From: mollems@wkuvx1.bitnet
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: The trend in adventure games
Date: 29 Sep 92 12:09:55 CDT
Organization: Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY

In article <librik.717727822@cory.Berkeley.EDU>, librik@cory.Berkeley.EDU (David Librik) writes:
> 
(All the things I previously said deleted)
>>make the games, but I believe that there are less and less real
>>WRITERS in the world today.
 
> I think this is unfair; there's more to it than that.  Creating real
> characterization, themes, sub-plots, and suggestions of greater profundity
> (both "game depth" and "philosophical depth") is much, much harder in
> Adventure games than in stories.  Even the best Adventure creation systems
> (like TADS) don't make it less than an utter pain in the butt.

I agree, of course, that turning a story into a game is quite a
difficult proposition.  In point of fact, when I write an interactive
fiction game, I actually do write the "story" first -- in other words,
I write a story, in which the puzzles and whatnot of the game are
explored by a second-person character (the "you" from those Choose
Your Own Adventure books is an appropriate analogy).  Then, I try to
take the story and turn it into a game ... and, inevitably, I lose
more than I get on the PC.  However, I contend that today's games
simply do not make the effort.  There are exceptions -- when I
mentioned Origin, I was actually trying to compliment them ... in the
Ultima roleplaying games, for example, there is an attempt to bring
depth to some of the recurring characters in the game.
 
> If I write a story and want to give a character some psychological depth,
> I can choose what she says as the story progresses.  But Adventures are
> driven by an input-and-response scheme that makes specifying character
> behavior difficult.  Robert Abernathy the Adventure Wizard (in UU2) is
> hardly a figure from Dostoievsky, but I imagine he took a good deal of
> code just to circulate around and make random witty comments.

Sure it takes a lot of code to get an "actor" to bum around and say
things, even at random.  The "input-and-response" scheme that drives
text adventures is not necessarily a limitation, however.  My view of
an IF game is like a novel, and each time you see the prompt, it's
asking you to turn the page, so to speak, by taking an action. 
Whether you take the action the game designer intended or not, is
another question, but too many games consist of characters which are
not "characters" at all, but rather objects which respond to the
player when he addresses them directly, or appear when you try to do
something you shouldn't, and then fade away until you do it again.
 
> In my TADS game, I wanted Leya (a woman you rescue near the end of the game)
> to have some simple behavior patterns: she was bothered by violence -- the
> game is full of necessary but unpleasant activities -- though she eventually
> becomes somewhat resigned to it.  Her responses, and general attitude towards
> you (used to determine certain reactions to commands), would be based on a
> simple model of "current mindset."  Unfortunately, this sort of thing is
> near impossible to do in any straightforward way.  The techniques of a
> writer's craft don't help you any, because Real Writers don't spend their
> time trying to come up with algorithms and canned responses for a hundred
> unanticipated commands.  In the end, I had to fall back on the Old I.F.
> Standard, the well-placed comment: a few remarks at appropriate times (i.e.
> in response to appropriate actions) sketch out a metal picture for the reader.
> (It's a bit like Chinese art: a few perfectly-placed brush strokes have to
> take the place of naturalism in representation.  You see a few squiggles, but
> your mind thinks "distant, inaccessible line of mountains.")

I think that we are diverging from the question of plot in adventure
games and difficulty of coding.  No, "Real Writers" don't come up with
a billion canned responses for off-the-wall commands.  I think that
should be the last stage of developing a game.  I write my games,
assuming the player will do one of the more logical items in a range
of possible actions, and write the main text that way.  Then, after
it's done, I go back and put in the "fixes" for the cute player who
has to try and put the spinach in the gas tank, or gnaw on the
princess's arm, or whatever.  I don't consider those things a part of
the real story; they are supplementary to prevent the game from
crashing and aren't truly a part of the plot.  We don't have the
technology to write "artificial people" for characters in IF games,
but at the same time, we can portray them as independent creatures,
who are not waiting on the whim of the PLAYER to give them their
impetus for action.  And I agree that making the characters "real" to
the player is more difficult in a game than in a novel, because in a
novel the reader has no impact on the outcome.  When the reader of a
novel turns the page, the same text is there no matter what, but the
"next page" of an adventure game is not fixed until the player types
in his commands.  The difference is subtle, but very real.
 
> But I don't think a more "pre-fabricated" Adventure development system is
> the answer.  The good thing about TADS is that it lets you get down and
> specify _exactly_ what you want the game to do: that is, you program it.
> An Acme "BILD-A-PERZONALITY" kit would only work if it were so constructed
> as to let the programmer override any defaults, and still have the expressive
> power to describe character behavior.  In TADS, at least, it would be nice
> to have some way to encapsulate _within the Actors_ their reactions to
> "external" events.  But what is an "external" event is hard to say ...

I haven't used TADS yet, but what I hear is mostly very good things
about it, so I will have to check it out.  One of the other adventure
development kits available is called ALAN, and in that language the
programmer specifies "scripts" for each "actor" or character of
importance.  Thus, one could write a large number of different
"scripts" for a main character such as you describe and then select on
based on external conditions (did the player do such-and-such).  In
fact, the program could contain an internal "value" scale similar to
the suspicion level in Infocom's Border Zone which determined which
script was taken.  In Border Zone, the Frobnian inspector was more or
less suspicious of you as a spy depending on conditions like blood on
the floor, suspicious actions, items, etc.  and then you were searched
to a degree more or less severe depending on how suspicious he was of
you.  Something similar to that could work well with your character --
the more violence she sees, the more she becomes "accustomed" to it,
and her scripts -- which might vary by only a sentence or two -- would
change accordingly for future actions and descriptions.

It's a difficult question, and one which the designers at Infocom
never got to fully answer.  I wonder what sort of games they would be
turning out if they were still around, considering today's amazing
PC's, with their tremendous memory and other advantages over the old
8-bit machines?  True "novel" characterization may be impossible, but
I believe that the author of an interactive fiction game can give the
player a very real sense of who these other characters are.  Indeed,
imagine a game where the PLAYER and his CHARACTER might be diametric
opposites -- the character might have to take actions the player would
never do himself, or the player might want to take a course of action
that the character would be opposed to.  A main character who would
never kill or steal, for example, could be a challenge to play.  The
story, in this case, might be told from a first-person point of view,
and when the player attempted an "immoral" (from the character's view)
action, respond with something along the lines of "I would never do
such a thing."  Just a thought...
 
> - David Librik
> librik@cory.Berkeley.EDU

-- M. Sean Molley, CS Department, Western Kentucky University
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction