[Howrad]

I'm a student at CMU's Entertainment Technology Center, and a group of us are serious about making a novel type of adventure game.

It's the sort of thing that lots of people have talked about, but I don't know if anyone has ever tried. One of our faculty members suggested that we post on an adventure gaming forum, and see if anyone knows of any such games. If such a game exists, we want to play it and analyze what went right and what went wrong, and how we can attempt to solve the problems that the last attempt faced.

This is a basic outline of what we want to do:

A 10-minute interactive story-game where the protagonist's background, the history of the world, and his relation to the world are all defined by the player's actions throughout the experience. In most games, you either create a character through a set of drop-down menus or have it predefined. We would like to give the player the opportunity to define not only their character, but the world, history, and place around them via gameplay choices, like conversation, action, and personal thoughts. By allowing the player to define the story, we hope to empower them as both a game-player and as a storyteller. As they play the game, their actions define certain constraints for the story to prevent narrative inconsistencies while still allowing a robust set of choices and interactions. The player will then be able to take a story that they created and share it with other people, to see where they may take it, or to just relive another person's experience.

We think that the reason that so many people have talked about it, but we've never heard of anyone actually try it, is that the number of choices will quickly explode to combinatorics way beyond control. One of our faculty members once started something similar, then gave up, because he thought he'd have to generate way too much content.

We're trying to think of ways to solve this problem, but we want to know: what has already been attempted?

Thanks for your help.

[Steve Ince]

I'm having difficulty imagining how you can define your character and the world in which he operates in ten minutes. In most games it takes you that long to learn the controls.

[insane_cobra]

Yeah, I have no idea how you plan on doing all that in the span of 10 minutes. Unless it's going to be a simple game based on menu choices, similar to character generation in some RPGs.

Anyway, I don't know of any such game, but I've been thinking about doing something similar. The actions wouldn't determine the history of the world, but they would help determine the character, his history and thus the range of actions he would be able to perform later in the game. It would possibly also determine the characters appearing at some later point (maybe even alternate playable characters), their disposition towards the player character and the range of final narrative outcomes. Of course, he wouldn't have an amnesia, he would "know" his history all along, but players wouldn't. It's a complicated design, though, and, as you already pointed out, requires many different assets. That's why I think it would be best to go with a simple, but striking and consistent graphic style.

Actually, there was a game that tried to do something similar, but on a much smaller scale: The Suffering. It's a survival horror in which you played the character imprisoned for killing his own family. Your actions towards the NPCs you'd meet on your journey (you could help them, ignore them or kill them) would determine whether you were really guilty of the crime.

[hermes]

Game (tm)

What are you?
<1 Hero
<2 Bad Guy
<3 Woman
<4 Odder
(press number to select)

What is your worlds history?
<1 Terrible war all the time
<2 Nice
<3 Bring us the peas

etc..

there. it could problably be done in less than 10 minutes...

sorry for not being serious - it is a good idea to post such questions at the appropiate forums. I find it difficult of my head to name anything specifically resembling what you define - as you define it in such broad terms. But try to search through underdogs.org - or even write an email to the guy behind underdogs - he knows everything

[Lucien21]

Sounds kinda similar to Farenheit (Indigo Propehcy in US)

Although it had a story the way the story played out was dependent on the actions of the character.

Start of game wake up after killing someone. Do you?

* Run out back door
* Clean up and hide evidence etc
* Calmly walk our front

Whatever choice you make determined how the next scene played out still within the narrative framework though.

[insane_cobra]

No, this is different, but now that you mention it, there was a scene in Fahrenheit that was somewhat similar to what's being discussed here. I'm talking about the flashback sequence in the military base in which you're trying to save your childhood friends. You can succeed or you can fail, but the consequences are only skin deep - you just gain or lose several sanity points, it doesn't change the character in any significant way.

[jjacob]

It sounds really interesting, but also *very* hard to actually do (almost impossibly so). I mean, to make it work you'd have to make dozens of possible variations for a lot of aspects of the game and gameworld, not to mention coming up with a very ingenious system. I wonder if it's even possible for a normal-budget game (or perhaps not even for a big-budget one). Don't get me wrong, try it by all means, just don't be disappointed if it turns out it's impossible or simply not practical. Anyway, good luck with it!

[rtrooney]

I'm having trouble grasping the concept from a practical standpoint. If each of ten bits of conversation has the capability of producing ten specific character traits, which, in turn interact with the world in ten different world histories....etc., the complexity of the game becomes unmanageable. In just the above three situations 10x10x10 yields a need to program 1000 possible paths.

Certainly the number of possibilities needs to be cut down for a 10-minute game. But if this project is a test platform for a larger game, I see difficulties on the horizon.

