GWJ Conference Call Episode 109

Great podcast.
I love how after several discussions on the site about the 'frat boyishness' of Elliott on the esteemed and doomed GFW radio, he immediately confuses the hosts with the hummingbird analogy.
Hooray, duality of man!

Thank you.

I think I've heard enough about the bowel movements of the GWJ podcast crew to last me a while.

Good show, guys. -I'm going to see if I can work in that hummingbird analogy into my next team meeting.

I think you're right that there are these two types of storytelling in video games, but I think that the complaint most of the time with the apples half of the equation is that game companies generally make lousy apple juice.

You use interactive fiction to mean the highly linear, unlock-by-playing type stories of Bioshock, Portal, etc. I don't know if there is an accepted term for the opposite style of storytelling, so I'm going to call it "world fiction." I think there are two key problems most companies run into when implementing world fiction techniques into their games. The first is false choice, and the second is weak pieces.

False choice is something we're all familiar with in video games. I haven't played Fable 2, but Fable was an excellent example of a game that wanted to create a dynamic, interactive story in which you had agency and the world could change "forever" as a result of your actions, but the decisions in the game were largely binary and in any case lead to the same results. The forks in the road were really just medians. I might have misunderstood the conversation, but I thought this sort of game was what Rabbit was responding to with his comment about Planescape. If the choices are so simplistic, why bother having choices?

Weak pieces are when the individual parts of a world fiction are not compelling enough to pursue so that a complete picture of the world can be created. I know that others disagree with me about this, but I felt that this was the major flaw in Oblivion. While I appreciated that the world was more the story than the story was, I didn't find the parts of the world to be particularly engaging; they made this large world to explore but it turns out that if you've been anywhere near a fantasy novel in the last thirty years you've already seen all there is to see. As such, none of the quests, locations, or people in Oblivion added up to create a more compelling story experience than could have been created in an interactive fiction using the same parts. This is an important point: world fictions are more readily sunk by cliche, lackluster implementation, redundancy, and other problems than interactive fictions because each of the pieces needs to stand on its own. In interactive fiction, you can count on the sum of weaker parts to create a stronger whole because those parts are bolstered by the traditional narrative devices of tension, foreshadowing, etc. This is part of the reason why Fallout (the original; I haven't played Fallout 3) was such a memorable experience for most players: not only could they explore the world and have an impact on it, but the world was made up of fascinating parts. The game's locations were well-differentiated and populated by strange and quirky characters (like Harold, Dogmeat, Killian Darkwater, the Enclave, and on and on).

I think game designers would do well to look for examples of fragmented storytelling in literature. The Spoon River Anthology comes immediately to mind as an example of a world that was created through the accumulation of individual parts. None of the poems are dependent on another poem for their impact, and they can be read in any order, but as you read them you develop a sense for the larger community of Spoon River and the interactions of its inhabitants. The same could be done with a game and to an extent has been done with some games, although I haven't seen anything where the individual parts are so intricately woven.

Also, out of curiosity: what were the two "obvious" examples of storytelling that Elysium didn't want to bring up?

Bioshock and Portal, which were both brought up in the conversation anyway.

We tried to avoid saying their names, to avoid creating anymore iTunes alcoholics.

I want to make a comment re. Mines of Moria. Especially Elysiums (sp?) comment.

I think people, especially those who play WoW, need to realise how excited the LoTRO community is for MoM. I find many people are very dismissive of LoTRO. Sure, it's never going to get the limelight of WoW or WAR, but i have no doubt that Turbine is ecstatic with how their game is going and the interest in the new expansion.

As someone who has only played LoTRO (and I suppose that makes me a fanboy =P) I just get a little frustrated at the dismissive nature of those who play WoW. LoTRO is an exceptional MMO with impressive story and a terrifically realised world, just becuase it doesn't have 9+million players doesn't make it any less commercially viable or important to the developers.

This is more of a general rant rather than a specific complaint, just thought I'd mention it tho

Loved the rest of the podcast tho guys =D

Wait.... are you saying the podcast wasn't enjoyable until he was on it? Heresy!

So I was listening to the podcast while driving, and it occurred to me that a possible solution to the Dialogue-Tree problem might be a sort of VATS interface for conversations. Essentially, at the initiation of conversation, there'd be a freezing of the action, just as there is with VATS. At this point, you'd be presented with various topics of conversation that your character is interested in. The list would be dynamic based on current quests. You'd check off the topics you want to hear about, and then hit the "action" button, again, just as in VATS. The "action" would be a fluid conversation without further player input as your character explores all dialogue options that the target character has for the topics of interest.

Pros:

Fluid conversations.
Avoids constant clicking of dialogue options.
Allows for third-person cinematic (i.e. face-to-face, or possibly even slightly removed camera position to show ambient surroundings).

Cons:

New information in conversations may lead to new "interests", requiring another converse-VATS round.
Would require a player-character voice, which might hurt immersion for some players.
More difficult to code, perhaps.

The second con could perhaps be dealt with in a first-person perspective by showing the target-character listening for a moment, and then answering the question (inferred from the answer).

I think this would make for a far more immersive experience, but I'm not sure how practical it would be from a development perspective.

What do you guys think?

That's a great idea (and certainly a bigger step forward than my idea of converting the tree format to more of a dialogue web). I could see new topics being foreseeable with high enough INT or similar stat, or popping up in the corner during conversation (at which point you could pause and reconfigure your dialogue tactics).

Shouldn't this guy get an instant tag? Something along the lines of "Grief Chief".