Story Architects of the [near] Future
By: Heston L Abbé
Tags: Procedural Generation, Video, VR, Virtual Reality, Storytelling

Virtual reality — once wedded to photorealistic real-time rendering and advanced corporeal interfaces — has the potential to deliver experiences so transportative and immersive you will forget the compulsion to glance at your phone every thiry seconds (even stereoscopic, surround-sound, IMAX, D-Box cinema can’t seem to accomplish this anymore — not for my girlfriend anyhow). It will be today’s Arrival of a Train.

That’s all fine and good, but I can’t help but jump ahead to the next level of audience engagement. One that has been probed by the computer-gaming community for decades, but may soon arrive in the mainstream as a major creative discipline: A new medium for storytelling will soon emerge between games and movies; between the interactive and the non-interactive.

Space Content!

Whereas video games are about participation in (and mastery of) a challenge-reward process loop; and movies are about passive observation of a self-contained emotionally/intellectually resonant story: the narrative experience of the future will be about participation in (and perhaps even mastery of — more on that later) an emotionally/intellectually resonant story. They will involve world-building in the same resolution and production value as film, but to the depth and scale of world-building in video games. Akin to childrens’ role-play only with big name celebrities for friends. It will be the “holodeck,” realized, one headset at a time.*

*And it need not be a solitary experience as many VR detractors seem to pine on about. Two or more headsets could put people together in the same virtual experience. Hell they don’t even need to be in the same geographic locale to be sharing an experience together in virtual space. There’s no reason why VR can’t be social too (Mark Zuckerberg’s bankers would probably agree …emphatically).

The technology behind all this is advancing. It is already pretty good. But there is one craft that has not sufficiently kept up with our technical capacity: Storytelling.

And that is what most keenly excites me: The addition of this single new element — participation — will require a ground-up rethink of how narratives are built.

Tell me a Story

There are two types of non-linear narrative: Finite-branching narrative; and a little something I like to call ‘Procedural Story.’

Finite-branching narrative is essentially a linear narrative that is punctuated by user choices. Segments of linear story are strung together at junctions of multiple-choice where the user simply selects from a predefined set of narrative paths. It is the ‘choose-you-own-adventure’ paradigm from paperbacks of yore. The limitations are obvious: Retellings are never truly unique or surprising as all possible eventualities must be described in advance by the author — a workload which, after even just a few binary branches, amplifies exponentially (behold! A mathematically accurate use of this sadly diluted buzzword). That is hardly a cost-effective task when all but one subset of those outcomes will never see the light of day. More importantly, the result (prove me otherwise) is always bland and forgettable.

Procedural stories on the other hand (we could also use the term ‘sandbox story’ or “storyscape”), stand to be a fascinating beast indeed. I first touched on this subject in my article Movies in VR: Why They’ll Never Work and What Will Instead where I made the case that audience emotional engagement in a piece of interactive content best emerges organically from the very mechanisms of interaction rather than shoehorned in opposition to them. Procedural storytelling attempts to bend this principle to the sole purpose of building engaging, memorable narratives.

Tell me a Procedural Story

A procedural story is a narrative written at ‘run-time’ by programs feeding on user and self-generated input. It is an emergent product of the complex interplay between starting conditions, user input, scripted events, and simulated system loops such as character personality engines and environments. Nobody, not even the ‘architect’ knows exactly how it will unfold. The same premise could be re-played a hundred times by a hundred different people and never be exactly the same experience twice.

I mentioned the word architect there quite deliberately.

Story Architect vs. Writer

Just as it is a writer’s job to make a traditional linear story compelling, it will fall to a Story Architect to design interest into a procedural story. Unlike a writer however, a story architect can not know what is actually going to happen in the story. How can they possibly do their job? It begins with a strong premise, but it goes deeper than that.

Just as traditional structural/building architects design spaces to contain and impel human activities within, so too does a story architect design narrative spaces to contain and impel human experiences within.

A structural architect does not precisely foresee or control how a given space will be used, but he/she can certainly optimize towards a desired outcome through the deliberate arrangement of open vs private spaces; stairs, access and traffic corridors; built-in appliances; the distribution of light, materials, storage, etc. The intention of the architect influences experiences had within the building, but does not strictly define them. Once inhabited, the building’s interior becomes a dynamical living system that may or may not be used precisely as expected but nonetheless is coloured by the character of its designer.

