Stephane Bura, 10tacle Studios Belgium

How do we mediate meaningful experiences that lead to a player’s story?

“Story.” Now there is a word with immense baggage.  For tens of thousands of years, people across the world have been telling stories to one another.  The most respected and vibrant arts across all of human history involve traditional narrative story telling.  Our designers are steeped in the lore of movies, novels and comics.  Many of our earliest, most influential games like Zork or Adventure are shown to the user as stories. Our blossoming new field of game design constantly finds itself forced to answer the question, “How do games and story intersect?” 

We believe that game designers are in the business of experience creation rather than that of storytelling. The story that is generated through gameplay is the player’s personal story that has been mediated by the game systems.  

This is a rather substantial shift from the concept of the auteur sitting down and penning a tale of love and despair.  Instead of writing about passion, our goal is to help the user experience passion.  Instead of describing fear, our goal as game designers to is cause fear.  We construct systems, whirling social and mechanical environments that lead, poke, prod, react, connect and encourage the player to reach, out of their own free will, a peak physiological and mental state.

Out of this experience, the player constructs their own very personal story.  They digest the experience.  They link the pieces together with their past life lessons.  In the end, if the gelled memories of the game were rich with meaning, they’ll share their narrative with others.  Hearing our players’ stories burst forth from our game is the clearest possible signal that we created a great experience.  And yet, we must never lose sight that these stories are secondary effect.  Story is tail of what we do as designers, where the mediated experience is the dog.     

Throughout our discussion, the one key visual that resonated with all the experienced designers in the room was the “Watery Pachinko Machine of Doom.”  In a pachinko machines, dozens of ball fall on pegs and bounce about in a chaotic motion until they finally reach the hole at the bottom of the machine.  When you add thousands of balls, to the point where balls are like individual water molecules, the patterns of where the balls flow throughout the system becomes more apparent.  You see currents and waves of motion.  

SimGolf: Sid should have just called it JAWPMoD
(Just Another Watery Pachinko Machine of Doom)

Each of those balls is a player, moving on their unique path.  As designers, we build the machine and analyze broad patterns of motion through the system.  Instead of the pachinko physics of collision, we calculate the physics of human psychology.

There are a broad range of tools and systems that can be used to create the successful mediated experiences. Many are well known and we’ve included a list of currently used support techniques/tools in the appendix of this report.

However, with such a diverse and experienced group of people present, we soon turned towards exploring new methods of creating mediated experiences.  Games range from 40-cutscene choose-your-own-adventure games to sandbox game where all you get is a sternly worded command from your mother, “Go out and play!” We are interested in the meaty mediated center of the spectrum.

With the vague and decisive word ‘story’ focused into a more palatable discussion of“the meaty center of mediated experiences”, we spent the rest of our time on three topics:

1. Examples that play outside the current rules of the game industry: What are examples from that wild that we can study to give us practical insight into how mediate experience can be built.
2. Models for supporting player emotions & experiences:  What are some conceptual models that we can adopt that helps us understand mediated system at a more fundamental level?
3. Vexing problems: What are the big problems that still need to be discussed further?

Many of the most exciting techniques for generating interesting experiences are found outside of the game industry.  Academia, advertising and independent games have been dabbling in these ideas for years.  We focused on rich examples from Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), Narrative spaces, and Social networks. 

Alternate reality games such as I Love Bees and Last Call Poker have found that breaking the barriers between the online game world and the player’s real world can lead to extremely compelling experiences. 

Patricia Pizer shared a tale of how they included a simple game mechanic in Last Call Poker that required players to take a picture of a gravestone where someone had died on the same day they were born.  Figuring this to be a rare occurrence, the game masters were shocked to find their inboxes flooded with dozens of images.  Players were going to graveyards and taking pictures of the graves of infants that had been stillborn.   The intense emotional impact of this intersection of game mechanics and the real world left a lasting mark on both the players and the designers.

Some lessons from ARGs include:

• Difficult to scale: It is difficult to make the experience scale well since it requires active game/puppet masters playing various roles and adjusting the game to account for the player’s unexpected progress.   ARGs are ultimately a highly leaky pachinko machine.
• Breaks players expectations of a game: However, the emotions that result are intensely powerful because ARG’s actively break the model of a traditional computer game player experience.  Players expect to play a game, but they end up being confronted by very meaningful and real situations.

There is a long history of environmental spaces that tell a story.  Disneyland, Location based entertainment (LBE) and amusement park rides have been successfully creating mediated experiences for over a century.

