As a book, Procedural
Storytelling in Game Design
has not quite been what I expected. The marketing material
declares that “The reader will learn to construct narrative systems, write
procedural dialog, and generate compelling characters with unique personalities
and backstories,” and that has not exactly been my experience.
It’s never smart to believe marketing material, but this
reads more like a collection of essays?
That’s fine — the essays are written by smart people! — but
it’s not a step-by-step instruction manual. Each essay has its own
perspective, and they don’t always fit neatly together for a clean set of best
practices.
I still copied down some ideas to swipe for later.
I. The Bare Minimum.
In Chapter 3, “Generated Right in
the Feels,” Veteran game designer Jill Murray (“best
known for her work on Shadow of the Tomb Raider, The Big Con, and a handful of
Assassin’s Creed games”) writes about her experiments trying to identify the
smallest, sparsest, most sketchy set of details that could make characters seem
relatable. “We know that players have a great natural capacity and enthusiasm
for attachment and interpretation. Why not provoke them to use it on purpose
and shift some of the processing power to the players’ minds, so to speak.”
Murray tested this idea by
developing a character generator that created sets of descriptive details. It turned
out that providing too many details distracted people from the character by encouraging them to play around with the generator. “A sparse level of detail
was more likely to tap into players’ creative minds and provoke them to
consider the person behind the list.”
II. Clever
Combinations.
In Chapter 8, “Curated Narrative
in Duskers,” Tim Keenan and Benjamin
Hill (the creators of Duskers)
discuss how identical story components can create different narratives when
they’re encountered in different orders. They gave an example with a dead rat
and two discussions of how it got there: maintenance technicians explaining that dead rats are found on spaceships all the time, and scientists talking
about how it could be a sign that something is seriously wrong.
Test audiences read both perspectives, and “most of those who read the scientist’s email
first generally felt the scientist was on to something and the operators were
being obtuse, while most of those who read the operator’s conversation first
were more likely to think the scientist was overreacting.” Using this insight,
they broke their game’s stories into a series of small ship logs from different
points of view, allowing players to experience the narrative differently and
encouraging them to draw varied conclusions.
III. Planned
Absences
In Chapter 18, “Dirty Procedural
Narrative in We Happy Few,” Alex Epstein
(narrative director for We Happy Few)
discusses the challenge of telling stories in a procedural sandbox. He relies on the fact that people will eagerly assemble their own stories from a
set of disjointed facts, approaching procedural storytelling with what he
calls “dirty narrative.” Epstein says that while good dirty narrative stories have
the same elements as every good story, “what distinguishes them is that,
instead of trying to make as clear as possible what happened to whom, where,
when and how, they intentionally demand interpretation.”
Epstein goes on to explain how
dirty narrative can use lies, absences, mysteries, inconsistencies, and
tangents to outline negative space around a story that the audience fills in themselves. “All dirty narrative could be boiled down to ‘something
should be there but isn’t’ and ‘something’s there that shouldn’t be.’” However,
he also warns that dirty narrative is “execution dependent” (i.e., something
that will be awful if poorly implemented).
I might have chosen these points selectively to support my own
biases (Dear God, these essays make so
many points), but it seems like good procedural narrative ends up being
willfully incomplete. When a system creates a single, definitive story that has
no room for interpretation, it’s tougher to engage with.
