Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling (45 page)

Many of literature’s greatest stories are tragedies; we shed a tear for the hero who dies in the end, but we know it just wouldn’t be right if he lived to a ripe old age and died after tripping over a stool. Shakespeare didn’t have to kill Hamlet to resolve the story’s core conflict; killing off Claudius would have provided closure. He didn’t have to kill Juliet, either; with Romeo out of the picture, the romance was over and the story could have been wrapped up then and there. But, no,
he had to finish her off. This brings us to an ugly little problem: How do you reflect this situation in a scoring system? Imagine a Romeo and Juliet storyworld, complete with all the Montagues and Capulets and their conflicts and intrigues. Imagine that it happens to wind up following something like Shakespeare’s version, and Romeo does himself in on discovering Juliet’s comatose body. The player, as Juliet, wakes up to find Romeo’s bloody corpse at her feet. Should the player kill herself or shrug her shoulders and walk away?

Here drama diverges from gameplay. A traditional gamer would certainly not commit suicide; she’d walk away. Drama places a higher value on Juliet’s death than on her life, however, so the scoring system must accordingly reward Juliet for suicide and punish her for selfish survival.

This will never work! Nobody’s going to commit imaginary suicide.

The source of the problem lies in the historical happenstance that games have always been comedies (in the dramatic sense that they have happy endings). We think of games ending in victory or defeat, winning or losing. There’s no fundamental reason for this association; it’s just the way things have always been. For the time being, we must respect the audience’s aesthetic expectations. As interactive storytelling develops as a medium, artistically minded storybuilders will expand the audience’s aesthetic horizon. This happened with literature in the sixteenth century; originally confined to devotional topics and casual entertainment, writers such as Erasmus and later Jonathan Swift used literature for social commentary. The cinema was initially used for spectacle and sensational material; over the course of several decades, artists such as D.W. Griffith expanded the medium to address serious storytelling. In the same fashion, storybuilders will push the medium so that someday, tragedy will be possible.

But what possible mechanism could encourage a player to commit virtual suicide?

The trick lies in shifting the player’s self-perception as the protagonist. An actor playing a role simultaneously lives inside the character and outside the character. Consider an actress playing the role of Juliet. She must surely identify with Juliet to do her job. She must feel something like the intense love for Romeo and the
agony of losing him. To be “in character,” she must also feel the emotional logic that drives Juliet to suicide and appreciate the dramatic forces that require her death. This is immersion at its deepest level. A player in the role of Juliet in an interactive storyworld should come to precisely the same decision. The player doesn’t have to come to that conclusion, of course. The storybuilder can only reward, not control.

And how does the storybuilder reward the suicide?

The same way an actor is rewarded: with applause. The storyworld should end with curtains coming down, the words “The End” appearing on the screen, and an auditory virtual audience reaction. If the curtains descend upon a dead Juliet, the virtual audience should erupt in thunderous applause; if she saunters away, boos and hisses should be her reward. Therefore, the player’s true role is to perform for a virtual audience; the drama manager evaluates the player’s performance with a scoring algorithm and expresses that score with varying degrees of applause.

Drama managers must listen, think, and speak. They listen with overview variables. They think with scoring algorithms, story templates, or story grammars. They speak with environmental manipulation, goal shifting, personality alterations, temporal pressures, or by dropping the fourth wall.

The storybuilder is a guide, not a parent.

Don’t block the player from error; reward the player for success.

Express your aesthetic values with your scoring algorithms.

In tragedy, the reward is applause, not victory.

ONE OF THE IMPLICATIONS OF
applying verb-based thinking to interactive storytelling is that the central data structure should be the
Verb
. The answer to the classic question “What does the user DO?” is “The user does Verbs.” Because verbs define the nature of any software, it’s only natural that defining the Verb data structure is the central problem in all software development.

A Verb, in this context, is not quite the same thing as a verb in a sentence; it’s functionally similar but a bit more abstract. A Verb is anything a user can tell the computer to do. The most obvious Verb is clicking a button, but contextual changes can create new verbs.

Thus, if I push the mouse button while the cursor is on the Delete button, I’m specifying an entirely different Verb than pushing the mouse button on the Save button.

Verb counts in most software have always been low, but with the passage of time, those counts have risen inexorably. MacWrite, the first true consumer WYSIWYG word processor, didn’t have a great many verbs. Aside from the obvious verbs for text entry, there were verbs for setting font types, sizes, and styles; verbs for justifying text and indenting paragraphs; verbs for inserting images; and verbs for setting and clearing tabs. All in all, I’d guess there were fewer than 100 verbs in MacWrite. But nowadays, Microsoft Word has so many verbs that when I assign students the task of counting them, they lose count somewhere around 300. What with style sheets, footnotes, index entries, tables of contents, and so on, there are just too many verbs to keep track of.