The current pet project that I am working on is a story system to handle stories in a dynamic way. It's related to the TV-style content that I mentioned in a post in March. Anyway, while doing some research for this, I've veered into a look at procedurally generated systems - mainly through a blog post on The Age's website which was written by an old work colleague, James "DexX" Dominguez, on these types of systems.

This lead me to this image from Introversion's current, in-development game, Subversion which can be seen here (the thread on Introversion's forums about this cool city system which creates this image is here).

It's interesting, but seeing this spiderweb-like, image made me think of using a similar structure for narrative, where the 'nodes' of the story are interlinked, allowing the player to find their way through their own story. It does make me wonder though, if you were using this sort of abstract, visual representation, is the player starting in the middle of a web (from a fixed starting point) working their way out to one of multiple endings, or are they starting at one of multiple starting points working their way through to a fixed conclusion?

I think that the latter is more in line with the systems that I am visualising, where the point of the system is not to create infinite choices for the player, but to handle their game decisions dynamically so that the game feels that the story is reacting to the player, rather than funnelling them down a fixed tube ('tubes=evil' in my current thinking, which is probably just the response to a difficult project!).

Movie vs TV storytelling

Traditionally game story telling usually uses a film model of storytelling - there is one big overwhelming foe to fight, and the player's character (or characters) develop until such time as the can challenge foe is a suitably dramatic location.

The recent project I was on (that just got canned) was a fairly traditional 3rd person action game. Now, when development started there was an assumption right from the start that we'd just be using the same old method of storytelling: here's all the cutscenes laid out at the beginning, let's just string some gameplay together to link them up.

There has to be something better than that.

Id like to see more games move to something more akin to the television model used in series like those produced by Joss Whedon. What frequently happens in his series is that each season there will be a group of episodes at the beginning that just establish characters. Foreshadowing of the future BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy) starts to take place with the main characters encountering minions performing tasks that will be part of the overall plan, until the BBEG is revealed.

The BBEG wins a few battles to unsettle our heroes/heroines (now that's a revolutionary concept in games, and I know - it's hard to pull off without disenfranchising the player) until the heroes come to the climactic battle.

But in between the main story arc episodes there are numerous 'filler' episodes that take the characters away from this plot and break it up.

New locations are added every season to the basic group of sets that have been built for the show, increasing the variety of locations that can be used.

I think this could serve as a much better model for episodic content, with player's downloading the equivalent of a season, rather than an episode. It would contain a new BBEG for the player to fight, a new set of 'filler' episodes that could be thrown around (ideally in a random order, but I've got more details of that system to come), and slowly add new locations, while still keeping the story around those used previously.