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Reaction: Balance of Power 21st Century
Admission #1: I think Chris Crawford is, by and large, crazy. I got my start in this belief because of this article lambasting Erasmatron, the predecessor to his new storytelling engine, Storytron. I gave Shattertown Sky, the storyworld that came with Erasmatron, a whirl and agreed with Neil’s take on it — things seemed to be happening in the story but nothing approached a coherent plot, and the graphics, even for then, were appalling. (Sadly, the best link I can find for a point of view of the author of Shattertown Sky, Laura Mixon, is this text file — search for her name — but maybe you can puzzle out the broken links on this page.)
Admission #2: I have not beaten Balance of Power 21st Century, if such a thing is possible. Play begins with the events of September 11, but it’s clear you can do much more than simply capture or kill Osama bin Laden — the obvious goal — so part of the design may be that you are allowed to set your own goals. In fact, there’s really nothing preventing you as the U.S. deciding that you really don’t care about bin Laden, and what you really want to do is take down Iran… but I’m getting ahead of myself.
First: the premise. You play the United States — technically, its president, but the actors here are political entities more than they are people. September 11 has just occurred and you want bin Laden. Unfortunately, the guys running Afghanistan really don’t care what you think. How to force their hand? You form sentences from pull-down menus that detail a range of possible actions, like “offer a deal” or “launch airstrikes.” You get textual explanations of how other countries respond to your actions, and hopefully, from there you’re able to manipulate events to your advantage. It’s a lot like an old DOS game I got into a while ago called Floor 13.
It’s an interesting simulation, certainly, and the menu interface (which Crawford has ballyhoo’d) is easy to use, though gradations of action ad nauseaum appear just as they did in Erasmatron. You can ask a country for help in the following ways: dismissively, nonchalantly, diffidently, earnestly, anxiously, timidly, humbly, deferentially, desperately, obsequiously, and grovelingly. Seriously! Just give me a slider to say how much I want help. Anyway, it was relatively easy to get Afghanistan to give up bin Laden, only for him to escape into Pakistan. No matter how I played it, though, I had angered Pakistan in the process, and though I tried a couple different approaches to making Pakistan like me, I have never got to the point where they would listen to what I said. Although frustrating at times, the playthroughs were certainly thought-provoking, and I’d recommend it to other people, at least to give it a casual playthrough.
(Two technical thoughts before I move on: I managed to get into a state where I was able to ask myself to do things [StoryTron cheerfully enquired: will you do what you ask?], and after evacuating the Gaza Strip myself, the game crashed. Also — without having any knowledge of the inner workings of Storytron at all, it seems to me that you could accomplish its interactions with the reader with JavaScript, not Java. People reflexively recoil at Java applets and for good reason.)
The elephant in the room, though, is: does Storytron represent a new way to tell a story? Because that’s how it’s billed. I would argue that Balance of Power 21st Century is barely a story at all. There are the elements of story — character, plot, setting — but there is no emotional content there at all, and little for the reader’s imagination to grasp hold of. You’re told in plain-Jane Mad Libs sentences (the same kind that you input actions into the story with) the results of your actions. “Mullah Mohammed Omar refuses to hand over Osama bin Laden.” I believe the heart of storytelling is in its details, its sensations, and you don’t get any at all with Balance of Power 21st Century. To me, it’s a simulation told with text alone instead of graphics, which is fine, but not really a story.
(I realize that this view puts me at odds with people would contend that, say, the Civilization series of games contains a story. Sorry! I disagree there too.)
Well, it is only a first try, right? I’m kind of curious what an attempt to tell a smaller, more emotionally-centered story with Storytron would look like. I worry it would resemble this first one, only instead of trying to get countries to do what you wanted them to, you would be manipulating characters’ emotions and motivations — the same simulation, but with different paint.
