The Narrative Design Exploratorium™

My article Dramatic play was published recently on Gamasutra.com and has created some interesting discussion on various sights and forums.

What is Dramatic play? Dramatic play is a new niche, a paradigm that is the focus of interactive narrative design, the craft that meets at the apex of ludology and narratology and conjoins the theories into functional video game development methodologies. To the right is a model I created based on Aritotles Dramatic Thoery as adapted for video games.

If you'd like to read the article it is available @ http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4061/dramatic_play.php

I think the article was best rephrased by AJ Glasser for Kataku as "You sorta owe Dead Space to Aristotle." Read the thread @ http://kotaku.com/5302557/you-sorta-owe-dead-space-to-aristotle

Having developed franchises ranging in genres and game types, I've become versed in writing and designing transmedia narrative delivery within the rules of a given property. Like any creative endeavor blank slates can be harder to fill than a penciled page. Restraints based on franchise rules can be both detrimental and freeing. Balancing these concerns and knowing when to stick to a rule, and when to throw it out is vital to successful franchise development. At the end of the day it's about pleasing fans, and surprising them too.

Pre-Production
This is a vital step, often truncated or overlooked in scope, but it is a large part of the process which can be time consuming.

Step 1: Study the Franchise
This seems easy, but it's can be quite time consuming and difficult. You need to know a world well enough to author in it. This takes a balancing of your subjective take on the franchise with a more objective view of how the fans perceive it. Sure you can jump in renegade style and bang around until Batman is wearing skates and Dr. Freeze is a beef cake, or you can take care knowing you are stepping into sacred ground. Yes franchises are the place of fairy tales and make believe, they are intellectual properties which exist in the imagination. When you take the task of altering and or adding to a franchise you get a chance to contribute to the imaginations of thousands if not millions of people. It's an opportunity best not squandered on sophomoric fearlessness. That said, some people know franchises too well to author in them, they become fearful of breaking the cannon of fiction for sake of damaging their nostalgic glamorization of what once was.  

Step 2: Identify the Pillars
Look at the Franchise and ask yourself "What makes this strong." "What does The Marvel Universe mean?" or "What is Harry Potter?" "What is Halo?" I find this is best done in a team setting. Key players a good team will have talents and likes which bring them focus on certain aspects of the franchise. Coming together to narrow and nail the pillars will be much more fruitful than if you where to attacked it yourself.

This is an ongoing NDE series featuring interviews with Game Writers in the Trenches™.  The game industry is riddled with the unsung heroes of interactive storytelling.  As game developers are increasingly looking to create meaningful virtual narrative experiences, listening to the real-world wisdom of these writers can help everyone on the development pipeline understand their trials, tribulations, and needs, in hopes of enabling them to do their job as they know best. Today's game writer is Micah Wright, I'm hoping to see what we can learn from his experiences in the trenches of writing and game development.

Stephen Dinehart: First off congrats on your continued success; between comics, books, games and more I'm wondering where you get the time. The first project I'd like to address is your propaganda remix project.  It is highly compelling from multiple perspectives. How did it get started?

Micah Wright: It started in early 2002... I saw a series of new WWII-era styled posters regarding "information security" that the National Security Agency commissioned, and something about them didn't seem right.  After staring at them for a while, I realized it was because at least one of them was a direct repaint of a Nazi propaganda poster, and all of them included a lot of techniques more commonly associated the social realism posters of Russia or China... military figures staring not at the viewer, but up and away to the glorious proletariat future.  It really angered me that after 9/11 our government's first instinct was to pass the USA PATRIOT ACT and strip us of our civil liberties, and here suddenly was a poster with Nazi imagery on it.  I didn't like the implications.  I blogged about the image, and a reader suggested that I make fun of it, so I did.  One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I had about 50 posters that I'd repainted, so I posted them all onto one page and started getting crazy amounts of hits solely through word of mouth.    That's when I knew that there were a lot of people like me... people who saw which direction the Bush Administration was leading the country and weren't on board with their plans.

