Quote: Original post by JBourrie from here I would like to see interactive stories, where your choices actually matter. Not just a "branching storyline", but a truly interactive one that blends written storytelling with AI to create a world.

I would like to discuss interactive stories, but I don't know how to discuss on the same ground. I want to learn about your (anyone's) view on interactive stories, especially the terms you would use to describe and characterize such stories. Can anyone give a simple example of interactive story? Deception When we play chess, the moves form an interactive story, although we don't call it a story. Chess-playing is strategic, it is a good property in role-playing game. To make a story interactive, it seems that it is crucial to allow the player to anticipate, plan, and deceit. Is there a way to represent elements in the story like strategic pieces? What are the analogies? I think that deception is a major characteristic in a game of chess. This is a great thing to implement in an interactive story. It seems that deception can bring much interaction in the game story. Do you think that this is a good direction to focus? What are some requirements for such design? What are the simpliest kinds of deceptions to implement? [Edited by - Wai on January 26, 2007 12:05:34 AM]

If you're interested in interactive storytelling, here's a link to a forum post I made a while back that's got a fairly complete list of all the resources I knew about at the time. I beleive interactive storytelling can be done in a similar fashion to a chess game, but the hard part is figuring out the rules and what the pieces should be.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by deception in this case. Chess is a game between two opponents, whereas in a interactive story the computer "player" is not necessarily trying to beat the human.

Trappers link is what i call a great thread, will have to peruse it slowly. congr TZ!

[Edit: It seems that what I posted below is a small type of interactive story. It would take some time for me to figure out which links you gave previously are relevant.]

I think it is easier to discuss using a single example.

"Alibi"
One day in the year 2210, a space pirate ship captures a pod with a girl and a treasure map. There are seven crew members on the pirate ship. In this game, you play the girl, your goal is to kill all seven crew members onboard, before they would figure out that the girl is the murderer.

As you said, the hard part is to figure what the rules should be. Here are some rules to start the discussion. The rules below are not necessarily known to the player at the beginning of the game. By playing the game, the player will discover the rules.

1) Each crew member has a unique weapon or unique mean to kill.
2) The girl must kill will a weapon.
3) The girl can kill at most one person per day.
4) The crew will execute a suspect if they feel 'certain'.
5) Otherwise, the crew will imprison the most suspicious crew member.
6) While the murders are happening, the crew members will try to decipher the map and identify the girl in particular, (7), (8), and (9)

Given enough time and the existence of certain items and resources:

7) The physician will figure out that the girl's body is not normal
8) The navigator will figure out that the treasure map is not a treasure map
9) The will figure out the meaning of the words in engraved on the escape pod

Since the game is about deception, the gameplay involves committing the murders in ways so that the crew members will accuse one another but not the girl. Since the 'story' is the girl's success/failure in killing everyone, the story is created from the gameplay.

In this example, I am trying to figure out how to turn this setting into a strategic interactive story. What does the game need to add strategy and thrill in the gameplay?

Strategies:
Perhaps the first thing a player would do is to steal a weapon, and use it to kill a crew member. Suppose the Girl(G) wants to make it look like the Navigator(N) has killed the Physician(P), several things must be satisfied:

- G must steal N's weapon
- G kills P with the weapon
- When G kills P, N must be alone (so that N does not have any alibi)
- G puts the murder weapon back

If G succeeds in this scheme, then the crew will execute N. This means that G has succeeded in killing two members. The crew will not suspect that anything had happened untill G kills again. The second time G repeats this scheme, the crew will lock up the suspect instead of executing the suspect. Another way to kill:

- G steals any weapon.
- G creates an alibi for herself
- G wait for a moment when the target is alone with her
- G kills the target.

If G does this and there was a crew member that was alone during the murder, the crew will suspect that crew member. More ways to kill:

- G lures P into N's room while N is gone.
- G kills P with N's weapon.
- G arranges N to arrive and discover P's body.
- G arranges the Captain(C) to go to N's room just a moment after.

How to kill the whole crew:

- G kills P with N's weapon, the crew doesn't find N's weapon but executed N.
- G kills another member with N's weapon, this time the crew has no suspect.
- G kills again with the same weapon, this time she hides the weapon in C's room. The crew members believe that C is the murderer and kill C.
- At this moment, only two crew members are left. G grabs any weapon to kill one of them, trap the remaining crew member for one day while she recharges.
- G kills the last member the next day and finishes the game.

In this scenario, the gameplay/story involves:
1) How to successfully steal a weapon without getting caught.
2) How to set up an alibi in order to kill someone.
3) How to hide the murder weapon
4) How to do (2) and (3) again
5) How to hide the weapon in someone else's room and stage its discovery.
6) How to separate the last two members, and trap one of them.

Like a chess game, the challenge of the game is in the how. Do all interactive stories have this property? How would you describe a design like this?

[Edited by - Wai on December 1, 2006 12:30:40 AM]

Quote: Original post by Wai
Like a chess game, the challenge of the game is in the how. Do all interactive stories have this property? How would you describe a design like this?

There isn't really a unified group of interactive stories - in fact there aren't really that many interactive stories period. Everyone seems to have their own definition of what the term means, and most of them are correct in their own way. There are a number of different approaches I've seen and considered myself and I don't particularly consider any one of them necessarily better or worse than each other - just different.

