Narrative in games - presenting a case for emergent narrative

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Most videogames have a tendency to come packaged with a story on the box (Juul, 2001). Does this make them narrative? Game scholars like Aarseth argue against the perspective due to structural differences between the two (Aarseth, 2004). In this paper we analyze these key design conflicts between games and pre-scripted narratives. We will try to investigate if there is a possibility for creating narratives in games, which will result in a series of guidelines for Emergent Narrative. To test the framework proposed, we will apply it in a game revolving around life in a shanty town (favela) in Rio de Janeiro. 1 Introduction A story can be defined as “a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors which is represented in a particular way.” (Bal, 1997) While a videogame’s gameplay is defined as “the degree and nature of the interactivity that the game includes, i.e., how the player is able to interact with the game-world and how that game-world reacts to the choices the player makes.” (Rouse, 2001) Stories have been presented in videogames for a long time. Mario (Nintendo Creative Department, 1985) was explained to be on a mission to save the princess; the player is trying to save earth against an alien invasion in Space Invaders (Taito Corporation, 1978). The transition to better graphics saw stories take an even deeper and central role in videogames. Developers could make detailed adventure games with engaging stories such as The Secret of Monkey Island (Lucasfilm Games, 1990) and Grim Fandango (LucasArts, 1998). Players had to push and prod the objects in the game world until the game recognized a pre-determined combination had been successfully achieved to reveal the next story plot. Most computer games provide the player with a vast variety of options during gameplay. They can walk around, interact with objects, shoot guns, and talk to other people in the level, etc. 1 However when it comes to the story, the experience is limited to the same outcome (or a predefined finite number at best). Each play session of The Secret of Monkey Island will always reveal the same three pirate objectives to the protagonist, which will always have the same hurdles to overcome. This feature of narrative 1 Incidentally all of those mechanics are present in some games like Mass Effect 2 (BioWare, 2010)

description

Most videogames have a tendency to come packaged with a story on the box (Juul, 2001). Does this make them narrative? Game scholars like Aarseth argue against the perspective due to structural differences between the two (Aarseth, 2004). In this paper we analyze these key design conflicts between games and pre-scripted narratives. We will try to investigate if there is a possibility for creating narratives in games, which will result in a series of guidelines for Emergent Narrative. To test the framework proposed, we will apply it in a game revolving around life in a shanty town (favela) in Rio de Janeiro.

Transcript of Narrative in games - presenting a case for emergent narrative

Page 1: Narrative in games - presenting a case for emergent narrative

Most videogames have a tendency to come packaged with a story on the box (Juul, 2001). Does this make them narrative? Game scholars like Aarseth argue against the perspective due to structural differences between the two (Aarseth, 2004). In this paper we analyze these key design conflicts between games and pre-scripted narratives. We will try to investigate if there is a possibility for creating narratives in games, which will result in a series of guidelines for Emergent Narrative. To test the framework proposed, we will apply it in a game revolving around life in a shanty town (favela) in Rio de Janeiro.

1 IntroductionA story can be defined as “a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors which is represented in a particular way.” (Bal, 1997)

While a videogame’s gameplay is defined as “the degree and nature of the interactivity that the game includes, i.e., how the player is able to interact with the game-world and how that game-world reacts to the choices the player makes.” (Rouse, 2001)

Stories have been presented in videogames for a long time. Mario (Nintendo Creative Department, 1985) was explained to be on a mission to save the princess; the player is trying to save earth against an alien invasion in Space Invaders (Taito Corporation, 1978). The transition to better graphics saw stories take an even deeper and central role in videogames. Developers could make detailed adventure games with engaging stories such as The Secret of Monkey Island (Lucasfilm Games, 1990) and Grim Fandango (LucasArts, 1998). Players had to push and prod the objects in the game world until the game recognized a pre-determined combination had been successfully achieved to reveal the next story plot.

Most computer games provide the player with a vast variety of options during gameplay. They can walk around, interact with objects, shoot guns, and talk to other people in the level, etc. 1 However when it comes to the story, the experience is limited to the same outcome (or a predefined finite number at best). Each play session of The Secret of Monkey Island will always reveal the same three pirate objectives to the protagonist, which will always have the same hurdles to overcome. This feature of narrative in games disregards the player’s control of the protagonist’s actions; her ability to exert micro influence on the narrative events is not possible.