The 'game system' fires up, the fans roar (or hopefully not so much), and the once black screen ignites. Immediately the player engages the video game and encounters stimuli; text; main menus, loading screens, cinematics, play mechanics, player characters, non-player characters, etc. They take witness and navigate the system using designed actions, play mechanics. Using these mechanics, the player acts as an agent within the participatory dramatic spectacle. An agent is a person or thing that takes an active role.  The player moves forward through a series of events acting with designed mechanics to bring about change in the system in order to achieve some desired outcome. To act is to cause or experience events. An event is a transition from one state to another. As a player acts he assembles a series of logical and chronologically related events, a fabula. This is the story, a series of events cognitively assembled and perceived by the player. The player authors this story through the reading of the text; the video game.

"A narrative text is a text in which an agent relates a story in a particular medium" [Bal 1994]. The video game is related, or narrated, by the video game engine to the player through both active and passive means. Text, imagery, feedback, sound, and temporal sequences are read, perceived and judged. The game engine presents a narrative text to the player and says read me; understand what I am; and immerse yourself in the simulation.

Some are better readers, better players, but all the players read and absorb the experience. As the player progresses in his play these judgments about the events, experienced as a result of his actions, cause him to modify his play to produce desired results. Reading allows the player to determine the next action needed to achieve a specific objective, or 'object of desire.' The story is needed by the player to convey the subjective meaning associated with the narrative read in the video game. A dramatic pattern that when assembled by the player creates a [player] story; a communication about the way things are within a particular system.

Interactive Narrative Design is a craft which focuses on creating dramatic play meaningful participatory experiences with interactive systems. An interactive narrative designer seeks to craft systems which deliver narremes, narrative elements, to a player in such a fashion that the player may craft a story cognitively based on their navigation within said system. When narrative design is successful the player believes that they are experiencing a story driven out of their own agency within a navigated dataspace or played video game. While the aims of Interactive Narrative Design are similar to Game Writing and Game Design, and surely involves the crafts, this hybrid craft aims to allow story to take center stage so that the systems engaged by the player are centered around the core thematic aim of the writers story.

Interactive Narrative Design is a craft that meets at the apex of Ludology and Narratology and turns the conjoining into functional interactive entertainment development methodologies. Ludology being the study of play that has become very fashionable in the game design community within the past 2 decades. Narratology is the theory of narratives, of spectacles, cultural artifacts that 'tell a story'. Video games allow the player to witness data as a navigable, participatory dramatic spectacles, unfolding before their eyes in real-time.

The aim is to transport the player through play into the video game by all means of his visual and aural faculties, so that he may forget the confines of reality and live and breathe in the video game which seems as life itself and on the screen which seems the wide expanse of a whole world. The craft to bring about that paradigm shift is Interactive Narrative Design.

Drama is defined as "A serious play of human conflict." This is especially apt for video games.The basic conflict of protagonist (player 1), deuteragonist (player 2) and the antagonist is at the core of life, drama, and games. Whether it's a Wii bowling game or a online multiplayer strategy game, conflict, and it's resolution, is also at the core of game mechanics.

It is the same mechanic that has driven mankind forward in the religion, sciences, arts, and humanities. It is this innate conflict of life which has been at the core of human pondering for almost as long as recorded history. The ancient Chinese drawing a dualism in approaches to conflict resolution between Sun Tzu, with life as a series of conflicts which can be overcome by a skilled tactician to achieve his object of desire, and Buddha, with life as suffering (conflict) and the way to overcome it as a secession of desire.

Conflict renders life in the present. Through it's being mankind gains purpose and meaning through the chaos of change. Too in the realm of story, in the realm of drama, conflict acts as the very catalyst which drives human life forward. A classical 3-act narrative structure is driven by an active protagonist seeking to achieve an object of desire, and the conflict which arises out of action to achieve that object. The pattern repeats until a final climatic conflict occurs that drives the protagonist to a penultimate action to achieve his object of desire. This is resolved in the denouement, which gives or takes the object of desire to the protagonist, in all or part, depending on the degree of irony.

