Storyworlds across Media conference

A few weeks ago I was at the Storyworlds across Media conference at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. This academic conference revolved around the creation of fictional universes and settings (storyworlds) through a variety of media. This conference was my first real contact with academic narratology and it was most definitely inspiring and interesting.

Over the course of three days I got to meet a set of interesting and intelligent people and talk about a intruiging topics. Of course there also were a number of papers being presented, some of which were quite intriguing while others were rather dry. Videos of all talks are supposed to be made available at the website, free of charge, later on. I’ll briefly try to highlight the, in my opinion, most valuable sessions so that you can give them a look once the videos are online.

Storyworlds across Media
from Marie-Laure Ryan

This introductory talk providfed a good overview over the idea of “storyworlds” and how they fit into theories of narratology. This lecture was a great start to the conference for someone new to the academic discourse on this topic. One of the things I specifically scribbled into my notes was her list of “constituents of storyworlds”, e.g. the things that together can create a storyworld:

  • An inventory of existents
  • A space with certain geographic features
  • Physical laws
  • Social laws and values
  • Events. A history of changes that happen in the narrative
  • Mental events

What I found especially interesting is that she specifically points out the fictional geography of storyworlds and it’s importance.

A Game of Thrones: Transmedial Worlds, Fandom, and Social Gaming
from Lisbeth Klastrup and Susana Tosca

These two discussed a few transmedial events surrounding the launch of the Game of Thrones TV series, specifically the online games. They made a few interesting observations when it came to the different target groups, how they overlap and interact. Using some low-fi data mining they tried to figure out how readers, GOT enthusiasts, gamers and other people interlocked.

The Developing Storyworld of H. P. Lovecraft
from Van Leavenworth

A lecture dealing especially with the slightly odd nature of the Cthulhu mythos and it’s reincarnation in different “texts”. There are a few peciularities since the IP is no longer copyrighted and there is a wide range of different authors. It seems that it’s more of a brand that implies that the text provides a certain sense of world, unifying themes and returning elements. The latter could be locations (Arkham…) or characters (old ones…) but don’t have to be.

Strategies of Storytelling on Transmedia Television
from Jason Mittell

This lecture delved into different methods of sharing the storyworld of a series outside of the TV show. Jason explained two fundamentally different approaches using the examples of Lost and Breaking Bad. The former is expansionist, where the transmedial material expands on the world an adds new histories, characters and events. The Breaking Bad material on the other hand aims to “fold in on itself” to provide denser information about the character themselves, to help viewers get into their heads.

Jason also noted that there are three different kinds of tie-in games to movies and TV shows:

  1. Exploratory: These games allow you to explore the fictional storyworld yourself.
  2. Imitational: Games that allow you to “try on the skin” of the story characters. These often fail because the expected drama from TV and Movies is missing.
  3. Narratively: Games that try to retell the story of the movie in the game. This is almost never done for TV shows. Here the approach is usually to have the game be “one extraordinary episode”.

The Paradox of Interactive Tragedy: Can a Video Game have an Unhappy Ending?
from Jesper Juul

Here Jesper took a closer look at the elements that make up a tragedy and why it’s so difficult to recreate that in games. His theory is that this lies within the paradox of failure. Usually, when we as players succeed in some task within the game, we are happy, as is the protagonist. Likewise, when we fail we are frustrated and suffer, as does our protagonist. In Tragedy however we need to delight at the failure and misfortune of the protagonist. Our long-term aesthetic desire for a well-rounded story has to overcome our short-term desire for the protagonist to succeed, something that’s quite strong in video games.

Dave’s Mapper

There’s a nifty little website out there called Dave’s Mapper. Basically what this web-based tool does is randomly generated classic Dungeons & Dragons style dungeon maps for use in pen and paper role-playing games.

The generation itself is pretty simple as you can propably see: It always uses the same points to connect the different tiles. However there’s quite a bit of content and it’s still growing since creating these “geomorphs” (which is what the tiles they use are called) seems to be a fun hobby for some people.

Meaningful Narrative Decisions in MMOs

So I’ve been playing the Web Game Echo Bazaar a lot lately and this sparked some thoughts about narrative design & story in MMO Web Games and common game design standards.

First off let’s talk about classic Role-Playing Games for a minute here. The key thing in many tabletop RPGs is the story; they’re all about telling a story together. They’re at their best, when the individual player has to take meaningful choices that shape the ongoing story. What makes these decisions so strong is that they are irreversible. Whatever you chose you have to live with, which will make you think more about how you play and act.

This is something that’s usually lost in video games. With the (expected) ability to save and load previous states of the game, a story decision loses much of it’s weight. You can decide one way, see the consequences, then load and chose the other options. This somewhat “cheapens” the decision because it makes it possible to evade the results of your actions. Games can somewhat work around that by delaying the consequences of an action. That way, by the time you hit the consequences you’re not as likely to go load a very old save game.

However the persistent and shared worlds of MMOs can help here. Actually it’s both a boon and a curse when it comes to narration. A boon since load/save features don’t really work with persistent worlds (and aren’t expected) MMOs have the potential to have meaningful narrative decisions. It’s not quite that easy though. The curse of the persistent world is that with so many players sharing a space it is difficult to create a story that feels unique and that can have any impact on the world, since it shouldn’t inconvenience the other players and their story.

That’s where Web Games (and Echo Bazaar for that matter) come in though. Since these don’t represent a shared “physical” virtual space, the stories can feel a lot more intimate.

Echo Bazaar does quite a good job at this, presenting you with a wealth of narrative bits that you can choose to create what seems to be your own story. For example there are often options where you have multiple “tasks” leading up to one final decision.