A similar problem arises when most of the current day games use cutscenes to show the narrative progression after a gameplay episode. The players have no control over decision making in those moments. Such problems have raised doubts about the validity of calling games a narrative medium altogether, to rather say that games sometimes include other narrative media to provide perception of a story being there.

We address this conflict by discussing key structural differences between games and narrative. While games may not live up to the prophecy (Murray, 1997)2 during this examination, how can designers keep these differences in mind when designing a game, and still incorporate “narrative” potentials in it? We’ll

1 Incidentally all of those mechanics are present in some games like Mass Effect 2 (BioWare, 2010)

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take a look at how games may be designed so that they are personal to the player and do not encroach upon her agency with the game. In the process, we formulate a general approach utilizing guidelines of emergent narrative to tell stories in games. In order to test the level of success achieved, a short game about favela in Rio de Janeiro was designed using the framework we put forward. The game’s setting is inspired from the motion picture City of God (Meirelles & Lund, 2002).

2 Narrative vs. GameThe current point of view regarding narratives in games reflects on the large market success that games with so called “epic” stories enjoy. In most games, portions of the story are conveyed in terms of very short movies, called “cutscenes” which are almost always non-interactive. However there’s a valid contention about how these cues lose the interactivity of games. For such cases, Juul presents a fitting analogy of gameplay providing moments of “lean forward” immersion as compared to “lean back” moments of narrative consumption in non-interactive sections (Juul, 2001). Consider Uncharted 2 (Naughty Dog, 2009) for a moment. The game employs cutscenes to direct the narrative flow (and mission objectives). These cutscenes can be viewed on the internet3 without going through any of the gameplay. It does make a compelling story indeed, but no input is needed from the viewer. Similarly game missions could very well be played without any of the cutscenes to enjoy the gameplay. The absence of either one from the other does not render them unusable. Hence, such games are independent from their narrative.4

Another reason why narrative is not influential in immersing the player has to do with the disjoint that she feels with the protagonist. While reading a story (or watching a motion picture) the receiver of the story does not have to relate to the protagonist(s). The experience only involves the recipient to participate as a disembodied viewer. It is our opinion that this disembodiment from the protagonist is not shared by the player of a video game. If the player is unable to understand the protagonist, then that would affect the extent of her gameplay choices. Being the player she is allowed to work within an action space, but not really allowed to influence the outcome. In such a flow of events, games loose one of their key attribute i.e. gameplay (crossref), and loosely become glorified hypertext adventures.

Let us consider an example to illustrate this point - Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream, 2010), one of the blockbuster hits of recent years which was largely marketed as a game. But was it really a game? Bogost has explained how the so called “game” boils down to being an “interactive film” (Bogost, 2010), where the player fills the role of a film editor selecting where to cut the movie into the next plot twist. However, in this case as in the previous ones, there’s nothing wrong with a new genre in entrainment. But this brings an interesting topic to the fore about how various medium available to computer (or computer machines) are so spread out in genre context that a generalized conclusion that “all” computer media is or is not narrative is largely problematic (Aarseth, 2004). This categorization, can however be helped a little by narrowing down our focus area to not include interactive storytelling (or ones which are informally regarded as games, but formally resemble interactive storytelling) and talk exclusively about computer games that are characterized by complex game mechanics.

2 Murray famously stated that games can one day grow to become a powerful media for narrating epics such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet.3 Uncharted 2 - All Cutscenes HD. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eLsYkPhicU4 RPG games without cutscenes provide a different option in game narration that is discussed in section 3.

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A common explanation provided in favor of games conveying narrative has been the representational view of narratives. The argument goes that since human beings represent reality through making stories, it helps the player to put a narrative context to her actions. Frasca however points out that games are inherently simulation based (Frasca, 2003). The connection made by Frasca between “Simulation” and “behavior” of the entities in a system is quite interesting for our purposes. This means that simulation model of a system, which are designed specifically to generate events will be able to create a narrative simulation that can be probed by the player.

