Dramatic Systems and Interactivity

The Modern Drama scholar H.L. Lucas suggested in his book "Ibsen and Strindberg" suggested that Henrik Ibsen, in his well known play The Wild Duck that there was a clear change in his beliefs and methods, turning away from his usual morally driven plot-based dramas, to an emergent plot formed out of interactions and tangents that opened up new doors; characters were no longer accountable for upholding moral imperatives imposed on the text, but instead for the well being of themselves and others.

On The Wild Duck in particular, Ibsen states that "Truth is an excellent thing, but not always. Much human happiness is based on a merciful illusion, a 'life-lie'." For those who haven't read it, the plot can be reduced quite simply. It involves a man whose father has destroyed the lives of a few, but has sheltered them and rebuilt their lives to a modest life that keeps them off of complete destitution; his son however finds out the truth and feels the need to tell it to those whom his father damaged, only causing ruin wherever he goes. In simple terms, he's an idiot.

From this I've been gathering the idea for a new project, perhaps one small enough logistically to allow some experimentation. Now, bear with me as I begin to rant: In The Sims, a game that I'm assuming anyone reading this would have a fairly decent knowledge of, we have a simulator that focuses on the basics of human relationships through short term actions but also occupies the user with paying the bills, eating, going to work, defecating, etc. etc. The Sims however is in this sense more of a dollhouse, one in which the user's imagination fills in the blanks of the story. In this project however, I would take an approach that I feel is much more suitable to this idea of psychological drama, one in which we have everyday actions facilitate deeper interactions that affect human interaction, namely the exchange of information.

This runs counter to another man in the field of interactive storytelling, Chris Crawford, who doesn't care much for spatial configurations in storytelling. In his software, The Erasmatron (a piece of software I cannot claim to have used, so feel free to correct me if I have any misconceptions to anyone who has used it), he creates a world in which spatial configurations do not play any role, but instead events are stripped down to their bare significance within a story-world. My model runs, as I have said before, counter to this by using spatial and non-dramatic factors as a lubricant for drama, and to make drama that is convincingly incidental instead of straightforward; the model would run as follows:

Within each character we have a set of personality traits that affect how they react to a given situation. Also within the storyworld is a subtext of what has happened, and what each character knows. This is somewhat tricky, in order to facilitate interesting gameplay, the right characters have to know the right thing. As we know from my synopsis of The Wild Duck above, if we start out with the idiot knowing everything and it's over in a pretty short period of time. Predisposed personal relationships may also be somewhat essential, but these perhaps could be modeled off of a combination of the subtext and personalities, with a minimum of history.

We have then a stage that serves as a series of potential triggers. There should be no need however, unlike The Sims, to guide characters, or to ensure their survival by making sure they're well fed (or making sure that they don't soil themselves in the event of a bathroom line), instead we let the characters have short-term desires to eat, to sleep, to watch TV, along with mood factors that will determine how they feel if these are not met. If they're in a bad mood, they may just react differently with others. We have a stage then that creates motion, which will cause characters to "bounce" off of one another, which will in turn cause information (and lies) to be exchanged, in addition to events that could cause turns. The data then that is mostly stored in characters besides their personality factors (which dictate how they primarily react to events), would be what "history" they have with other characters, and the information that they hold. These two things of course would affect one another in how characters further act.

This of course is a rough idea of what such a stage could be like, there may not be need to let mood so drastically affect the outcome of what a character says; but on the other hand, it's more likely that given what kind of engine we want, that we could customize what affects mood the most to allow some themes to start going. In The Wild Duck for one thing, Ibsen uses the lightning through a giant sloped window affect the mood of each theme, perhaps a day/night cycle may be appropriate. These are not part of the greater picture however, so I digress...

So one thing I haven't covered then, how do we make this into something playable? It sounds like a bunch of characters walking around going about their business. As I always feel about these things, we open up many doors for a place to allow interaction, the question is what strings can the player learn by pulling. We could have the user be a character; this was my first idea, which gave me the ad-hoc name for the project "The Thirteenth Guest", a reference to the penultimate line of The Wild Duck, basically personifying one of the protagonists as a troublemaker and a wrongdoer for his spouting of the truth and consequent upsetting of life. The challenge would be for t he user to understand what information is held by whom, and how these characters react to what they know, or may know. The gameplay then is to be able to analyze interaction and leave the right footprints in order to gain a mastery of the characters, or not. I admit that I feel this is too warlike of an objective, some extra touch of motivation could be needed.

So more likely may be to give the user a variety of scenarios that he could play through as whatever type of agent he pleases. The point of this game is more about observing behavior than any sort of "puzzle", so giving the user more options would allow him to experience this kind of gameplay in any flavor he liked. Maybe the scenario would be a sort of god-mode, and see how the same characters with the same information differ when things are set up differently or one more character comes to the party. Details again; there are too many rough edges that will become painful problems when I try to implement it, so in further posts I will try to focus more on the lasting process-intensive points than how this could turn out in implementation.