I spent a lot of last weekend playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution (via Steam), the latest installment of a gaming franchise that’s near and dear to me: The first game in 2000 was among the very first I wrote about at length (along with Thief: The Dark Project, an even more beloved predecessor.) They established for me the possibilities of immersive storytelling, or what the first game’s developers called “emergent narrative” - a 3D game world that was so deep, realistic, and interactive, players could figure out their own ways of accomplishing tasks within it.
First impressions after five hours of playing:
- The storyline, atmosphere, and gameplay are definitely loyal to the first two games, where you immediately get thrust into a morally ambiguous world and questionable role within it. (The player's character, a gruff ex-SWAT badass, is constantly told right from the top that he's responsible for a massacre that the player is not shown, at least not yet.)
- As with the first two Deus Ex games, the level of world interaction feels arbitrary and often a little weird. You can't interact with 95% of the computer equipment you pass, but you CAN flush every single toilet you encounter. (And come to think of it, flushing toilets have been a recurring motif in game design since the first Duke Nukem 3D in the 90s.)
- Speaking of AIs and NPCs more generally, it's been 10 years since the first game, but the characters’ facial expressions, their lip synch, their simulated ambient behavior, still feel artificial, stilted, and odd.
- As a combat simulation, Human Revolution is really, really, challenging. We’re talking ten tries needed to win the first firefight. (Switching the difficulty level to medium doesn't seem to help much.) Combat AI is extremely unforgiving, with enemies firing from behind barriers and covering for each other when they rush you. Once again, we see the traditional gaming industry is best at immersive storytelling when it involves shooting people in the face.
And again, these are just first impressions; while it’s an excellent game so far, I’m struck by how little the immersive storytelling aspect has evolved in the last decade.
SL-centric aside: Back in 2004 when I was still with Linden Lab, I got Harvey Smith, lead designer of the first two Deus Ex games, to judge an SL game development contest. He was pretty impressed by the possibilities of SL.
Storytelling is tricky in an interactive format. Either you guide the player along on rails to experience your narrative, you keep the rails but add side tracks for variety, or you toss the baby out with the bathwater and let the players roam freely and construct their own narratives (some of which will never amount to anything more than bash-rinse-repeat).
I think the gold ring is to give the players great freedom of action, but to allow narrative hooks and elements to form themselves around the players' actions and preferences. In this way, the storyline becomes a true collaboration between the designer and the player, and each player's experience is unique and customized.
If you've ever played a tabletop RPG where the players get totally sidetracked on the way to the objective and the DM improvises a story on the fly, you know just what I mean.
Computers aren't great at improvising. Yet. But I believe its within the bounds of possibility with current technology to take our first steps in that direction.
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Monday, August 29, 2011 at 02:31 PM
I can't dig it up right now, but there's a neat essay from Harvey Smith written shortly after he shipped Deus Ex. He talks about all the exciting places to go next with games.
But then, DXHR comes out, and it's stood still. I understand why they're content to do that, especially with a new team on a beloved (and difficult) IP.
Two notes:
* There are many games that do a better job of immersive storytelling, IMO. Do you mean interactive storytelling? Some of the linear narrative games are still reasonably immersive, if not interactive on a story level at all.
* Interactive storytelling is really hard, and nobody's made much progress on it. I think user-gen story games have done a bit (Dwarf Fortress etc.), and... anyone else?
Posted by: Matt | Monday, August 29, 2011 at 03:11 PM
Immersive storytelling isn't hard. Most storytelling is immersive. Interactive storytelling, though, is considerably more difficult - the user can make it exponentially difficult.
Personally, I thought DXHR's immersive storytelling was excellent, though its interactive storytelling was merely 'adequate'.
Posted by: Tateru Nino | Monday, August 29, 2011 at 10:07 PM
For the most part, we're still doing interactive storytelling with "if-then" branches in a tree structure. If you're scripting every branch and every sub branch and every sub-sub branch... yes, it gets to an impossible number of permutations long before it reaches a satifactory number of steps for a fulfilling story.
Consequently, many narratives with this sort of structure have branches that loop back into the main narrative. You can take path A or path B, but they both lead to room C for the climatic boss battle.
What I'm looking for is a storyline that branches dynamically while maintaining some sense of narrative cohesion. In essence, the server makes up the story as it goes along, combining parameters, characters, situations and settings supplied by the artists and writers.
I would love, love, love to prototype something like this in Second Life... if the programming support was more robust, if those NPC agents are flexible enough, if there was dynamic instancing and if the price structure for real estate weren't prohibitively expensive.
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Tuesday, August 30, 2011 at 06:43 AM