Frasca even provides the example of such a simulation based narrative model experimented by Boal (ibid.). Boalian drama (Boal, 2000) involves random audience members taking the position of the protagonist in a dramatic position on the stage. In this technique, instead of trying to weave “interactivity” and “narrative”, Boal approaches the problem sideways by allowing the user to experience the simulation. This way each player can experience the simulation with their own perspective to realize a narrative that is personal to them. This model holds promise for games where the narrative doesn’t have to make sense to a different game player as long as it satisfies the player at that time and only on that play-through (crossref to 3).

3 Emergent NarrativeUsing the Boalian drama as inspiration (Boal, 2000), we recommend a narrative methodology revolving around the simulation of events in game worlds. Such an approach is nothing new in games. It has been recognized by game theorists such as Sweetser, who points out that there are three kinds of narratives relating to (Sweetser, 2007):

• Player as receiver – These according to Sweetser (ibid.) is the narrative method where the user only acts as the story receiver; she cannot influence the outcome of the story by her actions. Classic point and click adventures and other medium like movies and novels belong to this category. These stories have already been discussed as the status-quo in the mainstream game industry (crossref to 1).

• Player as discoverer – Games where players have more freedom in terms of the order that narrative cues are discovered in the form of dialogue with particular actor, cutscene, voice in the sky, etc. This category has games that have branching narratives and player’s actions have larger effect on the narration, but the overall story still sticks to the same general arc. There have already been some successful game implementations of this paradigm like Fallout 3 (Bethesda Game Studio, 2008), and Heroes of Might and Magic V (Nival Interactive & Freeverse Software, 2006).

• Player as creator – This is the only category of games that Sweetser recognizes as truly emergent in their narrative form (ibid.). These are mostly sandbox games or strategy games where the players have a very large action set that can combine in ways to form a story as well as the fact that players have a more encapsulating view of their creation - such as in SimCity 2000 (Maxis, 1993), Spore (Maxis, 2008) or even Starcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 1998).

Out of the three paradigms described above, the one that interests us for its wider application in games is the one where players act as discoverers of the narrative. By placing short narrative cues in the environment and actors, we can leave their discovery up to the player without affecting her agency with the game. In addition these narrative cues can also be hidden within layers of rules so as to become

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discoverable only at a certain time in the game or as a result of certain actions by the actors. Using this idea as the basis, we can put forward a definition of emergent narrative as,

“A sequence of events (complex and unplanned) culminating from the interaction of relatively simple game rules.”

A common critique of emergent narratives is their storytelling, or rather lack of it. Emergent narratives are not trusted to turn out as “page-turners”. The narratives felt by the player are no more detailed than a simple retelling of events. These are not epic stories, but what makes them special is the player’s attachment to them because they went through those events.

This kind of “story personalization” is something central to games. Exclusive story narration is common in other media too. Parents tell bedtime stories to their kids that are not guaranteed to be in anyone else’s mind, bards sung songs that only the particular king would hear. But the retelling of events while playing an emergent game like Civilization IV (Firaxis Games, 2005) is always unique.

In the following sections we discuss the various design considerations that can help generate a structure that leads to an immersive emergent narrative. We will also discuss some examples of this framework being used to design a game (Carioca) as a case study.

3.1 SimulationA simulation related to the theme should be central to the game. The game mechanics should directly allow players to influence outcome of the story. In the example game Carioca, we simulate various characteristics associated with living in a favela such as drugs, character types, work types etc. (crossref to design).

The Sims (Maxis, 2000) is probably one of the best examples of immersive narrative being created5 from an emergent simulation. The player controls a human like avatar (a Sim) whose needs and wants are simulated by the system in a seemingly realistic fashion. The dependencies for these Sims vary from mundane needs like food, water, sanitation etc. to more complex ones such as partners and career. As Doornsbar explains in his GDC lecture (Doornsbar, 2001), actions for Sims are controlled via a behavior engine which simulates their needs by changing statistical values. For example, an extrovert sim would feel unhappy if she hasn’t talked to someone in a time period.