Ceci n'est pas une golfball.  It is a carefully designed visual goal.

Lessons from narrative spaces include:

• Controlled reveals/sightlines:  Structure you space in such a way that intriguing goals are clearly presented to the customer as they wander aimlessly.  People will tend to make their way towards the visual goals and thus will be guided even though they are acting out of their own free will.
• Established paths: By combining sightlines, you can create well trodden paths that users will move through while still imagining that they are exploring new territory.  This allows you to focus the majority of your production effort along these paths. A good example of this in games is what Naughty Dog has done with Jak and Daxter.

Various forms of social networks ranging from MySpace to Match.com are turned to connect people and encourage meaningful relationships.  As highly social animals, people find almost any interpersonal interaction to be highly meaningful.

Nothing rocks the social network like a good Tupperware party.

• Systems for bringing people together:  The surveys on dating sites help connect people of similar interests.  There is interesting work going on analyzing the hubs of various social networks and setting up events that causes hub roles to collide with one another, smashing together entire social groups for immense dramatic effect.
• System for maintaining relationships: Existing relationships must be groomed through the use of gifts, notes and idle chatter.  Systems like Twitter or the newsfeed in Facebook are excellent examples of these systems in action.

These were areas that weren’t discussed as in depth, but also offer powerful techniques for mediating the player’s experiences.

• Reality television:  Reality television shows ranging from moderately mediated examples like ‘Survivor’ to heavily mediated competitions like ‘Dancing with the Stars’ offer inspired example of how to use environmental and psychological manipulation to create intense human drama.  As ratings demonstrate, someone actually falling in love can be more appealing than someone pretending to fall in love.
• Rituals: Throughout history, various religious and cultural groups have used ritual to create deeply meaningful experiences that resonate across generations.  One topic we discussed was Aztec sacrificial rituals and their impact on an entire culture.  With their intricate rules, reward system and extensive use of the magic circle, they have many hallmarks of a social game, albeit one with serious real world consequences.  It is worth studying what makes rituals so powerful and contemplate how those lessons could be applied to games.
  

As we dig further in each of the examples above, it becomes clear that there is an underlying psychology behind many of the successful game systems.   By understanding the science of what we are attempting and then applying experimental methods, we can ensure that our games product their intended effects by designer choice, not accident.

There are numerous predictive psychological models that we can adopt that help designers understand how players will react to various stimuli.

• Theories of emotion: What causes emotion within the player?  There is a large body of academic work that describes the connection between memory, recall, emotion and decision making processes. 
• Organizational psychology:  How do group dynamics evolve?   Organizational psychology is the study of groups and how change occurs within groups. 
• Psychophysiology: “Psychophysiological measures are often used to study emotion and attention responses in response to stimuli. Loud startle tones, emotionally charged pictures, videos, and tasks are presented and psychophysiological measures are used to examine responses” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychophysiology)
• AI modeling of players:  Many of these academic techniques gain immense value when they are turned into AI routines that attempt to predict the player’s behavior.  Instead of turning loose a hundred players in a new level, you can instead turn loose a hundred AI driven bots.  For many situations like line of sight modeling or even prediction of how social networks evolve, AI’s are remarkably effective at generating short term predictions.

Basic game design is a highly iterative activity that requires the designer to make educated predictions, test those predictions and then adjust the design. Unfortunately, our measurement techniques are currently quite crude. 

• Biofeedback: The direct measurement of emotion through biofeedback systems can give designers a detailed understanding of how individual players experience the game.  Skin conductivity and heart rate variance are two promising low cost options.
• Skill chain-based logging:  The indirect measurement of fun by logging the player’s interaction with known learning opportunities can alert the designer to flaws in the flow of the game.  This technique works well across large populations of players.
• Social graphs:  Many social networks contain an immense amount of information about who each player interacts with, how long they interact and what key words they use.  This data can be fed directly into a reputation-focused AI model and used to tune the AI so that it becomes incredibly good at predicting what will happen.  Imagine being able to get an overview of guild conflict or player defections a day or more in advance. In effect, you can predict the social weather of your online game with ever increasing accuracy.

During the course of the discussion several difficult problems were mentioned that we would not be able to solve, but were worth highlighting.  These include scaling high touch experiences, the role of authorial voice, and ethical issues,

Mediation of player experiences ultimately leans towards creating psychological situations where player choose of their own free will to act in a desired manner.  In ARGs and Narrative Space, the most powerful tool available is the puppet master, a human actor who guides and adjusts the experience to the player’s current needs.  Many years of experience have taught game designers that players will always react mostly strongly to the prods, suggestion and presence of other human beings.  