Still, an interesting concept. It has the potential to produce a truly non-linear game. Which, despite how we all argue about what is and what isn't linear, has, to my mind, yet to be done in the Adventure Game arena.

[wildcat]

Sounds similar to those choose your own adventure gamebooks. Which isn't a bad thing.

[After a brisk nap]

In Blade Runner, I believe your actions throughout the game could determine whether or not you were a replicant all along. Is that something like what you're talking about?

Is Jesse still teaching the Game Design class, by the way?

[insane_cobra]

Originally Posted by After a brisk nap

In Blade Runner, I believe your actions throughout the game could determine whether or not you were a replicant all along. Is that something like what you're talking about?

Spot on. Only, I think these guys have something more elaborate in mind.

[Litrick]

Originally Posted by Howrad

I'm a student at CMU's Entertainment Technology Center, and a group of us are serious about making a novel type of adventure game.

It's the sort of thing that lots of people have talked about, but I don't know if anyone has ever tried. One of our faculty members suggested that we post on an adventure gaming forum, and see if anyone knows of any such games. If such a game exists, we want to play it and analyze what went right and what went wrong, and how we can attempt to solve the problems that the last attempt faced.

This is a basic outline of what we want to do:

A 10-minute interactive story-game where the protagonist's background, the history of the world, and his relation to the world are all defined by the player's actions throughout the experience. In most games, you either create a character through a set of drop-down menus or have it predefined. We would like to give the player the opportunity to define not only their character, but the world, history, and place around them via gameplay choices, like conversation, action, and personal thoughts. By allowing the player to define the story, we hope to empower them as both a game-player and as a storyteller. As they play the game, their actions define certain constraints for the story to prevent narrative inconsistencies while still allowing a robust set of choices and interactions. The player will then be able to take a story that they created and share it with other people, to see where they may take it, or to just relive another person's experience.

We think that the reason that so many people have talked about it, but we've never heard of anyone actually try it, is that the number of choices will quickly explode to combinatorics way beyond control. One of our faculty members once started something similar, then gave up, because he thought he'd have to generate way too much content.

We're trying to think of ways to solve this problem, but we want to know: what has already been attempted?

Thanks for your help.

Sounds like a good idea in theory, The game Farenheit attempted a similar thing on a lesser scale. I think you may run into problems with just how many options you can make available to the player though, as you would have to program for years, and the game would be terabytes big for you to have an experince where you can truly shape the character and the world. Most attempts at this end up fairly linear, with the story/circumstances converging at some stage...

Good luck though, hope you can figure out some way to do it

[Howrad]

Originally Posted by After a brisk nap

In Blade Runner, I believe your actions throughout the game could determine whether or not you were a replicant all along. Is that something like what you're talking about?

Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Thanks for pointing out that example. Now we have to go play Blade Runner and see for ourselves.

As insane_cobra said, we would do this in a much more elaborate way. Can anyone else think of similar examples? We want to investigate everything that's out there.

Originally Posted by After a brisk nap

Is Jesse still teaching the Game Design class, by the way?

Yes, and we're all taking it right now. Jesse is actually the faculty member who suggested that we post on this forum. How do you know him, anyway?

Originally Posted by rtrooney

I'm having trouble grasping the concept from a practical standpoint. If each of ten bits of conversation has the capability of producing ten specific character traits, which, in turn interact with the world in ten different world histories....etc., the complexity of the game becomes unmanageable. In just the above three situations 10x10x10 yields a need to program 1000 possible paths.

This analysis is not entirely accurate. Though it yields 1000 possible paths, we have the ability to collapse the tree a bit. If we collapse the tree all the way, we only have to create 30 pieces of content to handle all 1000 paths. This could happen if the choices are job, hair color, and clothing. We could make it such that these three choices of ten things did not affect each other at all, collapsing our content creation requirements to 30.

This is only an example of a best-case scenario, and not something we'd actually want to do, because that would be incredibly boring. I just wanted to demonstrate that the number isn't necessarily 1000. We're trying to come up with good ways to collapse the tree.

[samIamsad]

Originally Posted by Howrad

Can anyone else think of similar examples? We want to investigate everything that's out there.

Perhaps some of Bioware's / Black Isle's titles are worth checking out. I'm thinking of "Knights Of The Old Republic", "Baldur's Gate 2", and especially "Planescape:Torment" (the game itself is the character generator - your character is defined by his actions in this one).

[rtrooney]

Originally Posted by Howrad

We would like to give the player the opportunity to define not only their character, but the world, history, and place around them via gameplay choices, like conversation, action, and personal thoughts. By allowing the player to define the story, we hope to empower them as both a game-player and as a storyteller. As they play the game, their actions define certain constraints for the story to prevent narrative inconsistencies while still allowing a robust set of choices and interactions.