What you've described in 'Alibi' seems to follow what I call the "emergent story" pattern. The theory behind this approach is if you provide a good enough simulation of a world and let the player loose in it they will provide their own stories. The weakness behind most of these approaches is that a good story is stronger than just a selection of events - there's usually a pacing and rhythym to the structure that makes it flow, and an underlying message to hold it together.

However most of the examples I've seen from prospective game designers is they wish to create a fully living RPG world and hope that they player will find enough interesting things to make that a story - but by making the scope of what the player can do too broad they lack the depth that makes an interesting story. What makes your 'Alibi' example more workable in my view is that you have constrained it to a narrow subject matter as well as put some objectives on the player that could lead to some interesting story potential. The challenge from this approach would be to make Alibi more than just a mere murder simulator and give it some deeper meaning.

I thought about Alibi today. As of now, there is no backstory nor meaning. It didn't occur to me that a deeper meaning is the main challenge, since a game of chess does not have a deeper meaning. When I thought about Alibi based on chess, I forgot about the need to have a meaning.


In the year 2210, almost every action can be reversed, and every situation simulated. The experience inside a simulation is indistinguishable from real life. However, one thing is certain in real life:

In real life, death is not reversible.

Our main character is a psycho killer who believes that murder is the necessary mean to feel alive.



Without the meaning, it would have been a murder simulation. There would still be a sequence of events that form a story, but the story would have no meaning.

Quote: Original post by Wai
I thought about Alibi today. As of now, there is no backstory nor meaning. It didn't occur to me that a deeper meaning is the main challenge, since a game of chess does not have a deeper meaning. When I thought about Alibi based on chess, I forgot about the need to have a meaning.


In the year 2210, almost every action can be reversed, and every situation simulated. The experience inside a simulation is indistinguishable from real life. However, one thing is certain in real life:

In real life, death is not reversible.

Our main character is a psycho killer who believes that murder is the necessary mean to feel alive.



Without the meaning, it would have been a murder simulation. There would still be a sequence of events that form a story, but the story would have no meaning.

yep, thats a type of a meaning, but now you are into good/bad, moral/immoral/amoral morass...hard to solve, i know...

I don't think that the game story needs to have a moral solution. I think that it is sufficient to show a moral point of view, and let the accept of refuse.

While killing is related to the gameplay, moral is not part of it. I feel that if the story explores more moral issues, the gameplay must reflect those. The gameplay has a methodical way of killing and killing without being detected. If the deeper meaning is related to existence, it seems that the killer would want to be recognized by an alias.

Here is another line of thought:

There is a group of 7 characters who know one another already. One of them always get picked on. One day, an event provoked her to act on her hatred. She killed the first person. And she couldn't stop since.

The deeper meaning is Giving in to weakness is a steepy slope.

The story:

The player character is Aida. She is one of the crew members onboard a pirate ship. The crew uses Aida like a slave. One day, the crew raided a transport, and imprisons a person that they captured in the raid. As usual, the crew does not tell you anything about the situations. Yet, the prisoner in the cell starts talking to Aida. And Aida listens.

this is very interesting concept. is there any similarity to Agatha Christie's murder mystery? you know 10th man or some title like that?

I don't know either. I have realized that in the original idea, I didn't think about character development of the main character. I was just trying to get a situation where deception is the gameplay, and the process of the deception forms the story. What I have now is quite different from what I had, since now I have more story elements that do not related to the gameplay of deception.

In particular:

- The bit about how murder is Aida's revenge is irrelevant to the gameplay.
- The character development of Aida is irrelevant. The player's goal is to use strategy to kill everyone onboard. If Aida's emotion affects the player's options, the player will find it annoying to have to babysit her emotion in order to do the killing successfully.
- The character development will get in the way if the player were to play the game several times.

I am thinking that for games like this, it is necessary that the story leaves some room for the player to imagine. Anyhow, I see two approaches to get an interactive story out of the Alibi idea. The first way is to stick to the gameplay of deception, and try to get a story out of the interaction. The second way is to start with a linear story, and add interactions. For the discussion, I want to try both, so that I can compare their strengths and weaknesses.

Starting from a linear story:

Act I: The pirates raid the transport and captures a pod and a prisoner. Various mistreatment to Aina are shown, which leads to a dialogue between the prisoner and Aina. Aina listens to the prisoner's and kills the first crew member.

Act II: Aina's murder continuous, as if a mysterious force is haunting the pirate ship. Some of the crew members figure out that it was Aina's doing, but Aina kills them just in time.

Act III: There are only two crew members left--the captain and the new recruit--the two that Aina hates most and least. The prisoner figured out that the new recruit is an undercover police, but hid this fact from Aina. Aina kills both, and releases the prisoner. Just as the prisoner thinks that he has understood everything about Aina, Aina kills him also.

Ending: The police boards the pirate ship, finds all the dead bodies and their undercover agent who is seemingly killed in order to protect Aina. In the dispensary of the patrol ship, the nurse assured the jaded Aina that everything will be fine from now on. Just as the scene is ending, Aina lets out a murderous grin.