was a project I called the 9/11 Flight Simulator . The
idea was to use the language and mechanics of flight simulators to put players on the flight
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path of American Airlines Flight 11. Take your hands off the controls and the plane hewed to
the historical flight path. There is always a pull towards history.

I abandoned the work for a number of reasons. I never found a way to present the context of
the material as more than parody or farce. Establishing the calm neutrality of flight simulation
required a huge amount of work that I simply wasn’t ready for. And more to the point, I was in
the neighborhood of something that interested me, but I was coming at it from the wrong
perspective.

My father worked in the World Trade Center for more than 35 years. I used to visit when I was
a kid, up on the 64th floor. My Mom told the story of how they had the best view in town for
the bicentennial fireworks.

So, on 9/11, I felt like I had that perspective of the average American, that flag waving,
patriotic misery. It is not a hard perspective to have. Thousands of innocent people died and
we know who killed them. It is not hard to relate to that, the sentiment and motivation for those
feelings is evident, the first answer to to a national emotional calculus.

Yet, the planes were not piloted by masked comic book villains, but by real, whole people who
had to make the decision to commit a harrowing act of violence. What I didn’t see in the
national conversation was this: Who was Mohammed Atta? Who wakes up in the morning to
hijack a plane with the intent of using it as a weapon? Who trains for years with such vast,
devoted conviction?

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The answer to that question remains confounding. This was a man who lived all over the
world and came from a relatively wealthy family. Someone who lived in Hamburg and in
Florida and among western cultures and values. Someone who didn’t just show up with a
suicide vest, but trained for his violence. He wasn’t a disaffected teenager showing up to join
rank and file ISIS nor was he the cartoonish, turbanwearing desert fanatic. How did Atta get
to the point where he felt this was his work and how did he sustain that intensity when he had
so many chances to lose it?

That story, Atta’s story, feels more illuminating and interesting a thing to try and discuss.
Aubrey came out of that. With Everything, All the Time , I want to try and step through a story
of someone that you’d like and identify with and to explore the process of becoming more
radical, of trying to find what could drive someone to that point and keep them there. It was
never the idea that a player would support Aubrey, but rather that they’d see the syllogistic
logic of her actions. That she, like Atta, did not act in a vacuum of nihilism. That their calculus,
however grim, holds water. Worse, still, is the realization that people like Aubrey and Atta can
do in moments what decades of protest and petition fails to accomplish.

On the flipside, I wanted to counterpoint it with a story that felt much more familiar. If Aubrey
is the believer, full of conviction, then William exists in this state of never having to prove his
conviction. He’s a good man because he does not do bad things. He is a good father simply
because he has never had to be anything else. William’s story is what happens when people
who don’t really have to believe are forced to stand for
something. His indecision throughout the story is his
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downfall and I think that story is darkly familiar to most of us.

Both of these stories also tap into a larger theme about authority in a postglobalization
economy. When a company whose profits can exceed the GDP of a small nation is doing
wrong, what are your options? When they can afford to take you to court for a hundred years,
how do you affect them? From William’s perspective, why do we so often uphold the rules and
dictums of these powers even when they don’t benefit us? I’m thinking here of the Walmart
cashier, making less than a living wage, dutifully price checking every mislabeled item that
comes across the belt.

There are good answers for these things and I feel like those answers complicity, inherent
fear of authority, a sense of duty and pride form a bridge between the story of William and
Aubrey, even as they sit on very different sides of the issue: Action & Inaction.

Early works & Inspirations
Once I had this very clear, very vivid story I wanted to look at I had to figure out how to shape
it into a game. From the first moments, I wanted the interactivity to reinforce the narrative
goals. Something like Papers, Please is the gold standard in this regard, but I also wanted to
get away from what Ian Bogost calls “procedural rhetoric” , which in this case I’m taking to
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mean the use of gameplay systems to lead players to a logical conclusion rather than
didactically telling it to them. I didn’t necessarily have a lesson in mind, I just wanted players
to get inside these characters by performing and experiencing them.
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“Procedural rehtoric is the process of using processes persuasively...its arguments are made not through
the construction of words or images, but through authorship of rules of behavior” Persuasive Games ,pp 23
Ian Bogost, The MIT Press, 2007
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One of the earliest ideas was that you’d play the game as a point ‘n click adventure game and
then the characters would have cell phones whose apps would have weird little games that
would ostensibly be about their internal thoughts. I backed off of that because it didn’t contain
a component of formal experimentation I was just slapping a mechanic upon a tried and true
form. In as far as this is a thesis in a safe crash space, I really wanted to push hard on the
idea of what I started calling ‘ Playable Short Fiction’ and what that would mean.