This is not entirely consistent with

Originally Posted by Howrad

This analysis is not entirely accurate. Though it yields 1000 possible paths, we have the ability to collapse the tree a bit. If we collapse the tree all the way, we only have to create 30 pieces of content to handle all 1000 paths. This could happen if the choices are job, hair color, and clothing. We could make it such that these three choices of ten things did not affect each other at all, collapsing our content creation requirements to 30.

If you can collapse the tree, then the freedom to make choices stated in your original posting is not entirely accurate either.

Yes, blondes may have more fun, and thus may be better able to act in a free-spirited world, where the protagonist is not constrained by inhibitions.

Getting to that point may require as few as three program paths, or as many as 1000. It depends on the player.

[Steve Ince]

Much depends on whether the player really has complete freedom or just the appearance of complete freedom. If it's implemented well, would the player be able to tell the difference? Would they play it 1000 times just to prove that, actually, the freedom was managed?

Although there may be a potential 1000 paths through a game, the player will only ever take one of those. If the player is thinking of those other paths all the time the game has failed to be a truly immersive experience. For any player there should only be one path through the game, the one they are creating through their choices.

Collapsing trees is perfectly valid. Decisions shouldn't necessarily exclude the alternative choices to be taken at a later stage. For instance, if I'm given a choice between tea and coffee and choose tea, it doesn't mean that later I can't choose coffee.

[lostwolfe]

the closest approximation i can think of is the old mud/mush/moo's that used to run. one of the nicest character creation systems i ever saw was one that basically guided you down a path.

long after i playled something like that [nineteen ninety four or five, i forget when, exactly] i thought about writing it into a piece of fiction. it could potentially work.

the way *i* did it, when i was writing was that i started the player out in a black room with a path leading in two directions. the "left fork" picked male and the "right fork" picked female. as the character progressed down the chosen path, they gained more traits.

as a sort of crude example, if your player went down the left fork and was male, then you'd pick a race. after you piced a race, the game would start giving you choices. as a baby, did you play with the rattle? did you stare at the clouds? did you sleep a lot? all this stuff gets fed into the "stats" of the character. by the last few choices, you were choosing things like "did your character study science? philosophy? religion?" part of this would, ultimately, even wind up defining what you looked like, though that could be tweaked, but the *other* thing it did was give you a history - you could write a little "journal" program alongside this character creation tool and it would track what you did and how that played out in your early life.

after that, my idea became a lot less esoteric, because the piece of fiction was then supposed to drop the "player" into a given universe and that was where the piece of fiction actually started telling it's own little story, but even there, you can use that "path system" to change things around you and generate things around you.

really - the closest thing i can think of is that when you generate the character, you're generating a "god" subtext, and that "god subtext" allows you to do things most of the mortals couldn't.

the kind of thing you should probably look at to some extent is the "sims" games. also, there's an *old, old* game called "alter ego" which came in either a male format, or a female format. it's interesting, because it *does* show some of the tree-work you're talking about.

the other game you might want to look at in this vein is [assuming you can find it] "princess maker two." each choice you make with the princess eventually defines what sort of princess she's going to be and what the world around her thinks of her to a small extent.

there aren't very many good online mmorpg games that do this very well, but this is probably the closest modern approximation i can think of.

i hope this helps in some way.

postscript:
oh. something else i thought of - and sorry for not putting it in sooner - is to look at very old online communities, like "habitat." these didn't have concrete rules about anything. those rules evolved over time. there's a white paper some of the lucasfilm guys wrote called the "lessons of lucasfilm's habitat" which might make for instructional reading -->

lessons of lucasfilm's habitat

i understand that this takes you a little off your path, but i do think it'd make for interesting reading.

[rtrooney]

Originally Posted by Steve Ince

...whether the player really has complete freedom or just the appearance of complete freedom.

Of course that is true. Whether the number of paths is 1K or 1KKK, the player will ultimately find him or herself at an endgame the designer led him or her to. It's unavoidable, unless the game has no end. Which is possible if looping becomes part of the programming equation. But that's another discussion.

[Steve Ince]

One trouble with completely open gameplay is the vast amount of resources necessary, which either takes a long time to create or is of poor quality because you have to rush its creation. Even with collapsed trees, you still have a lot of material that players may never see. It could be that there are "natural" routes through the game which preclude other routes and it may be that some material won't be seen by anyone, but how will you know ahead of time?

Personally, I'd rather work towards a relatively fixed story goal, but give the player enough freedom that they can work towards it in their own way. For instance, if the player is presented with five objectives at one point in the game, the player should be able to choose which order to take each one.