Game design musings

[alexxkay]

Last night, I was reading an article in Game Developer Magazine, which was a roundup of various gaming luminaries putting in their two cents as to what revolutions the next ten years will bring in gaming. Quite a lot of them mentioned some form or another of "non-linear storytelling" or "interactive storytelling", which has long been an interest of mine.

It occurs to me that the term "non-linear storytelling" in the gaming community shares a lot of similarity with the term "artificial intelligence" in the academic community. Both of them describe semi-chimerical moving targets. In academic AI, once a technique is well understood, it's often not considered to be "really intelligent" any more. "Sure, Eliza fools a lot of people, but we understand the simple way in which it's faking it, so it isn't really intelligent." In the same way, game developers keep inventing new techniques for interactive storytelling, but as soon as we understand them, we decide that they are not the "holy grail" we've been looking for.

Of course, this similarity is no coincidence. After all, truly non-linear storytelling is in the set of what I refer to as "AI-complete" problems. For a full solution to be implemented, you need something that is equivalent to (and perhaps indistinguishable from) an actual AI. Many such problems are linguistic in nature; for a program to process language (written or spoken) in a complete manner requires (at least) human-level intelligence.

Comments

[greatsword.livejournal.com]

I'm intrigued by two things about this.

First is the question "What does the user experience?" I'm not sure any two people who see the phrase "non linear storytelling" have the same understanding of what they're talking about, unless it's a marketing meeting, and what they're talking about is 'something to put on the box.'

What do you mean by non linear storytelling?

Second, your observation about Eliza suggests that if the story is put together with the correct simple fakes, a really good game could result.

Remember, the competition is reading you... ;)

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

What do you mean by non linear storytelling?

It's a fuzzy term (part of my point). A decade or two ago, I would have said "a story with several pieces that the player can perform in arbitrary order." Five years ago, I might have said "A story that is significantly affected by player choice." Now, I'm tending more towards "A story that is generated dynamicaly, interactively with the choices a player makes."

Second, your observation about Eliza suggests that if the story is put together with the correct simple fakes, a really good game could result.

I had that particular epiphany during my first ever interview for a games-industry job. I was describing why Ultima V was one of my all-time favorites, and one of the reasons was because it presented me with a difficult moral dilemna in the middle. Which, as I discovered in subsequent play-throughs, was essentially faked. But it was damn effective at the time. I still prefer "real" player choice, but faked plaer choices are significantly better than none at all.

Remember, the competition is reading you... ;)

I see the smiley, but answering seriously: You are only my competition in a very weak sense. Personally, I think I'd get far more value out of others producing good games that I'll want to play and that raise the bar on quality, than out of some vague "not interfering with my company's market share".

Competition

[greatsword.livejournal.com]

True. And we're in very different markets right now, I suspect.

I don't mind this sort of discussion of generalities, but there are parts of the job we should leave off LJ.

Just so you know, I'm unlikely to work on a story based game that isn't heavily scripted for some time. I do have some thoughts, but I'd like to put more research into them before I discuss them - I'm beginning to suspect that my current model makes too many simplifying assumptions.

I'm now trying to decide what the essential elements of game storytelling are, and how to generate them dynamically. Your mention of natural language processing is significant, I think. Language generation might be an essential component for a truely randomized story.

Re: Competition

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

randomized story

I don't think these two words should go together. Anything worthy of the term "story" is decidely not "random". Perhaps you mean "dynamically generated"? Possibly with a side order of "in a large, complex, and hard-to-predict phase-space" :-)

Re: Competition

[metageek.livejournal.com]

"Hard-to-predict phase space" makes me think: Perhaps "evolving story" is the word we want: a story whose outcome is strongly dependent on the path it takes to get there.

That, in turn, makes me think that such a story is likely to partake of one of the complexities of evolution: you can't specify the phase space in advance. If you want to model the system, all you can do is take the reductionist approach ("model the atoms", or, at least, "model the individual people"), and ignore the higher-level behavior.

The problem, of course, is that the story is the higher-level behavior. So what you really need is something that can think narratively. The model needed here is not reductionist, but one based on an understanding of how stories go, and how the world in which this story is set works. In other words, you need a storyteller. And, yeah, the only good storytellers around are humans (Pan narrans, to quote The Science of Discworld II); the task
is pretty well certain to be AI-complete--even most humans don't manage it very well, after all.

But, y'know, I do see some room for cheating here: if your game has access to the Net, recruit some human storytellers. You'd have to give them proper tools to make sure they didn't have to be involved every step of the way--for example, if the player is exploring a forest, the storyteller can page out until they find something. (You still need somebody to cope with NPCs, of course; those might be handled by actors, a la The Diamond Age.)