We use a similar approach for simulating the world in Carioca game. The game has characters that are simulated through their needs and wants. For example, each character of type gangster will intimidate his most hated enemy by beating him up or killing him (crossref). This helps us in generating violence in the world. This can have effects on many levels, especially if the player is reckless in their relations with the gangsters. It can become a fatal mistake for the protagonist.

As it might be expected, the more cogs there are in a simulation, the more care needs to be put into fine-tuning them so the simulation as a whole is perceived optimally by the player. This becomes a momentous task while analyzing the behavior and outcomes of the simulation. In case of the Carioca game, final design of the system (crossref) required simulation of three different bot behaviors:

5 An example story about a homeless father and his daughter trying to survive without money. The story is chronicled on http://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/alice-and-kev/ with many regular followers.

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• Civilians,

• Druggies, and

• Gangsters

Each character type has its own logic of prioritizing tasks. This priority order is roughly based on Maslow’s hierarchical need structure (Maslow, 1943). Even though the structure is very old and contested, we choose the pyramid model so as to simplify the bot’s behavior testing as well as to make it easy for the player to understand the simulation (Appendix, p.36). Due to the large number of variables influencing the believability of the bot actions, a method to approximate values for these variables had to be found.

The solution however was quite simple - use spreadsheets to simulate bot parameters which are influenced by variables such as state/space of actor and time of day. This process achieved a roughly believable bot simulation model that is used in the final version of the test game as depicted in Figure 1. The variable values derived from this process are posted in the appendix.

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Figure 1: Graph showing the intended behavior of a Civilian type character in Carioca game

3.2 Interesting ActorsThe player can do different kinds of actions towards the actors to move narrative state of the game world. For example, in the Carioca game actors carry out common actions comprising of the world simulation such as working, taking drugs, selling drugs, eating, going to nightclub etc. The characters increase their hunger value when they do most of these actions. In turn, this hunger value is connected to their health. When the characters get too hungry, they will try to eat food in one of the food areas in the game level.

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This kind of autonomous AI behavior helps in keeping the simulation ticking over even if the player is not playing an active role. But just watching the bots do actions to each other is not enough. To immerse the player, some events need to be simulated that create personal tension for the player. An example of such a behavior in the game relates to the AI’s “MoneyMaking” state. Each character type in the game has specific kind of actions in order to make money. When the need arises, certain characters can try to steal money for other characters. In such a scenario, if the player also has equal probability of being mugged as the bots, then that improves the player’s involvement. In that case the player has to pay even more attention to the actors around him.

The emergent narrative approach has also been explored in Virtual Environment media (Aylett, 1999). She explains the strategy of generating narrative from actions of the ‘Virtual Teletubbies’. A useful lesson from Aylett’s experimentations has been the concept of “social presence”. Aylett uses the environment actors to respond according to the player’s actions. This concept however needs to be balanced very carefully. Any kind of extreme judgment on the actor’s part might be misunderstood by the player as an unfavorable game state. This hampers freedom of player actions. On the other hand, limited social presence can make the player feel her actions don’t really mean anything and she cannot affect the world.

This means the AI actors involved in an emergent narrative have more than one role in game:

Agents of Simulation (crossref 3.1), Providers of Social Presence

Bots help place the influence of player action in terms of social presence (ibid.). In the Carioca game, each character simulates a relationship value with every other character in the level, including the player. This relationship value denotes a friendly relationship when the number is positive whereas a negative number denotes enmity. Making dialogue choices between player and characters dependent on relationship status informs the player about the nature of interaction they will have with the actor.

3.3 EnvironmentEnvironments can be used both as an actor in the narrative as well as tools for giving narrative cues to the player. Jenkins mentions this strategy as a Narrative Architecture (Jenkins, 2004) which can be used for special storytelling. Similar to characters, the environment can also communicate player’s social presence by giving hints about the effect of her actions on the world - what is good, what is bad, and what is in between.

In the Carioca game, when actors need to take passive actions like eating, working etc. they need to go to a certain space type which is designed for different action options. By providing an overlap of different choices and different consequences, we leave the style of play to the player. For instance, the action of making money can be executed by working at a legitimate work space, scavenging for scrap at a garbage location or by dealing in drugs at a drug selling street corner.

