Comments on: A Kiss is always harder than a Kill I am fascinated and have spent a lot of time on emergent story telling, and your article is a very good read. If you haven't already I suggest you take a peek at Chris Crawford's Storytron. What your tackling is a different problem, your enabling player narrative through game systems. Which is awesome, and doable in current systems, as you correctly point out. What I'm tackling at least with this research project is the much more technical and narrow problem of agents in these systems being able to communicate and intelligently interact with these systems, rather than be just plain reflex agents with dumb pre-baked responses. This allows these agent's to become part of the emergent player narrative. They say the only reason we conquered Neanderthals was our ability to communicate, so just imagine what a communicating M.A.S. could add to the player narrative. My work is a small cog in the bigger picture you highlight. And yes the problem is mostly a technical one ^_^ I am fascinated and have spent a lot of time on emergent story telling, and your article is a very good read. If you haven’t already I suggest you take a peek at Chris Crawford’s Storytron. What your tackling is a different problem, your enabling player narrative through game systems. Which is awesome, and doable in current systems, as you correctly point out.

What I’m tackling at least with this research project is the much more technical and narrow problem of agents in these systems being able to communicate and intelligently interact with these systems, rather than be just plain reflex agents with dumb pre-baked responses. This allows these agent’s to become part of the emergent player narrative.

They say the only reason we conquered Neanderthals was our ability to communicate, so just imagine what a communicating M.A.S. could add to the player narrative.

My work is a small cog in the bigger picture you highlight. And yes the problem is mostly a technical one ^_^

]]>
By: Alan-Jack/2011/05/27/a-kiss-is-always-harder-than-a-kill/#comment-5705 Alan-Jack Thu, 16 Jun 2011 08:44:17 +0000 what I wrote about interactive storytelling – we’re both thinking that emergent systems as story machines are the way forward, but we both attack it from a different perspective.

I feel like there’s room to work better in accommodating player agency through the actual writing in games – perhaps not a means to an end, maybe more of a stop-gap solution, but the ability to accommodate player agency in a story is, I feel, the first real practical application of abstract/interpretive storytelling techniques. Up until now, they’ve been a nice trick in cinema to increase the connection to the individual viewer, but in an interactive setting, they can really aid in cutting down on the stoic, dry responses that come from too many branching dialogues.

I’ve come to the belief now that games writing is all about brevity – saying more with less, creating more interpretive and less direct story. Writers should, in fact, be looking to do as little traditional writing as possible, and look at every scripted line and sequence they write as something they’ve taken away from the player.

]]>
By: Gabriel/2011/05/27/a-kiss-is-always-harder-than-a-kill/#comment-5404 Gabriel Thu, 09 Jun 2011 04:45:35 +0000 [...] Originally written for #AltDevBlog: Link to Original Post [...] [...] Originally written for #AltDevBlog: Link to Original Post [...]

]]>