With a lack of overall formal direction
apparent, I started working on a couple of
ideas for what those mindspace games and
interactions could be. The first, When I Think
of Myself, I Think Of Everyone Else, Too
hewed a little too close to the procedural
rhetoric I was trying to get away from. It
feels didactic, the player feeling the character’s emotions by evoking them via a mechanic.
Nonetheless, it provided a template for further works and set a bar for the level of abstraction I
was willing to entertain.

A follow up, Nothing, Ever , combined a
Twine game with a Unity 3D experience,
the two feeding into one another. The
combination of two very separate forms
text adventure and full 3D simulation
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became a major driving interest for the project. It’s what inspired the idea that no two sections
had to be the same.This notion was reinforced by A Dark Room , the iOS hit that starts off as a
text adventure management sim, reveals itself to be an overworld, turnbased RPG and finally
becomes a space shooter in its final moments. The sheer surprise of seeing those modes
revealed and the way they reflected on one another, yielding when the moment was right,
absolutely drove me to the decision that Everything, All the Time should be anthological in
nature.

An additional outcome of this early works phase was the belief that the game should be both
very authored and very linear. This is a reaction to the overall trend of games becoming more
emergent and open at the cost of being meaningful. One of my earliest statements on the
project was that I very rarely get the kind of moving, deliberate value that I get from movies
and books. This is fine and play does not need to be meaningful, but I very much wanted to
make something that leveraged interactivity for the purpose of storytelling, while avoiding
some of its less useful traps like the need for alwayson engagement and the AAA pursuit of
neverending content.

In particular, Ubisoft’s collectathon school of game
design is especially egregious in this regard You get sold
10 hours of game in a 100 hour package. Some people
love and adore the challenge of finding 10,000 beetles
hidden in virtual flora. I find it tiring and disrespectful of my
time. If a book or a film meanders for too long, we tend to
discard it. I wanted to make a very finite thing, but at the
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same time to build in texture and depth that might have a player replaying a previously
completed section in a new light.

With clear examples of what I wanted the game to be like, I turned my attention back towards
the formal elements. This is easily the most turbulent part of my project, both in terms of
player reaction and in terms of the way I’ve struggled to sell it. My original pitch was
“Videogames are terrible” and the most recent was a softer “Its okay to be boring”, both of
which are reactionary and defensive. What I was really trying to get to was a project that was
interactive and took its cues from games, but wasn’t really a game, it was more of a media
object that leaned on interactive principles. That kind of hemming and hawing about “what is a
game” is largely resolved and I’m not sure why I felt the need to bring it back other than a
broad dissatisfaction with what is currently available to play.

Its why I keep leaning on Playable Short Fiction because it sits at the center of this
contentious venn diagram of the things I’m interested in. I keep coming back to this use case
where its right before bed time and instead of reaching for a book or idling away 15 minutes
on a dumb app, I play Everything, All The Time . I want it to be that experience of moving
through a story, but I also want it to require input and reflection and require player
involvement. In other words, I want the book to be the app and I want the app to be the book.
To complicate that, it’s definitely not an ebook and it very much doesn’t occupy the same
territory as something like a children’s interactive storybook. I want the player’s motivation to
play to be one of wanting to see what happens next and not to unlock achievements.

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I wanted it to have chapters and each chapter would be a different kind of experience This
one is more like a comic book, but this one is a puzzle game and that one is a space shooter.
It was short fiction, deconstructed and rearranged, for the interactive form. It’s why I was so
resistant to the current formal experimentation as seen in things like Life is Strange or Gone
Home . They’re games rearranged to tell
stories, not stories rearranged to be games
and that felt like a failure of process to me.
That realization took a long time to get to and
I think it manifested as a general
disappointment and anger with games as a
whole. However, having that as a driving
manifesto, as negative as it was, gave me an
angle to start from.