The importance of environment also becomes apparent if we look at Sims (Maxis, 2000). The simulation in Sims is not only limited to the characters, but also the environment. The environment also gives perspective to the player. The god-like point of view allows players to see all variables in the environment effecting the simulation as well as the larger potential action space. All events related to the sim happen in

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clear view of the player. This advantage is lost when translating the model to a first-person view game. If a narratively important event happens in the level, but it’s not communicated to the player, then she can’t use it to create a narrative.

As there are many more aspects related to environment as tools of narrative, this topic is discussed further in detail in (crossref).

3.4 ObjectivesIn most videogames, moments of narration are used to setup a gameplay objective for the player to aim for. These missions set the small scale target for the play, so that the game can unveil the plot a little more, introducing a new objective. While the structure can get rather monotonous and as we’ve already discussed, forcefully feed the events to the player, what it definitely provides is a sense of purpose for the player. The player always knows the plan (even if he’s not the planner).

Take Mount & Blade: Warband (TaleWorlds, 2010) for example. The game is a medieval, emergent, role-playing game which is very much an example of emergence as a result of “discovery”. The game provides several goals that players can decide to set themselves up for. These goals are variable and provide different kind of gameplay choices. Through the game’s dialogue system, the player can obtain varied roles such as bodyguard, raider, general etc. She doesn’t have to do any of them, but she can shape the traits of her avatar via these decisions.

Such options from the beginning of play session are helpful, otherwise the players may not be motivated enough to explore the potential of narration and only exploit the gameplay for immediate returns (clear the current level in Portal, without thinking to look for a way out of being a lab rat). For instance, if Mount & Blade: Warband (ibid.) did not hint at the possibility of eventually becoming the king, then players would aimlessly raid around the kingdom (gameplay) and not progress the narrative.

These objectives also need to be designed with careful consideration so as not to have biased meaning of moral choices or financial gain while providing means for the player to achieve her own long term plan. In the game we’re designing as a case study, the players have very small objectives like eating food to not lose health, making money to buy food, etc. However, after interacting with the game for a little time, she can find out about the Church she can go to in the level and the option of buying the guy from friendly civilians. Now she is equipped with a long term objective where she can combine the need for money to donating it to the church or buying a gun, depending on what she fancies.

3.5 Story DeltaAs current games go, while they’re structurally limited in being a narrative medium, they do enjoy great success in some cases. We’d like to learn more from a couple of examples. Let us consider the very popular game Portal (Valve Corporation, 2007). The game hit market in 2007 and told the story of a human being stuck in the shoes of a lab rat that is being put through a series of tests by a robot. The audience felt a connection to the protagonist and the story came through very well. On analysis, much of this success has a lot to do with the game’s concept. Confined test chambers allow the player to accept loss of interactivity experienced through the narrative. Moreover, the story did not have any cutscenes (albeit the game ending). Players would hear the robot talking and conveying bits of info, never really a detailed narrative.

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The player could use this partial information to makeup a story by filling the missing parts – “ Why is she here? What’s her name? Did I voluntarily choose to be tested?”

As the game’s designer and writer talk about in their GDC lecture (Swift & Wolpaw, 2008), the game’s design was especially tailored to improve the narrative immersion by using something called Delta Theory. The hypothesis is that player immersion in the narrative is dependent on distance between story of the gameplay and story of the game. Using the example of Portal, the story of the game is (as described above) - protagonist is stuck as a lab rat, and being run around by a seemingly psychotic robot. The robot kept dangling the proverbial “cake” to lure you into clearing the puzzles. The gameplay story is reflected as the capacity of the player to solve the puzzles through tools provided, in a seemingly destitute position, and use the same tools in the last part of the game to escape from the robot that’s trying to kill you. The two mesh together very nicely. Through repeated and concentrated testing, this disjoint can be avoided from growing to dangerous levels.6

We also see the same phenomenon in emergent narrative of Sims. Sims succeeds to associate a narrative in the player’s mind because the events happening (made up emergent story) have a very short delta from the gameplay (satisfying the sim) and the player’s affordance (sustaining a human). Since, the player’s story and her gameplay actions are very close in an emergent narrative the delta is minimized, showing that emergent games almost always conform with Delta Theory (ibid.).

