One of the highlights of this year’s Game Developer’s Conference was Harvey Smith and Matthias Worch’s talk, “What Happened Here: Environmental Storytelling.” There’s not much point in my going into great detail about what they said, because they have posted extremely thorough slides and lecture notes. Suffice it to say, the talk is about the way that set-dressing choices povide a parallel narrative channel, which is powerful in the way that it invites acts of interpretation from the player, at his own pace.
First, as an aside, I seem to not be the only one interested in this topic, as Emily Short (I think it was) drew comparisons between this player experience and Interactive Fiction at the IF panel at PAX East. Many people don’t seem to even realize that games have storytelling methods available to the designer other than non-interactive cutscenes, so this is a topic I was very happy to see getting some attention.
The really thought-provoking part of the talk for me, though, was what the presenters called “Systemic Environmental Storytelling.” Here, they’re referring not to the set-dressing choices made by level designers, but to the visible enviornmental effects of play. Examples of this would be bullet holes, scorch marks, collateral damage, and such. These side-effects of play serve as memoranda of the experience the player had in each space. Sadly, they are often transient, for RAM reasons, though Smith and Worch point out that this is a design choice.
This puts me in mind of the work the destruction team did for Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2. One of the things I think they really got right is that they took on an explicit goal that the side-effects of superhero battles should remain visible. It’s one of the things that defines the genre and gives the player a feeling of power. However, they went further than that, into the transformational possibilities of damage systems, which really took things to the next level.
See, for me, the interesting thing about this so-called “Systemic Environmental Storytelling” is that it transfers authorship from the designer to the player. In fact, it has the potential to do so via emergent gameplay behavior, which gives it far more potential for player agency and self-expression than the scripted moments of “regular” Environmental Storytelling.
Structuring a game for emergent behaviors, especially if you want the unpredictable results to still be manageable to your QA staff, means constructing multiple interlocking systems that are individually simple enough to design and test. So, how do they “interlock?” There are a variety of possibilities, but one of the most conceptually simple is when game objects can transform in a way that moves them from the domain of one system into another. So, for example, the fully destructible buildings in Red Faction go from being (functionally speaking) terrain to hazards when they collapse. A guard in Thief transforms from an enemy to a piece of suspicious evidence (when you knock him out). Objects in MUA2 become thorwn weapons, hazards, or even enemies when struck by splash damage.
Bringing this back around to the “storytelling” part of Environmental Storytelling, I see at least two possibilities where what we might think of as “storytelling” actually feeds into emergent behaviors. Even if a transformation serves no other function than landmarking (i.e., the “What Happened Here” of the title), this can feed into the behavior of either other players in a multiplayer game, or that of enemy AI (as in the Thief example).
I guess the short version of this is that the exciting part about “Systemic Environmental Storytelling,” to me, is the “Systemic” part. This probably shows my biases as more of a gameplay designer than a writer.
Tags: convention, emergence, GDC, PAX, transformation
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Harvey Smith, Matthias Worch. Matthias Worch said: @austinat Yes. We talked for a while after the session. Try this: http://www.timstellmach.com/?p=242 [...]