Unfortunately, finding skilled people to fill these mediation roles is time consuming and often futile.  It is a new role that most practitioners stumble upon by accident, not one supported by schools or trade organizations.  Once you do find these unicorn-like game masters, you run into problems of scale.  A single game master can handle a few hundred players in an emotionally meaningful manner.  With games hoping to reach millions of players, all those game masters start costing you big bucks. High touch experiences, mediated by live human beings, are exceedingly costly.

Luckily many puppet master activities are relatively mundane, such as giving new quests or acknowledging the completion of real world activities.   Also, they are time limited to a few minutes or less of actual contact with the players.  This has lead several participants in the group to attempt to create high touch experiences by build emotionally engaging, highly social NPC characters.  General purpose AI is an unsolved problem, but perhaps if we limit the scope of what we are attempting, we can create an effective helper.

The Shrike: We all need a little AI Jesus to help us make the right decisions.

Attempts thus far build on the psychological models of the player we mentioned earlier.  Designers build proactive NPCs that poke and prod the player in ways the AI models suggest will result in desired behavior.  Current research in this area includes:

• Building believable personalities that include inconsistency, unreliability, etc.
• Ensuring that the NPCs are goal-oriented with long term, deep agendas.
• Focus on opportunities for influence mechanics rather than combat/conflict.
• Generating artificial social structures, populated by AIs that create social norms and goals for the player to operate within.

• Giving AI’s knowledge of player’s existing social graph in order to inform NPC decisions.  For example, the AI might suggest that you, as a powerful guild lead, form an alliance with another powerful guild leader whose group is becoming too isolated and risking dilution.  This creates meaningful conflict that adjusts the layout of the social network in predictable ways.  The AI is ultimately playing a strategy game that involves manipulating and cultivating the social graph of the player community.

With such tools, the hope is that a game masters can use its socially aware NPC army to support thousands of players in a high touch, emotionally meaningful manner.

Game designers are artists with vision and their own personal voice. If games are experiences where the most active voice will be that of the players, what opportunity is there for designers to express their authorial voice?  How do we identify our Steven Spielbergs or Orson Wells? Historically, such iconic voices are rare in the game industry. 

Perhaps one day we’ll remember Hitchcock as
“That guy who was only good at cutscenes.”

Perhaps we are looking in the wrong place. In games, the voice of the designer becomes less about having a unique narrative style than it is about using various types of game systems in a distinctive fashion.  In this light, you can easily observe the unique voice of industry luminaries that extends beyond simple genre classifications:

• Jeff Minter with his psychedelic retro shooters
• Shigeru Miyamoto’s teams and their crisp mechanics of exploration and skill acquisition.
• Will Wright’s teams and their micromanagement heavy simulations of everyday life.

Once you begin looking at authorial voice from this perspective, new opportunities become apparent.  Instead of asking “What type of characters or narrative do I want to put in front of my audience” you instead ask “What are the cultural values and common emotional touchpoints that our team wants to encourage in our player community?”  This is most evident in multiplayer games, but the same decisions apply to single player experiences as well.

Ron Meiners told a tale of how while serving as a community liaison for an online game, he always made sure to talk publicly about how the group was surprisingly helpful and generous.  Overtime, this strategy of highlighting and socially rewarding desired behavior was adopted as a standard practice within the community.  As a result activities such as trolling, griefing and other common negative social behaviors popped up only rarely. 

There are two fascinating aspects of this example.  The first is that authorial intent is exercised through active social engineering.  Again, the designer is playing with systems, albeit social ones instead of merely mechanical ones. The second aspect is that the players themselves take an active role in magnifying the designer’s message. The player-base acts as a “greek chorus” that guides and informs the individual players.

Lesson here include:

• Community norms shape the players voice. Designers and community liaisons assume immediate roles of authority and through their actions, set the tone for the community.
• Belief creates behavior.  The designer is in a unique role to codify, promote and reward desired beliefs.

What are the ethics associated with the type of massive, intentional psychological manipulation that we are contemplating?  

The Stanford Prison Experiment: Is this appropriate player mediation?

Much of what we are discussing is not so different from the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment.  In the 1970’s, two groups of apparently well adjusted students where put in a simulated prison.  Some were randomly assigned as prisoners and others were assigned as guards.  After only six days, the researchers called of the experiment due to evidence of sadism, depression and intense prisoner stress.   The act of putting good people in an evil environment resulted in behavior most would deem immoral.

