Against the wall 2

Games may be considered cheap entertainment with lots of violence, but so were the first movies: they where circus side show material filled with cheap thrills (have you ever seen the movie 'Freaks' made by Todd Browning in 1932). And next to that were the people who tried to create movies (and pictures) to replace painting as an art-form. We all know where this led to: a mixture of both influences, a melting pot of the two with a new art-form as its offspring.

And this has happened before. Cervantes' 'Don Quixotte de la Mancha' is considered to be the first novel ever written and it is a mixture of both the low comedy and the chivalry stories of those days about noble deeds and glorious victories in the name of love. The novel as an art form came into being in the western world and today most development in novelwriting is done in other parts of the world where story-telling traditions there meet the western novel writing traditions.

In what way could interactive fiction and 3D games melt into a new art form? If we look at games with a strong rules-based component, games like GTA (especially 1 and 2) and black & white come to mind. (And maybe the Sims but I never had a closer look at that one). In these games you are building a reputation. And you can do so by following the rules of the game. And the things you can do (and sometimes have to do) are based on your reputation.

Somehow people never get tired of playing GTA. Despite its bad graphics (1 & 2). And that is simply because the possibilities are diverse. In GTA 1 and 2 there are various gangs and you can work for them only if they respect you. But in order to gain the respect of one gang you sometimes have to kill a lot of members of another gang. Which in turn earns you their disrespect. The jobs you have to do are narrative based. These are simple lineair stories: you have to go from a to b and then to c. No other possibilities. But the rules of the game (respect, reputation, and not to forget the police, the FBI and later the army chasing you) turn it into an interesting game.

The same can be said about Black and White. The rules of those games offer the possibility you to experiment and watch the outcome. There is a lot of freedom in those games, because you have to build a reputation. But that alone is not enough for a new type of interactive fiction/narrative game.

Suppose we were to mix this with a component that is used in games like Half-life: scripted events. Which in short means that at certain moments in time special events happen and you have to deal with them. In my concept this would mean that the way you can deal with the events depends on your reputation (and maybe you do not even have to deal with them). In this way one could create an adventure with a lot of possibilities, without much effort (from the point of view of the writer).

If you were to write a script for a game like this, you need to do two things:

• Define what type of person the player can become, the type of reputation one can acquire (and how to get there)
.
• What is going to happen in the game, the scripted events. Some of these scripted events could be a result of your reputation or resulting from previous actions you have taken. But not necessarily so.
• If you where to write script for a game like this, you do not need complicated tools to help you manage a labyrinth of choices. A spreadsheet like structure would be enough. On one side of the table the kind of person you can become - your reputation if you like - and on the other side the events that take place in time. Things get a bit more complicated if you make events dependant on the location you are at, but I think that is something that can be easily solved.

What will come from this? If we rewrite the story about the man in prison who knows he will be executed tomorrow, the first thing you have to do is define the reputations this man can acquire among the people populating the prison.

Next steps are defining the things the player can do when having a certain reputation and the events that will occur as a result. And the player has to deal with all that, make choices, discover the rules. And in the end find a way out of there. If it is a good script, the player will then restart the game and try to find another way. Who knows: maybe even non-violent games will become interesting when written like this. Aren't all those action shooters a disguise for non-interesting stories?

But creating a story or a game remains a lot of work, especially for the programmers and modelers. I don't know if I ever will get there, but I still want to write a world... Well, maybe I should start with something smaller. A city. Or a village. Okay, I'll start with one building (a prison perhaps) and see how big it grows. Maybe I'll end up with two buildings. If I'm lucky.

Jeroen Goulooze

(28th of july 2002, The Netherlands, written for Borderhack number 3. Thanks to Fran Illich for encouraging me to write down the things I have been constructing for several years now)