It could be a nice business, whose advantage as a game (more compelling than games without human storytellers) would mirror its advantage as a business (people can't play the game without paying a subscription fee). The tech is certainly feasible; the only problem is that the business might have trouble scaling up--how do you find enough good storytellers?

Re: Competition

[jducoeur]

And, yeah, the only good storytellers around are humans (Pan narrans, to quote The Science of Discworld II); the task is pretty well certain to be AI-complete--even most humans don't manage it very well, after all.

I don't know if this logically follows: essentially the same statement has been made in lots of fields, until people found the right "cheats" to be able to produce decent algorithmic approximations.

I mean, think about chess. Once upon a time, this was viewed as the canonical AI problem: a computer couldn't "think" abstractly enough to beat a human. Then clever algorithms and brute force came along, and lo -- master chess players started to be defeated by them. The computer doesn't go about it in anything like the same *way* a person does, but it still accomplishes the goal.

Another good example is the Thief engine. This produces in-game characters that move and sound astonishingly real sometimes. But it's all smoke and mirrors: carefully-constructed scenarios and well-designed stimulus-response engines, with just enough degree of freedom to appear real while still being deterministic under the hood.

Personally, I think it's mainly a matter of analysis. Truth to tell, I've given this question at least some lightweight thought -- back when I was at Looking Glass, we did a proposal for Ultima Underworld Online that was fundamentally grounded in this. I don't remember all of the handwaves, but the high concept was that we would use a combination of semi-randomness, control of world events and observation of user actions to create a concept of "destiny" for users: we would have oracles that would steer users in fluidly-evolving campaigns with as much thematic unity as we could accomplish. I have no illusions that this would have been perfect, nor that it would be easy to do at all, but I'm fairly confident that we could have come up with "cheats" that gave a good measure of story-like flavor without any real intelligence being involved at all.

Computer games are entirely the art of illusion. The most successful ones are usually the ones that understand that fact, analyzing the surface aspects of their problem space to simplify out the key facets. The resulting illusion isn't perfect, but can be plenty good enough if you constrain the problem space carefully...

Re: Competition

[metageek.livejournal.com]

And, yeah, the only good storytellers around are humans (Pan narrans, to quote The Science of Discworld II); the task is pretty well certain to be AI-complete--even most humans don't manage it very well, after all.

I don't know if this logically follows: essentially the same statement has been made in lots of fields, until people found the right "cheats" to be able to produce decent algorithmic approximations.

I mean, think about chess. Once upon a time, this was viewed as the canonical AI problem

True...but storytelling is much harder than chess; and true interactive storytelling is harder still. I mean, once you have a program that can play the role of any character in the game world, and react in a human-like way to whatever the player does or says, how far is that from being able to play the role of a real human? That's what AI-complete means, after all: a problem is AI-complete if any solution qualifies as artificial human mind. (Not necessarily a smart one, I suppose...)

And yet...your idea of oracles makes me think again. It
doesn't strike me as a full solution to the problem, but I suppose it would be interactive storytelling; you'd be exploring the story and interacting with the storyteller from time to time. It's just that it would be hard making it a good storyteller.

Re: Competition

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

storytelling is much harder than chess

Unproven (and possibly unprovable). They are very different problems, to be sure. But it is not clear to me that one is necessarily harder than the other. We may simply have not found the right "cheats" yet.

To come back around to my original post, Eliza is totally built out of cheats, but it's good enough to pass at least a limited sort of Turing test. It is at least conceivable that good enough cheats (or at least, much better than we have now) may be found in the realm of game storytelling. Of course, as soon as some significant cheats are understood, they get redefined as "not really interactive"...

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Non-linear games, to me, have been achieved. Unlike the receding phantom of AI ("well, that can't be AI, cause we implemented it!"), it just indicates a game where you aren't stuck in a side-scrolling, this-is-the-next-monster-to-kill, linear game.

On the other hand, I think other people are using it as marketing-speak for "feature we have the competition does not!" This is kind of silly, but typical...

That being said, I'm not happy with the interactivity of most games. There's always this tradeoff between keeping the player on-plot, and giving him freedom. As a GM this is *still* a problem; I've given up on herding my players now, and just have "plot everywhere". But this is, as you mention, is closer to true AI -- the ability to improvise entirely new elements based on the current situation. But I wish people wouldn't call it "non-linearity"; it's more like "plot wandering freedom" or something.

I have lots of disparaging remarks about AI researchers who overcommit or overstate what they have, but I'll save those for later...