Here the decision feels like it has much more narrative weight, since you can’t just go ahead and do it differently. Well at least that was what I thought when I first took one of these decisions. Unfortunately though this is greatly weakened by the fact that these composite tasks (multiple jobs leading to one decision) can be replayed for a while, allowing you to do the same thing over again.

So to put things in a nutshell: MMOs have the potential to present really meaningful narrative decisions to the player since decisions can be final.

Agree? Disagree? Debate!

Inspiration Example: Black Moon

I’ve described a creativity technique I use for roleplaying games in a previous post. As promised, here’s an example for a story created with this technique.

The game.
The game we were playing is called Houses of the Blooded. It’s a game about intrigues, romance and revenge – a bloody and melodramatical opera. To establish the drama, the system gives the players a lot of leeway to shape and influence the plot. Speaking of my players, they were all nobles and part of a loose secret order whose members back one another in the courts and ballrooms.

Black Moon

The concepts.
I sent out the call for suggestion and four out of my five players replied with the following concepts:

  • Black moon
  • Tears in rain
  • Dream
  • A hunting lodge at a lake on a clearing in a forest
  • Fire, something is burning that’s not meant to be
  • Betrayal / traitor
  • Spell circle
  • Edelweiss (the flower)

Looking at these inspirations, one might think that vague concepts (Dream, Betrayal) would be easier to find a use for since they are more generic. That’s true but at the same time they don’t provide nearly as much inspiration as more complex ones.

The plot.
The one concept that resonated with me the most was black moon. This worked really well for me since the color black is the color of forbidden revenge in the world of Houses of the Blooded. This brought to mind the central image of the moon turning black to foreshadow a revenge. The skies gaze down upon the bloodshed to happen.

Given this omen I also knew I wanted to have a more social situation and so I came up with a marriage ceremony. Also since my players had been quite bloodthirsty I wanted them to protect instead of destroy so a prophecy told them to ensure the completion of the ceremony.

Of course the location given was an excellent place for such a supernatural omen, so the entire event was happening at a hunting lodge at a lake on a clearing in a forest. This also defined that the groom was big on outdoor activities like hunting, which meant that a formalized hunt had to be part of the event.

And that was my entire setup. As you can see I only used two of the concepts but it was enough to kickstart my imagination. Then as we went through the two sessions it took us to conclude the story I also used other concepts on the fly. For example I had a Thunderstorm seperate the hunting lodge from the rest and make excursions into the wild for help look like a really bad idea.

If you want to read more about this session, I’ve posted a detailed writeup on the HotBlooded forums.

Inspiration through player input

If you’re into pen and paper roleplaying games and (like me) often end up in the Game Master/Storyteller/Referee seat, let me help you. I’ll share with you a little something with you that might help you and your players if you’re stuck in a creative rut. It’s a technique I’ve developed and successfully used quite a few times now. It can be used for any game and it goes like this:

  1. Ask your players for 2 concepts each
  2. Write all concepts down on a piece of paper
  3. Look at them and be inspired
  4. Play!
  5. Reward the player as a suggested concept comes up in play

No worries. I’ll explain in some more detail now and I’ll put a detailed example up in a couple days.

Before the game starts, generally when setting up the next date to play, I ask my players for input. That’s a bit vague and since people are more likely to respond to precise orders I’m asking for precisely two “concepts” from each player. A concept could be anything they come up with: a character, a location, a phrase, a situation – whatever. Previous examples are “The Wine-king”, “a sacred gravesite”, or “tears in rain”. I don’t force my players to make suggestions (you can’t force creativity) but I do try to encourage them through the promise of tiny, temporary but tangible in-game benefits (Bonuses to a roll, Style or Fate Points etc.) that are awarded once a player’s suggestion comes up during play.

So how does this work? Well I begin by pooling all the suggestions and writing them on a piece of paper. Then I try to use them as a springboard for my imagination. It’s actually important for me to work with pencil and paper here, so I can place the concepts about arbitrarilly and scribble in between them, draw lines connecting them, and so on. Usually one or two of the concepts pretty quickly jump out at me and suggest some sort of core story seed. This could be an important character or event that becomes the center of the session. Then I try to combine this with some or all of the other concepts to create an overarching, more complete plot. Usually the already existing story elements of the campaign (characters and places) also enter the equation and help flesh out the story.

Sounds like a few unneccessary steps just to come up with something whole cloth? Well they’re not. There’s two really good reasons for this:

Firstly this method provides my players with a (voluntary) way to influence the next session and the general direction of the campaign by simply telling me what they want to see. “The streets run with blood” suggests something different than “A dagger grasped by a velvet glove”. Now you may scream about dirty indie-fueled player empowerement and how this takes away a player’s sense of wonder and discovery but I have a counter-argument! The other nice thing about this technique is that it gives players a way to steer the game without taking away the surprise of an unfolding story. After all you never know if I even use your concept or what I make out of it.

And secondly (and much more important to me): trying to stay within the confines of this player generated input helps me be a lot more creative. One could argue that such limits inhibits creativity but I find that (for me personally) it seems to be quite the contrary: It focuses my creative juices. It is a lot easier for me to come up with something if I have a few guidelines as opposed to an endless blank canvas. This seems to generally be the case as I’ve heard a lot of people say similar things, just recently at the GDC for example. So it seems there is something to it. Additionally I believe that the jumbled combination of concepts that I would not have put together myself can easily create some new associations. This is a technique not uncommon for brainstorming – looking for the connection in the seemingly unconnected – to try to break out of the mold of the usual ideas.