In the game example being tested, we apply this same human sustaining model employed in Sims, but modified for living in Rio favela. Player has to interact with actors for secondary motivations (wealth, gun, menacing character, good relations), but the primary motivation is to sustain herself (low hunger, low fatigue, low money). Applying the same simulation of parameters as the bots should also give the player a better understanding of the AI psyche. We are aiming to provide hints to the player about the harsh living conditions in the favela. But rather than tell her that, we choose the game mechanics that convey this. So the player herself wipes the sweat off her forehead and says, “Jesus! It’s hard to earn money.”

3.6 TimeAs Aylett points out, narratives are different from a simple retelling of events (like in emergent narrative) because of flow of time (Aylett, 1999). Narratives do not list every small thing that happens during the latent periods of the story time. Moreover, the topic of flashbacks as well as other avant-garde narrative models would be almost impossible to convey through an emergent narrative approach. Dramatic narratives would do some kind of optimization to skip these moments from the player’s experience. This however is not a necessity. In fact, if we consider the definition of story as provided in the beginning of this paper (crossref), nowhere it is mentioned that the events must be prioritized in the discourse 7 in a particular way.

An example of a mundane activity that can be skipped over from the experience is sleeping. In the case study, the player’s “Menace” is inversely proportional to his “Fatigue”. So if the “Fatigue” gets too high, the player cannot do any aggressive actions like rob somebody. In such a case, the player can only sleep before doing any aggressive actions successfully. Now this act of sleeping might seem like the perfect time where the game can leave out the boring latent period and jump forward till after sleeping is finished. But, if we

6 Dangerous levels here represent the case where players lose immersion in the narrative.7 Discourse is the way that the story is told.

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take the interactivity of the player during this sleeping time, by our own argument, it will break the agency with the game. Hence, in the game we do not skip any of the actions and the game is played in continuous time.

4 MethodEffectiveness of Carioca game, in terms of narration, was tested through a combination of qualitative and metrics test.

The qualitative tests revolved around observing the player experience while playing the game. The player was encouraged to speak out aloud and his comments were noted (as well as recorded on video) by the evaluator for analysis after the test session. In this process, we were looking for narrative associations that the player made through the simulated events, actors, and environment feedback.

The second aspect of the test was covered by a questionnaire where testers have time to analyze their play session and reflect back on the narrative events during the play-through. The specific questions of importance in analyzing the emergent narrative framework are question numbers 2, 7, and 9 (crossref).

The final part of the test comprised of analyzing player action data after the play session. Each tester’s actions are recorded by the game in a sqlite database system that can be analyzed after the session to see player’s behavior towards system as well as the system’s outlook towards the player. All references to test sessions will use the shorthand representation of testers as T# (such as T3 would mean tester number 3).

5 AnalysisAfter the test sessions, when players were asked to recount the story of their play session, many of them created short stories such as (Appendix, p.87-106):

T10 – “I came, I saw, and I robbed people” T1 – “My playthrough involved being as aggressive and violent as possible….. I also beat as many

people as I could, I was hoping this would make people "fear" me more.” (sic.) T3 – “I decided I don't have any qualms about mugging gangsters. I took their money and donated it

to the church to fight crime, converting gangsters to civilians.” T4 –“…. Later, I talked to a woman who also seemed very friendly. We talked colloquially, and joked

about me possibly being a gangster. She thought the drugs were to expensive…..” (sic.) T6 – “…. After earning money by working in a factory, I realised that mugging people was a much

faster way to make cash. I then learnt which building was the church and began to convert the gangsters into civs with a selfish aim of being the only seller on in the favela. I converted about 7 gansters into civs by the fourth morning.” (sic.)

T8B – “I tried to be a nice citizen trying to avoid selling drugs but being kind of a Brazilian Robin Hood. Thus, I bought a gun and started to get money from the gangsters, killing them, and expending the money in the church to convert drug addicts into citizens.”