Sound and Vision: On Working and Personal Process
“ Pale blinds drawn all day / Nothing to do, nothing to say / Blue, blue / I will sit right down/
Waiting for the gift of sound and vision ” David Bowie, Sound and Vision

Whenever I start a creative project, I usually have the vision. By that I mean some thing in my
head, the platonic ideal of what I want to make, a 10 second loop of play. The thing that
makes my heart skip a beat, makes me start talking about it with other people. Sometimes the
final thing isn’t at all what I saw at first, but seeing that perfect version of it always gives me a
kind of magnetic north, a way to orient the work..

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The single largest challenge in creating Everything, All the Time was the lack of vision. It’s an
issue that has dogged the project every step of the way. Outside of an interest in creating
‘Playable Short Fiction’ and an interest in exploring the outer boundaries of what is fun and
worth a player’s time, I never saw it in my head as a whole thing. Early on in the project I kept
a short diary and this is the first entry, from September 10th:

Yesterday I was in a funk because I saw someone working with their team and I realized that I
had no vision for the project. On stuff like theBlu or Aegis Defenders, it was easy to see the
vision and the producible steps to get there. Here, I felt lost. I had no idea what to tell anyone
else to do except to beg them to somehow inspire me. Keep talking at me. Shake something
loose.

This is not a new thing. Vision is precious and weird. It is itself usually a product of something
Work or experience. It is not a divine gift and you can’t just wait for it. In a lot of ways, the
somewhat pointless work of the last few weeks has been the work of preparing the vision.
This is, on one hand, pragmatic and on another slightly mystical Prepare the ceremony and
maybe the God of Ideas will visit you in the night. I believe it is pragmatic, but I love that
quasireligious element. We are our own gods, all of us worshipping the subconscious
workshops that give us a reason to work.

What I ended up doing to clamber out of this rut was: I worked. I figured that even if I made
something bad, the opposing force might, in a Taoist way, bring the good thing to the
2
surface. And that mostly got me going. Again, from the diary, on 10/14:
2
“ Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness. All can know good
as good only because there is evil.”
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The game is doing the thing I want it to do, even as it does so badly. Which is a huge and
enormous difference from “I do not know what I am making”. I’ve made a point of discussing,
at length, what a different working process this is for me. I usually start from the vision and
then work to attain it. Starting from a raw idea and using that plus painful trial and error is a
baser kind of magic that I’d previously thought was sort of impossible.

I think that last sentence really brings home the most important thing about EATT to me.
Which is that I never had the vision, but I managed to build around it. Unlike Bowie, I didn’t
draw the blinds and wait. I busied myself building content.

In a whole lot of ways that worked. There’s about 30 solid minutes of content in EATT right
now and I am immensely proud at how I disproved this need for magical inspiration. That’s a
huge win. But in a deeper way, it sometimes feels like there’s a rot at the center of the project.
Where there should be this central pillar, this supporting beam, there’s a vacuum. Early on I
knew that I wanted each part of the project to look and feel and sound different from any other
part, but it also sometimes feels like I’m just making it up. The lack of vision means that I’m
often guessing at what the next thing is and from day one that’s felt a little wrong.

But, as I acknowledged earlier, it’s also good to just be able to work . I think the real takeway
in terms of process is that its fine to not have vision, but that means I probably should have
had a much, much longer concepting period. If that central pillar didn’t come heavensent, then
I should have built it. Of course, this is a classic hindsight observation Between the pressure
of playtesting and trying to show every week, it meant that I had to get down to work. I very
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much did not want to be the person coming in every week with more concept art and no
concept. Writing about it now, it still feels like a rock and a hard place. Even with the hindsight
lesson, I’m not sure how I’d go about the work differently.

And maybe that’s the larger point That by refusing to commit to a direction, maybe even in a
way I’d have regretted, I undermined the work in a way that almost inevitably, tautologically
leads to regret. EATT never really developed that central pillar and coming to terms with that
and figuring out how to avoid the existential thrash that comes along with it took months. It
really wasn't until the second semester that I felt like I was working on the project without an
enormous amount of damaging selfawareness.

An Evolving Object: It Is What It Is
As I just discussed, the lack of a central vision was a real challenge throughout the project
and it meant that even as I was making it, I was figuring out what it was. One of the side
effects of that was becoming both over protective and obstinate about feedback and the
direction of the project. For the first few months I essentially refused to hear what was wrong
with it. By and large, that was a defense mechanism to try and protect this still incubating
idea.

A really great example of this was the text. The first few vignettes we did in the ‘Day in the life’
Prologue section didn’t have any text. So I got in my head that we should never have text,
even when we were trying to communicate a really complicated idea. I pushed Bethany
through multiple iterations of textless design concepts because I refused to accept the idea
that maybe I should put some text on the screen.
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If I had been more sure of what I was making, if the idea was to never use text, we could have
designed for that. And if I had been more willing to just let the idea breathe, then I probably
would have put text on the screen and stopped trying to design around a dumb idea.

But that specific instance (And a handful of
other moments in which I took my ball and
went home), also point to the antizen of not
letting the project be itself. The best thing I
ever did was to stop working on it . Shortly
after the start of the second semester, I
disappeared for about 8 weeks so that I
could work on theBlu: Encounter , a Valve Vive VR demo. I dropped into ten hour, seven day
workweeks. And when I came back to Everything, All the Time it was a minor revelation. It is
what it is, it is a work in process. It didn’t have to be this great big perfect thing, I could let it
breathe.

Ever since then, the work has been happier and substantially less anxious. But that process
of purging the anxiety that surrounded it’s lack of direction was long. Even worse, the lesson
that’s there Step away for a substantial period of time isn’t always viable. But finally
managing to relax around the work, to enjoy the way its coming together without the sense of
dozens of eyeballs on it is the best possible resolution.

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One of the major revelations has been to observe the game as a constant work in progress.
theBlu: Encounter has no edges. We sanded them all off, took every detail seriously. It was
agonizing, slow, precise work. It gives the sense that the project seemed to pop into being
spontaneously, that it arrived done. This is the sense that a lot of polished, complete work
has Books are created by geniuses, films by talented auteurs. The amount of craft and sheer
labor is what we don’t get to see. To that end, as much as I’d like to just throw out the
Prologue section of EATT and start over, I also love that it’s a product of the profound
confusion of the first semester of work. Maybe it shouldn’t be polished or done. Maybe it
should be a record of when it was made instead of becoming slickly timeless, without a dasein
of its own. Beginning to treat the project as mine was a huge breakthrough and one that took
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a long time. The second semester work is significantly stranger than the work of the first
semester, but also feels much, much truer to the original vision and the anthological concept.
Like A Dark Room , no two bits of it feel the same and yet it is united as a whole by content
and narrative thrust.

That approach feels closer to the idea of Playable Short Fiction than any one piece on its
own. The form mutates to match the content, all of it under the same thematic umbrella, but
unique to its purpose.

As Written: The Content of Everything All The Time
“Well you're in your little room/And you're working on something good/But if it's really
good/You're gonna need a bigger room/And when you're in the bigger room/You might not
3
In this case, Hegel’s state of being in a time and place. Perceptually perfect, polished works, to me, often
seem to lack this The ‘eternal’ or ‘timeless’’ works of such and such an artist.
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know what to do/You might have to think of /How you got started sitting in your little room”
Little Room, The White Stripes

Very early on I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to tell the whole story of Everything, All
The Time . It’s a substantial work when done right and the idea of creating any of it seemed
daunting enough. Still, there was the question of what to make first. I had a handful of ideas
for specific story moments I wanted to highlight, but for the marriage of form and function, I
decided to start at the beginning.

The first completed chunk of EATT is the Prologue, a series of 6 vignettes alternating
between the perspectives of William and Aubrey. The first major challenge was trying to
devise 6 vignettes that were not only somewhere in the ballpark of engaging, but could also
do the narrative lifting of A Telling us who these characters were and B The dilemma that
each of them faced.

Structurally, the presentation of these vignettes changed quite a bit and reacted to the
challenge of being interactive. The first pass was really inspired by film montages. It featured
very quick, surprising cuts between the scenes. William would be in the middle of filling a
beaker and cut we’re in Aubrey’s bathroom. The challenge here is that we are not watching
a film and players almost universally felt that they had either done something wrong or were
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confused about why they had advanced. Initially, Aubrey’s scenes were all timed and actually
required no input from players at all, while William’s always required some kind of action. This
was a really nice, clean design rule but, again, confused players enormously by changing the
rules out from under them.

