Sims creator Will Wright spoke about the structure and opportunities of storytelling as it relates to his new game Spore at South by Southwest 2007.
- Nature of story: following one causal chain and presenting that to an audience. Stories are series of interconnecting causal chains arranged in different ways. Manipulating casual chains sets up different story structures.
- Games have traditionally been developed as branching trees that utilze equations to determine possibilities.
- Linear storytelling is more compelling due to nature of story arcs. Drama can be built over time. Dramatic amplification in linear stories allows small events to lead to big outcomes.
- Language, Imagination, Empathy = Story
- Film: rich emotional palette (joy, sorrow). Truman Show & Groundhog Day are the two movies most relevant to games.
- Games: basic instincts (pride, accomplishment, guilt, expression)
- Game use agency vs. Film use empathy (can I do it vs. what will happen)
- We are stuck in a timestream. But stories transfer experiences through time and space. They displace experiences. Through shared experiences we build abstractions to shape our future.
- As you think forward into a story, the realm of possibility is wider. You begin filling in adjacent possibility space with your mind: imagining branches of possibilities.
- Biggest obstacle of interactive story telling is we don’t know the outcome. Linear story telling directors know the possible outcomes.
- Game models: branching models (pick your own adventure), gated (levels, loops), generated (fragment of story with trigger conditions and results)
- Media is something today’s generation molds. The computer is a now a communication device. Player use games to tell stories: unintentional subversive, expressive.
- Unintentional: Players come across bugs and create back stories about why they occurred.
- Subversive: try to push envelope of the game.
- Expressive: parallel simulations get translated to linear narratives.
- Story listening: can we teach the computer to listen to user stories?
- If we understand intended end states, we can introduce obstacles to increase dramatic effect.
- Time spent consuming linear entertainment is pretty much flat across age gaps. But interactive entertainment is still skewed to younger audience.
- Games are evolving more toward hobbies. Like tools of self-expression.
- Fulfilling aspirations of design through tools. Players love making content in games, sharing and collecting, and organizing.
- Quality vs. Quantity. Most of the content created is crappy. As we create better tools, will increase the value of the output of those tools.
- Players build models of games in their heads, but now computers can build models to understand users and build games that adapt to their behavior.
- Give players tools to be George Lucas not Luke Skywalker.
- Spore demo: wow.