In a procedural story, the ‘writing’ process ceases to be one of defining specifics and becomes an exercise in probabilities — tweaking knobs and variables to optimize towards desired outcomes. It is gardening as opposed to sculpture (too many metaphors?). Through an artful arrangement of premise and settings; characters’ fears and desires; and environmental context, the story architect shapes fertile narrative spaces from which compelling events will emerge organically — and if done right — inevitably. Once populated with autonomous and semi-autonomous agents the storyscape, like a building, becomes a living and dynamical system, coloured but not defined by its designer.

That sense of ‘Being There’

It’s not impossible: Characters with opposing agendas and fractious personalities hurtle towards an inevitable conflict. The audience could be equipped to either resolve the conflict or exacerbate it, or get sucked into the middle by choosing to take no action. Regardless, something is bound to happen. Deftly constructed triangles of overlapping intent; shifting gauntlets of obstacle; deep relationships teetering on the brink of disequilibrium — all the regular ingredients of a great story will be equally at play here. Only the outcome is uncertain.

And here’s the kicker: Because the ‘viewer’ was ‘there’ when it happened, was in fact partly responsible for the way it happened, that eventual uncertain outcome will be all the more memorable and impactful.

Don’t believe me? Consider why sports events, so enduringly popular, are best consumed live and not the day after — even when you didn’t know who won!

Take that intoxicating sense of ‘being there when it happend’ and multiply it by all the usual reasons humans seek out big-S stories: vicarious fantasy/wish fulfillment, role-play, escapism, catharsis, education, allegory/sense-making of life’s seeming randomness… and you’ve got yourself one potent new medium indeed.

Which brings me to the next point: How story theory will need to be advanced.

The State of the Art

Writers and storytellers, myself included, still operate essentially on instinct. We cast about for ideas, know a good one when it strikes us, and knead out a narrative with often more than a little trial-and-error. But we can not automatically piece one together from component parts like Ikea furniture, let alone generate one algorithmically according to dynamic input. (True there’s no shortage of self-anointed gurus hawking manuals and skeleton-keys to perfect story structure, but there is enough disagreement among them to reassure me that it’s still not an exact science. Moreover, a glance at any of these authors’ own body of work will confirm that their formulae are not yet infallible).

Perhaps storytelling was never meant to be an exact science, so dependent as it is on human mirror neurons and personal experience. But still I am fascinated by the notion of what it would take to advance this black art to the point of viable proceduralization (or dare I say automation).

Stories will have to be broken down into its component parts: Elements like anticipation+uncertainty (suspense); irony+reversal; comic timing; cultural reference; conflict; romance; character arc; and many more not yet identified.

Story structures will have to be abstracted: Why are a sequence of events arranged one way compelling but arranged another way inconsequential? They will require a new ‘functional language’ of conditions and contingencies, that will allow descriptions of dramatic situations and encompass all possible outcomes (along with probability distributions and weights accounting for ‘dramatic effect’).

The effort is inherently multidisciplinary: elements of character and personality are already being explored by the engines of AI chatbots, a field basking in investment and whose advances will spill over to benefit the world of procedural story.

Finally, stories (like everything nowadays) will have to be analyzed from a holistic-networked point-of-view: How do particular structural relationships between the aforementioned component parts affect the overall impact of the story? What about the contemporary cultural context?

A tall order no doubt. Maybe once natural language processing gets real good, we could unleash deep-data-mining-machine-learning-AI (whatever Bloomberg is calling it this week) systems on our collective cultural reservoir and really glean some insights. Maybe it’s a job for quantum computers. Regardless, there’s a good chance it will happen in our lifetimes. Then Story Architecture will be a real bona fide profession.

In Closing

It’s true that there will always be demand for a linear story well told. One that we can simply sit back and observe.

It’s true that an algorithmically generated story might never be as objectively good as the best in traditional literature/screenwriting.

But invention is the mother of necessity. If I told you you could be James Bond for a few hours — not just watch him, but really BE him: have what he has; do what he does; feel what he touches; live his life… would you do it?