One of the first moments in which I finally stopped being bullheaded was when I added clear
transitions and title cards before each of the vignettes. William’s first scene no longer ends
midfill. The beaker fills completely and his hand animates out of the frame. In Aubrey’s first
scene, her cell phone rings and needs to be tapped
in order to leave the scene. The title cards give us a
small summary of the scene’s action and then allow
the player to live it out. These definitely break the
feeling of being in a montage, but better matches the
needs of the interactive format. Additionally, players
tend to selfadjust, taking in the information they
need and discarding that which they don’t. Providing them with more information increases
the approachability and clarity for players who need it and those who don’t tend to ignore the
title cards The only remaining montage mechanic is the nondiegetic, consistent, looping
audio that plays over the experience.

The idea that these particular vignettes needed to be gamey vanished pretty quickly. Of the
6, Aubrey’s Petitioning scene and William's water testing are the closest to that original
gamey vision. Yet, both lack score or feedback or a sense of progression. They are simply
stolen moments and fate unfolds around them. The other 4 scenes feel more like interactive
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comics. Aubrey’s initial scene, which takes place in her bathroom and invites the player to
poke around, at least has an element of exploration, but William’s first scene and Aubrey’s
final scenes are very linear. You do the thing or you don’t move on. This is both part of the
overall design, but was also a deliberate choice to highlight the fatedness of these characters
and to communicate to the player their lack of input into the story.

The amount of linearity was a real sticking point in this section. As noted above, Playable
Short Fiction meant that it was heavily authored and highly narrative in the fashion of more
linear, traditional media. A good example of this is at the end of William’s water testing
sequence. A clipboard comes up and in the first iteration you were able to mark it as
“Polluted”, the correct answer, or “Clean”, which would have been a lie. Marking it ‘Clean’
would cause the screen to flash and William to erase the mark, rebuking the player’s mistake.

I removed the ability to make a choice here for a few reasons. The first was that nowhere else
was I allowing the player to make a choice, so why do it here? The second is that not having a
choice felt much, much more in line with the character of William. He’s not someone who
makes a mistake. He’s good at his job and wouldn’t ever lie for the sake of lying.

As a counterpoint, in a later vignette William submits the paperwork and is challenged by his
bosses They’re looking for a ‘different result’ and coerce him into marking the results as
‘Clean’, even as the water appears more and more polluted. In this instance, checking the
‘Polluted’ box here flashes an image of him family, of what’s at stake. In this scene I felt like
the choice had weight and narrative import even as it rebukes player input in favor of its
narrative goals.
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Trying to found the physics of linearity in this project was always a challenge, but I think the
point where I landed On rails, except when the narrative gains something from letting players
hit the button gives EATT its unique flavor. On the other hand, Aubrey’s petitioning segment,
which is easily the most apparently ludic of the bunch, is the one that players almost
universally like the most. More than it’s gamey flavor, I think what players react to is the
union of mechanic and sentiment. This is a flavor of procedural rhetoric and it’s extraordinarily
powerful, but also complicated and difficult. Pulling that trick six times in a row could have
taken the whole year and I didn’t want to spend a whole year on just the Prologue.

There’s an argument to be made for the ‘beautiful corner’, that perfect piece of corecontent
that will explain the game. Much of the highlevel feedback I got was to pursue that beautiful
corner, to chase down the thing that really worked about EATT . I chose to disregard this
feedback for two major reasons. The first was that by deciding to pursue an anthological
project, there’s a component of scale involved. I really felt that I needed at least 3 pieces of
content to comment on one another to really investigate that approach. One beautiful, perfect
piece would have felt incomplete and have fallen short of this larger idea of having a story
broken into different experiences.

The second reason was more personal. I wanted something experimental. I wanted to have
fun. I’ll spend the rest of my life sanding the edges off projects so that they go down easy.
This may be a last, truly free chunk of time to spend on a project. The idea of spending that
time trying to please everybody felt wrong, so I decided to head a little further down the rabbit
hole.
22

The two most recent portions of the game are a textadventure employee personality quiz and
a and LSD fueled spaceshooter about fear and faith. Both portions are definite responses to
the pace and content of the Prologue. The text adventure is a response to its linearity and
visual focus. I wanted to create something that was more open, but also literally confined.
Where the prologue takes place over a few days and features nondiegetic music, everything
in the textadventure takes place in that moment, in that ambience. It’s much more immediate.
The space shooter comes from trying to find an event for Aubrey that would help her come
into her own and also create a very gamelike piece of content with a sly nod to the form. As
much as I resisted deliberately ludic, structured mechanics, I still wanted to use use those
tropes to explore a character.