More fundamentally, I also believe the most interesting character moments in stories defy the kind of modeling techniques that Storytron employs. Why does Michael Scott quit his job the moment David Wallace, his boss, capitulates to his demands for respect? Why does Hamlet choose to drive Ophelia to madness? These ambiguities are essential — they’re where people find meaning in stories.
6 comments
First of all, I think you’ve displayed remarkable restraint and civility for someone I called crazy in the first sentence of my post :).
1. I brought up Erasmatron to explain the prejudices I brought with me to my experience with Storytron… obviously, what’s past is past.
2. I was using Floor 13 as a the closest comparison I had for the BOP experience, not really as a critique. Whether it’s old or not doesn’t really play into my opinion on the game. It’s actually pretty fun (though difficult); it is available on Abandonia if you’re ok with the concept of downloading abandonware.
3. It’s the first result if you google Deikto — I remembered you mentioning the name in an interview. I honestly wasn’t sure what happened between then and now, whether you had abandoned it completely or had just simplified for BOP. In any case, the version in BOP was much easier to comprehend than the diagram in my link.
4. Well, blame 10-year-old memory, I suppose. I recall the choices in Shattertown Sky being mostly related to how the manner in which you interacted with the characters — e.g. asking a question angrily instead of beseechingly. But I don’t have any way to check this out now, so I’ll take your word for it.
5. I plead the fifth to this one as well — I have played lots of games before, and can’t speak to what a casual gamer (or even non-gamer) would think of it.
6. Honestly, the bug amused me, just wanted to note it so hopefully people who could fix it would be aware of it.
7. All I’ll say is that JavaScript has made leaps and bounds recently in both performance and ease of use for programmers, and may be worth a look if you haven’t in a while. Naturally you have a lot invested in your Java codebase — the devil in me says, “I could do this in JS,” is all. (That’s not meant to be a pejorative statement. I like JS a lot.) Then again, easy for me to say without laying eyes on a single line of code.
8. I think it boils down to the “show, don’t tell” maxim. The sentences I encountered leaned heavily towards the telling end of the continuum. A sentence I found on a quick replay: “Israel ask opposition to sanctions from EU obsequiously.” (Sorry to pick on you re: verb agreement here, I would say it works well in 95% of cases.) In a traditional narrative, we would witness a phone call between Israeli and EU representatives, perhaps, or a face-to-face meeting. In this, we’d get a sense for character through not only what their responses to each other were, but also how they asked, how they responded. You don’t get any of this flavor in BOP, you just get: “EU votes against sanctions against Israel.”
I realize there’s economy of storytelling that comes into play here — you can’t have huge swaths of text for every action, but I do believe there’s a fundamental trade-off here. You gain generated sentences but you lose the human handcraft. I don’t expect code to ever be able to write a scene even at a paperback-thriller level, and it sounds like you don’t, either.
This trade-off isn’t worth it to me. I’d rather have increased richness and accept decreased interactivity. But that’s just my point of view.
All that said, can you give an example of a sentence you’re especially proud of?
9. An interesting point re: the phrase “interactive story” vs. “interactive storytelling,” and I appreciate you locating Storytron alongside other media. Too often I think there’s been a dichotomy drawn between Storytron and traditional computer games alone.
I assume Prom Night will involve romance? If so, that’s quite a challenge you’ve set up for yourself, I think. Romance, at least in my opinion, has been where interactive techniques have really failed to make progress so far.
To conclude: I actually enjoyed playing BOP, even though I wasn’t very good at it. And I would be willing to give other storyworlds a shot. I just haven’t been won over to the side that believes Storytron is the future of interactive storytelling, or a direction I personally want to go in with my work.
The fundamental difference between us, I suspect, lies in my faith — and it is only faith — that interactivity will open up new artistic opportunities. Until I demonstrate this with actual storyworlds, I have no defense against those who say that it can’t be done. I do believe that BoP2K demonstrates the basic feasibility of the technology, and I think that it makes plausible the possibility that storyworlds could be entertaining — even though BoP2K falls short of robust entertainment. So I consider that I’m only halfway to the point of proving my faith in interactivity. There’s still room for skepticism.