In that, games become systems to understand conflict and it's resolution in the drama of real life. An old friend of mine once told me that his British father would say: "We don't have wars in Europe anymore, we have soccer."

There was a interesting discussion on the the IGDA's Game Design Special Interest Group about the necessity of gore in games. In any other genres but action, horror and war, I would say no, gore is not needed. That said, I do not believe in the "gore-wars" to one-up the "real" nature of violence in games. To me this is a childish enterprise for a grail which is never realized. Do you remember when the Mortal Kombat arcade game series seemed truly violent? Watching it now reveals it's almost comic interpretation of gore.

The pleasure of horror is to become, for a while, wired to your subconscious mind. I'm subscribed to the "life is scary enough without horror" group, but for the player whom is engaged in a violent game, he is experiencing in himself as a human being, what is often buried in the subconscious, now in the conscious. It's a rush of identification with great power, with the life-force. We live in a society which chooses to ignore the "elimnation of life" our tax dollars pay for in the day, and glamorize brutality in the night, amongst the shadows of the 10 o'clock news. We bring real horror to the door steps of our unwilling global neighbors, but we seek to regulate the fantasies of adults though censorship of the arts. I ask why? We cleary have bigger issues.

I create games to make meaningful emotional experiences, not to further puzzles or to encourage the slaughter of hordes of trolls. It's not that these puzzle slaughter games are wrong, but they aren't meaningful for me, and that's why I work in games, to try and make these shoot 'em up, dry puzzle mechanics into something the player can draw emotional, and maybe even spiritual, meaning from. The hope is that Interactive Narrative Design can do just that, if not now, then within my lifetime.

Why focus on narrative?
In the design of interactive story, actions (player agency), characters, setting and plot and the intermeshing of characters and events is the hardest work I've done, and to create a playable ending that is inevitable, but insightful and provoking. I craft narratives that provide insight into life, ones which are satisfying; emotionally gratifying. They are tests for how much one really understands life. I want to make and play games that end, and end well. Ones that when finished provide the player with insight about the very real human condition.

This is an ongoing NDE series featuring interviews with Game Writers in the Trenches™.  The game industry is riddled with the unsung heroes of interactive storytelling.  As game developers are increasingly looking to create meaningful virtual narrative experiences, listening to the real-world wisdom of these writers can help everyone on the development pipeline understand their trials, tribulations, and needs, in hopes of enabling them to do their job as they know best. Today's game writer is Richard Dansky, I'm hoping to see what we can learn from his experiences in the trenches of game development.

Stephen Dinehart: First off, congrats on being named one of the top 20 game writers most recently by Gamasutra! How has the recognition of your craft changed over the pas 15 years of your career?

Richard Dansky: Thank you! It really is a tremendous honor, particularly being listed with some folks whose work I've always looked to as a model for what I've tried to achieve. I think the list itself is indicative of how much game writing has grown and matured as a craft  - fifteen years ago, I don't think you could have gotten folks to name twenty game writers, and now there are energetic debates on message boards as to who else deserved to be on the list. The fact that game writers are getting known for their work - not just within the industry, but by the fans as well - means that there's more of an understanding of what good writing brings to a game. And that can only be a good thing moving forward.

The International Game Developers Association's Game Writing Special Interest Group just released a book with A k Peters, called Writing for Video Game Genres: From RPG to RTS . I was fortunate to have contributed the chapter called Writing for Real-Time Strategy Games. The pages are graced by many popular game writers, including Haris Orkin, Richard Dansky, Tracy Seamester, Lee Sheldon, Andy Walsh, Sand Chen, Evan Skolnick, and that's just the start! The book can be orderd online, and should be on retail shelves soon. This is the third book released by the WSIG and could be a helpful a part of any game students or aspiring game writers collection. It can also serve as a good resource for those of us in the field.