Interaction and Flow
I read this very good article the other day... Losing for the Win: Defeat and Failure in gaming from Ben Schneider.
And it actually got me thinking about Joseph Campbell and the power of myth and its relationship with how we perceive stories.
The problem with story and interaction is the risk of an open ended scenery (pretty much like in The sims). Schneider's article is brilliant in a way because it scratches the surface of what I think is a very good solution to this problem.
He discuss how defeat and failure in a game can affect the flow of the narrative. If the player feels that the failure was related to something he done wrong, he'll go back to his last "save point" and do it again, breaking the "flow" of the story.
On a truly interactive story, player actions shouldn't be neither right or wrong, but they should be taken into account in order to produce a "fable", something that cam be perceived as a story. Pretty much like the "Campbellian" way of seeing it.
Take life itself for instance, it is a constant streamline of events, life is not a story but you can find infinite stories within people's lives. And this little stories are narrative units. If you can extract little narrative unites from life, or simulations, there should be a way of generating a streamline of events within a certain space and time, that would consist in a single narrative unit that can't be repeated in the exact same way.
What I'm trying to say is. Interaction and narration don't go along because of control. On interaction, the agent (or player, or actor...) has control, and in narratives the control lies exclusively in the hands of the author. By taking the control out of the hands of the author and sharing it with the player you mine the nuances that only the author can give to the narrative.
Take the LucasArts Adventures for instance, there is a story, that the player has absolutely no control over. There is a feeble sense of interaction because you have to solve puzzles and push the hero forward in order to advance the narrative, much like the effort of turning a page on a book.
In a sense I think that's still what I want to do, I don't want to give the control of the story to the players, because their behaviour is unpredictable, but I don't want to hold the control over the narrative as well, because I kill the amount of possibilities a scenery can give me.
How do I "generate" a verisimilar and complete story out of interactive elements?
And it actually got me thinking about Joseph Campbell and the power of myth and its relationship with how we perceive stories.
The problem with story and interaction is the risk of an open ended scenery (pretty much like in The sims). Schneider's article is brilliant in a way because it scratches the surface of what I think is a very good solution to this problem.
He discuss how defeat and failure in a game can affect the flow of the narrative. If the player feels that the failure was related to something he done wrong, he'll go back to his last "save point" and do it again, breaking the "flow" of the story.
On a truly interactive story, player actions shouldn't be neither right or wrong, but they should be taken into account in order to produce a "fable", something that cam be perceived as a story. Pretty much like the "Campbellian" way of seeing it.
Take life itself for instance, it is a constant streamline of events, life is not a story but you can find infinite stories within people's lives. And this little stories are narrative units. If you can extract little narrative unites from life, or simulations, there should be a way of generating a streamline of events within a certain space and time, that would consist in a single narrative unit that can't be repeated in the exact same way.
What I'm trying to say is. Interaction and narration don't go along because of control. On interaction, the agent (or player, or actor...) has control, and in narratives the control lies exclusively in the hands of the author. By taking the control out of the hands of the author and sharing it with the player you mine the nuances that only the author can give to the narrative.
Take the LucasArts Adventures for instance, there is a story, that the player has absolutely no control over. There is a feeble sense of interaction because you have to solve puzzles and push the hero forward in order to advance the narrative, much like the effort of turning a page on a book.
In a sense I think that's still what I want to do, I don't want to give the control of the story to the players, because their behaviour is unpredictable, but I don't want to hold the control over the narrative as well, because I kill the amount of possibilities a scenery can give me.
How do I "generate" a verisimilar and complete story out of interactive elements?
posted by Hulshof at 10:09 AM
0 comments
...we met after a conference he made in Barcelona and were in a group walking in the streets looking for a place to drink and eat something.
Second: yes, he once stated that "video games are dead" (Gamasutra, June, 2006). But that wasn't what he said to me.
I was telling him about mi interest in studying games narrative potential and asking him about the relations between games and narrative and Crawford's told me that he thinks that "games have nothing to say to narrative". In other words, seems that he doesn't think that games could be (or become) an innovative or legitimate narrative form.
The discussion was a little deeper than that, but the main idea was that he thinks that studying games would be of little help in trying to find out how to create good interactive storytelling.
The thing is: Crawford is well known for his work experience in game industry and research and in some point he realized (or decided) that games were not the path for him to follow.
Anyway... I strongly disagree with him about the narrative potential of games... but I've got to respect his opinion.