The idea of using mechanics to investigate a character without a clear rhetorical purpose in
mind is the clearest example of Playable Short Fiction that came out of the project. It shares
an interest with systemsbased storytelling techniques, but lacks the editorial design of those
systems and mechanics. It aims for emotion and provocation, not to merely push players to a
predefined conclusion.

IN CONCLUSION

Finding a conclusion is difficult because nothing is done. The two major works, Everything, All
The Time and the work of finding myself as a creator and productive person, are not
done.Talk to me this time next year and I’ll probably have a fresh batch of realizations about
the project. There’s that old adage about the journey being more important than the
23
destination and as much as I hate it, it rings true here. The degree and the thesis are both
biproducts of the work. Playable Short Fiction is the result of having the guts to try and bring
an idea to life. There are lessons learned and things to be absorbed and contextualized, but
the really important takeaways will never be signed, sealed and delivered. The really
important stuff is like a sourdough starter You live with it, you feed it, you grow together. It
becomes part of your work, always. The things I’ve learned in the program are going to be the
foundation of the work I do for the rest of my life.

That idea is hard to tie up. What’s most important to me is that all of this the project, my life
and my experience in the program would have been impossible three years ago. The ability
to have an idea and shepherd it into reality would have been impossible. It feels disingenuous
to put a conclusion on that, but here goes: Games are this amazing, multidisciplinary fusion
of the arts. They’re visual and intellectual, technical and artistic. But most importantly, they’re
young. What I really wanted to do with Everything, All The Time was to take a walk with the
form, to find out where the walls are. I feel like the project sits at a unique intersection.

A lot of people look at the mobile revolution and think that consumers are hungry for dumb,
reductive play experiences that hoover coins out of their pockets. I think that what it says is
that there are more players looking for more experiences. Maybe your core gamer will find
EATT boring, but the rapid expansion of what we’d consider ‘players’ means that as creators
we should be exploring the outer limits of the interactive form to see what things we can do
now that we couldn’t do five or ten years ago. The idea of doing very linear, highly narrative
experiences is old (Think Sierra adventure games), but also new (It sits in opposition to
engagement loops and open world design which are prevailing design trends of the era).
24

The hope is that by designing at the limits of the era the audience expands and the form
becomes more inclusive. If by creating experiences that are more diverse we can find more
people who say, “That’s something for me”, that’s a win. It’s a win artistically and
commercially.

At the end of the day, I hope that someone puts their hands on EATT right in that reading
sweet spot before bed and says, “Oh, I didn’t know they made things like this”. That they find
an equivalence between traditional media forms and the interactive one. As a creator and I
can say that now this is the highest good, the ability to communicate and deliver fulfillment.
The ability to reach across distances and time and commiserate, explore, provoke and share.
This is, after all, the reason we all started playing in the first place.

25
Bibliography
Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2007.
2-3. Print.
Gone Home , version 1.0, Fullbright Co., August 15th, 2013. Video Game
Life is Strange , Build ID 557524, DONTNOD, January 30th, 2015. Video Game
Mitchell, Stephen. Tao Te Ching . London: Frances Lincoln, 1999. Print.

Asset Metadata

Creator Stephan, Scott (author)

Core Title Everything all the time: anthological storytelling

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Publication Date 04/29/2015

Defense Date 04/15/2015

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

Tag digital storytelling,Fiction,interactive storytelling,Mobile,OAI-PMH Harvest,playable short fiction,tablet

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Advisor Brinson, Peter (committee chair), Gaynor, Steven (committee member), Lemarchand, Richard (committee member)

Creator Email scott.stephan@gmail.com,srstepha@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-565618

Unique identifier UC11300402

Identifier etd-StephanSco-3425.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-565618 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-StephanSco-3425.pdf

Dmrecord 565618

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Stephan, Scott

Type texts

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

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Everything, All The Time is an experiment is designing a framework for interactive fiction pieces. The goal is to develop a criteria for melding the interactive and thematic and, in the process, enhance the fiction via interactivity. This is in opposition to games like Life is Strange or Gone Home, which simply place their narratives on top of existing design and interactive mechanics.