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The lack of a longer overarching story was observed, which is understandable due to the limited content for the test case. When the players got to the part where there were no more actions to explore, they became bored with the limited gameplay, and lost interest in linking their actions together as a story.

For understanding the particular shortcomings of the system, in the following sections we will analyze the test sessions with a particular eye towards our framework.

5.1 SimulationIf we compare the bot behavior between two different play sessions, the same bot actors have sufficiently high difference in stat values. This difference can be seen while comparing the variable values of Hunger and Money for bot number 65, as shown in Figure 3 & Figure 2. This tells us that characters behaved very well as per our requirements to generate an emergent system that can balance itself while interacting with the player.

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Figure 2: Graph showing Money values for Bot65 in Tests T2, T3, T7

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Figure 3: Graph showing Hunger values for Bot65 in Tests T2, T3, T7

Asking the players about the importance of different actions (Question 3 in asked in tests – point to test questions) from the play testing sample informed us of a general trend. As expected in any simulation, the players rate important actions for their advantage, and neglect a few. The problem however was that much more actions comprise of

these extremes than expected. It’s our opinion that the player’s perception is limited by a literal lack of options they have, as well as being a reflection of unbalance in the system. Some actions like “scavenging” just did not make sense for the players to do because of the presence of better options like “mugging.”

5.2 Interesting ActorsWhile we want to make distinct characters for the game, the process was never really possible for the small sized team of three to accomplish on time. Hence, we tried to create an illusion of interesting actors by using a class structure and personal stats. All interactions of the player with the bots were administered by logic of the class they belonged to, such as the gangsters would talk about beating you up, while the druggies would always ask for free drugs.

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However, this strategy did not turn out to be effective enough as most players could not relate to the bots. As T6 noted in his questionnaire (Appendix, p.98), “they all looked rather generic.” An increase in immersion can be predicted by increasing the depth in behavior of characters in the game, via better character models and dialogues.

In terms of the characters presenting social presence of the player, we can analyze the before and after values representing relationship of bots towards the player. This absolute change in the relation values is grouped by each class in Figure 4. The advantage of looking at absolute values is that it helps us to only look at the degree of interaction and not worry about the kind of interaction.

As is evident from Figure 4, the relationship system lacks balance. While some of the players (such as T1, T2, T3 and T10) interacted a lot with Civilian type characters, most of the other players mostly interacted with the Gangsters8. This was not the intention. Another anomaly is the extremely low level of interactions with the Druggies. Some players showed the interest in interacting with Druggie but weren’t able to; T8A wanted to “going to try to sell drugs to the drug addicts” (Appendix, p.86, viii, 10:07).

T1 T2 T3 T4 T5 T6 T7 T8A T8B T9 T10 T110

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Figure 4: Average relationship change (Absolute) on bot classes during test interaction

Moreover, if we take a look at the net change to analyze the direction of relationship change as shown in Figure 5, player’s regard for their relationship can be called nominal at best. Majority of the players show a positive trend in their relationship with the world. But the number that ignores keeping good relationships is too large. Deterioration in relations with the actors was given no regard, except only in certain cases where the testers would voluntarily ask how they can improve their relations with the bots - T10: “… so, how do I make them trust me (Appendix, p.86, xi, 7:15)?” We also see extremely low levels of interaction with druggies. This can be because players simply don’t like druggies, but the universal nature of this trend

8 We analyze the reasons behind larger gangster interactions in Section 5.3

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signifies that the Druggie class was not performing as expected during these test sessions due to some implementation bug.

We would like to balance the system so that the player can see clear effects of these deteriorating relations. One way that this behavior can be modified is by having bots behaving badly towards the player when their relationship is bad, rather than just dialogues being disrespectful.

T1 T2 T3 T4 T5 T6 T7 T8A T8B T9 T10 T11

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Figure 5: Average relationship change (net) on bot classes during test interaction

5.3 EnvironmentSince we paid special attention to the environment in this project, a detailed report on individual considerations that can affect environment’s influence on the emergent narrative have been discussed in Section (crossref to orestis’ analysis).