I won’t attempt to include romance in Prom Night; that’s meant for a later product. Prom Night is meant to be a quickie to answer the complaint that BoP2K is impersonal. Later on, it should be possible to expand Prom Night into the area of romance.
[...] Crawford’s gracious comments on my post on the recent Storytron release, though, have changed my thinking in at least one respect: I now [...]
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I’d like to engage you in a discussion about this; I think it would be productive. So let’s go through some of your comments:
1. Since Erasmatron and the review you of it that you mention is some ten years old, I suggest that we make some allowance for changes in the software in the past decade.
2. I’m not familiar with the game Floor 13, but I can assure you than any machine operating in 1993 would require several minutes of CPU time to carry out the computations that the Storytron engine carries out each turn.
3. The page to which you link with the word “ballyho’d” — how did you find that page? It is more than a year old and as far as I know it should not be accessible. The material it presents is obsolete and incorrect. Surely you noticed the difference between the contents of that page and what you saw on the screen when you played Balance of Power 21st Century?
4. “though gradations of action ad nauseaum appear just as they did in Erasmatron.” First, Erasmatron had no gradations of action; the player selected entire sentences, not individual words. That’s one of the huge differences that we developed in the decade since Erasmatron. Second, one of the biggest complaints against Erasmatron was that it did not permit any gradations of action.
5. “Just give me a slider to say how much I want help.” That would certainly be the best interface for a hardcore gamer, but we’re trying to reach a different audience, and we felt that retaining the linguistic model would be more appropriate for storytelling.
6. The problem you cite with the game crashing has bedeviled us for a long time. It turns out that almost any mistake in the coding would ultimately generate this bug. We have steadily ironed them out; I believe that the final instance of the bug was killed off last Thursday or Friday. And in fact, that particular instance was pretty hard to trigger. You were very unlucky in this regard.
7. I won’t address the differences between JavaScript and Java, as this gets us into some weighty technical issues. Suffice it to say that we have solid technical reasons for using Java.
8. “plain-Jane Mad Libs sentences”. Most definitely not! These are super-duper, turbocharged, high-tech, fully programmable Mad-Libs sentences! We have developed an entire programming language for constructing the wording of sentences to meet all manner of different situations. I suggest that you go back and look closely at the phrasing; you’ll find all sorts of subtleties in the phrasing. Verbs can agree with their subjects in person and can be conjugated by tense and mood. I might have missed a few spots but the capabilities are demonstrated in numerous places. I suspect that it was the very naturalness of the language that escaped your notice. And remember, this is computed language — something that has never been pulled off to this degree until now.
9. On the crucial matter of story, there is a valid point here, but first we must clear up one common misunderstanding. Storytron does not make interactive stories, because that phrase is a oxymoronic; you cannot interact with a story. Storytron is a technology for interactive storytelling; a story is the consequence of a single playing of the Balance of Power storyworld. Thus, one way of evaluating its effectiveness is to review the story that was generated after it ends. Was that story in some way entertaining? Of course, de gustibus non est disputandem, so I won’t make any claims here. If you found it unentertaining, that’s a perfectly valid data point.
I have begun work on a new storyworld that is smaller and more emotionally-centered than BoP2K. I’m calling it “Prom Night”. Yes, it will involve manipulating other characters’ emotions and motivations. I believe that’s one of the things that characters do in stories. It will involve other things as well.
“More fundamentally, I also believe the most interesting character moments in stories defy the kind of modeling techniques that Storytron employs.”
I agree. Storytron will never equal the very best hand-crafted storytelling. That’s because its strength lies in its interactivity, not the polish of the resulting story. Theater can never match the visual spectacle of cinema, and cinema can never attain the intimacy of theater. That’s why we extol BOTH of these storytelling media; each has its own strengths. The same can be said for interactive storytelling.