There is obviously a spectrum of moral behavior possible in a mediated experience.  At one end you have the relatively good hearted ‘Dancing with the Stars’ where everyone proclaims it to have been an empowering experience.  At the other, you have game designer created situations like the ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’ where the design provokes the dramatic and life altering psychological breakdown of the players. Heaven forbid game designers get into the business of mock human sacrifice.

There are already a few voices in the game design community, such as Jonathan Blow, that are actively decrying the game design techniques used in popular online games as unethical.  On the other side, capitalistic forces are pushing teams to build ever more intense and addictive experiences.  The ethics of mediated experiences is a topic bound to spawn passionate debate over the coming decades.

The group covered an immense range of topics in our two brief days.  We ended the conference with the clear understanding that expanding these thoughts further would require an ongoing conversation. 

To that end, the group is creating a website called FabulaRasa.org that serves as a focal point for our discussions.  Our hope is that experienced game developers and researchers will contribute to building a rich repository of essays, papers and discussion on creating mediate experiences in games.

• Whole Group (12/9/2007): Complete report for publication
• Stephane (1/1/2008): Share his grammar table and text on FabulaRasa
• Danc (1/1/2008): Share his design atoms documents on FabulaRasa
• Mike Sellers (1/1/2008): Share his “AI with feeling” PPT on FabulaRasa
• Mike Steele, Ron (12/4/2007): Create and maintain website for ongoing work. You shall be glorious Site Admins!  Such power.
• Patricia (1/1/2008): Share her Narrative Spaces PPT with this group

Appendix I: Papers and references

• Constructing Artificial Emotions, Daniel Cook http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1992/constructing_artificial_emotions_.php
• Chemistry of Game Design, Daniel Cook, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1524/the_chemistry_of_game_design.php?print=1
• Stanford Prison Experiment, http://www.prisonexp.org
• Understanding rituals through the work of Claude Levi-Strauss: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss
• Why we play games: Four keys to more emotion without story, Nicole Lazzaro
   http://www.xeodesign.com/xeodesign_whyweplaygames.pdf

• Site name: FabulaRasa.org
• Type of site: Blog
• Setup activities
• Introductory blog post by everyone that is their own manifesto for their work and contributions to this area of game design.
• Members of this workgroup and invited participants may blog
• Meme page
• Contributor profiles
• Static pages/framework
• Reference material links (our hosted docs) and external links
• Results pages from our efforts
• Bibliography

Appendix III: Traditional mediating techniques

The following is a laundry list of traditional techniques that games have been using for decades.  Think of these as mediation 101.

• Basic plots – 39 Plots
• Hero points – bends plots to your needs (or Villain points). Storytelling resource.
• Whimsy Cards
• Storytelling Patterns – pattern language – Christopher Alexander
• Reversals that are heuristically created
• Modularity
• Hierarchical
• Character Development
• Personality
• Customization
• Emotion Managements
• Games split between evocative and physical. Books and films are pure evocative.
• Music
• Ambience
• Environment
• Exposition
• Cinematics
• Relationships – ties chars together through game play mechanics, different roles, access, organization
• Novelty
• Mechanics of player progression
• Manipulation of Game Economics
• Voice/Style
• Manipulating Time (compressing/style)
• Manipulation of Player’s Perception
• Content Contribution
• story ramification
• must be bounded
• player myths – supporting by the game
• Switching POV
• Treating the group as a character; character == actor
• Collaborative puzzles

The following are interesting side comments that were made that didn’t find a place in the main report.

• Player story is the metric of the how “good” the game is.
• The quality of the story the player gets out of a game from not making choices should be the same as the quality of the story of the player who makes the choices.
• Game designers are about generating new experiences. “Storytelling” is the players brain interpreting that experience and retelling it through the filter of their experience.
• What are the metadata of these stories? Metadata is the distillation of the common narrative elements across a genre of story and how you can use those to create programmatically instantiated experiences.
• How do we build mediated experiences that work for larger audiences across multiple different cultures?
• What would be the format for sharing stories in the context of “one laptop per child”?
• What is the psychological process by which we make meaning out of our experiences?  Simply have the experience is not enough to generate meaning. There is a cognitive process that occurs after the experience where we assign meaning to the events.  Understanding and mastering this process is a critical component of encouraging great player stories to emerge.

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