However, we would like to show how the players responded to the environment through a simple metrics test. The level design used for the game had segregated the playing area into three “districts” that present different inhabitants as well as scenery. These districts afforded different kind of narrative potentials. For example, if the player was seen predominantly in the uphill areas, then he has a higher chance of being involved in a violent situation as compared to the district down the hill.

Many players commented that they found it more fun and felt it was important to mug people. This attitude is confirmed if we look at the data showing player’s location on the map during the play session in Figure 2. They are more concentrated toward the areas uphill where the rich actors congregate more (at the entertainment spaces), as compared to downhill districts.

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T1 “Beating” actions T2 “Beating” actions

T5 “Beating” actions T7 “Beating” actionsFigure 2:”Beating up” actions for players T1, T2, T5, T7

5.4 ObjectivesThe current version of the game really doesn’t have any objectives. The game is more of a sandbox system where the players are creators of emergent narrative for the most part rather than discoverers as explained in Section 3. We noticed that players were happy in formulating narratives in the short term as well as coming up with long-term goals while playing the goal. For example, while looking up the hill, T1 commented about becoming powerful enough to go to the mansion at the top and usurp the boss and take over the role of leader (Appendix, p.86, i., 15:13). But we would have liked more players to come up with such objectives. The game’s limited content could only afford activities worth about 2 days play in game time and then the players would lose focus.

This problem can be helped by having more content and larger map space. But a more efficient way would be for the system to generate such objectives such as the player’s friendly actors can ask the player to save them from mugging or beating. The key however would be to make such objectives be voluntary, giving freedom to the player to pick and choose.

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6 ConclusionWhile the implementation shows many shortcomings, the biggest reason for those seems to be a smaller set of options and content. Lack of actions that the bots could do to the player failed to keep player in check, and allowed rampant abuse and disregard for the actors. In addition, the lack of deep actions hampered the player’s ability to piece together a longer story.

However, most of the framework specific designs made an impact on how players interacted with the system and how they formulated a sequence of events that expressed their story. Further development iterations along the lines of the framework can help the game take more concrete shape and purpose. In addition, further research into the following topics can help in creating a more robust emergent narrative framework:

Testing simulations – The definition of emergence through simulation involves a dangerous pitfall for game design - how to design for unexpected events? This happened in our case study as well, we constantly kept finding new neat (and sometimes annoying) side effects that arose from interaction of simulation rules. For example – during final testing players found a loophole in the game where, because of the partying nature of gangsters, they could catch them with low Menace most of the time and stack up on money. Such simulation trends need to be recognized while designing, so that an emergent strategy does not break the immersion in the story. Finding out a better methodology for testing the simulation in this case study would improve its effectiveness as well as streamline development.

Procedural generation of objectives in simulated environments – An interesting experiment would be to see if the introduction of an objective generation system can improve the experience. As discussed in Section 3.4, emergent narrative games use such systems to challenge the player. Introducing a system that can decipher the simulation state players are in and deliver custom objectives to them could introduce more dramatic events in the player’s narrative.

Post-Game Narrative – Since emergent narrative constitutes of actions of the player, it might also be a good idea to support this story creation mechanism through the game. Fallout 3 (Bethesda, 2008) has several missions for the player. The player can take up the mission she wishes, complete it, gather up the reward, and proceed with the game. There is a story that players experience, but it disappears after the event as most games forget about them. Fallout: New Vegas (Bethesda, 2010) takes the same model and improves on it wherein certain actors met after such missions will mention your performance. Even to the extent that your actions have led to a change in the game world. This improves the attention that players pay to their own actions, in turn helping their immersion in the story. Sweetser lists few methods that can aid players in this process like event Journals of the protagonist (Sweetser, 2010). For the Carioca game, one of the earlier ideas was to have the player’s actions and world events being communicated to the player via a friendly “gossip” system. Such a system was to comprise of friendly bots that could convey pieces of information deemed important to the player as well as relay back how important her actions have been on the world. For example, during conversation with a friendly character, actor would inform player about the gangster that was killed (by player), and how it has led to a gang war.

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