Recently, I follwed a link from the Endicott Studio bulletin board to the site of the Belgian game design company Tale of Tales, currently developing two seperate products that make my myth-loving gamer-girl heart palpitate in anticipation.

The first, 8, is a single-player game based on the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty. I won’t relate their evolution of the story — you can go read it yourself — but I’ll say that while they incorporate multiple historic versions of the tale, they have put their own dark spin on the material that will appeal to anyone who enjoys authors like Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, Ellen Kushner, etc., etc., etc.. This is no Disney tale, to be sure!

As a game, 8 is built on the principal of playing, not gaming. The player is invited to go where they like and do what they want to do without being driven by tasks to complete or goals to achieve. While the narrative does have an ending, reaching it is not the focus of the game — enjoying yourself along the way is the whole point. I keep saying game because there is no term, really, for a narrative that utilizes the technology of a video game, including puzzles and obstacles to overcome, but does not have an objective “you win” target for the player. The term “interactive fiction” applies in the most general sense, but is so often used to refer to hypertext prose that its use for other forms of computer-aided narrative is limited. Products like 8 look and feel like games, and for the time being will continue to be called such.

Other intriguing features of the game include an avatar with a mind of her own, who doesn’t always do as instructed by the player, and a complete lack of language. With no words, the entire narrative must unfold on a visual level, a challenge that appears to be well-met, judging by the sample screenshots on the site.

The second project under development by Tale of Tales is The Endless Forest, and MMORPG where players take on the role of stags living in an enchanted wood. Like 8, this game uses no language during play: there is no chat interface for either in-character or out-of-character communication. For a social game — and the site does emphasize the development of community and interpersonal relationships over achievement goals — this is a unique experiment, and I have to admit that having been plagued with meta-game issues deriving from OOC conflict in other multiplayer arenas, I’m keen to see how well it works. Stags will be able to fight with each other to impress the females, with whom they can mate in order to produce offspring, and they can learn magical skills that can change the appearance of their avatars or to make changes in the environment. The oddest thing about it is that it will run as a screensaver on your computer: I assume the developers intend the low-key game play to be an intermittant activity, not something one sits and focuses on for prolongued periods.

Both games are still have a ways to go before release, and I can’t say that either will live up to their own hype. However, I think they have intriguing premises — both mythically, and as far as narrative gameplay goes — so I will be keeping my eye on them to be sure.

Progress on High Noon is speeding along at the rate of a snail stuck in molasses. Which is to say, very slowly. Much of this is due to the lack of a proper team — I’m frankly surprised at the lack of response from the Skotos community when I put up my “want ad” for builders and coders. I really don’t want to do all the building and object creation myself, and I’m not capable of doing the coding, not to mention that this kind of project is hard to accomplish in a creative vacuum, without other minds to share ideas back and forth. It’s beginning to look like a couple of people are coming on board, though, and I’ve sent off an initial list of coding needs to the stable of other developers and coders at Skotos, so maybe some concrete work will start getting done.

I haven’t been totally non-productive. My efforts have been directed at the story end of things. Though the basic plot has been set from the beginning, I’ve had to make a lot of decisions about characters. I’ve had two goals in mind from the beginning (as far as characters are concerned). First, to provide a flexible number of potential cast members that can accomodate a dozen players as well as thirty. Second, to give players substantial freedom with regards to how they play their characters, for the dual purpose of allowing more variation in the story during each run of the game (the sheriff might be the hero one time, the villain the next), and to let players feel more comfortable making their characters their own, instead of being constrained by a detailed character portrait.

Orignally, it was my intention to provide practically no character information at all, just names, physical descriptions, and the individual’s position in the town. Everything else would be up to the player. It didn’t take me long to realize that would lead to a game filled with chaotic boredom, as players wandered around wondering what to do until the climax happened. My reading of Lajos Egri helped me see the light, as did feedback from a few players and looking at some LARP (live-action roleplaying) resources. “Conflict springs from character”, and a well-made set of characters will create their own plots. Given time, a good group of roleplayers will develop characters that generate conflict on their own — I’ve seen it happen more than once over in Castle Marrach — but the limited time frame of High Noon necessitates that players be given more than a shell to work with.

I think I’ve come up with a solution that provides for easy dramatic development along with considerable player freedom of interpretation. Each character will have a background, along with a sketch of his or her relationships with the other characters. This information will presented in a factual way, without any attempt to insinuate personality or motivation. These will be left for the player to decide — you could play your school teacher as a stuck-up prude, a sweet young girl just looking for love, or a conniving tramp out to marry a cattle barron, whichever suits your fancy. The built-in chain of relationships will be devised in such a way that each character has multiple opportunities for conflict and development, and potentially any character (or all of them!) can become the main character of the scenario depending on how agressive the player is in pursuing the opportunities. No one should feel that they’re relegated to supporting cast or the chorus just because of the character they chose. In addition, each character will be given a basic in-character goal, which will help the player focus their initial efforts. Hopefully it will be made clear, however, that the goal is not something that has to be achieved in order for the player to “win” the scenario. This is not a goal-based game, but a story-based game, and success doesn’t always equal having your character achieve what he set out to achieve.

Naturally, settling on this course of character development has made the first of my initial goals — making a flexible number of characters — even more complicated. It was easy enough to come up with a generous number of name-and-description-only characters based on the various personalities one might find in the Old West to populate my town. Whoever the players chose, those would be the characters for that run on the scenario. But the decision to create chains of relationships between the various characters in order to facilitate dramatic conflict means I have a lot more work to do. It’s not enough to simply choose a random set of people and plunk them down in the middle of town. It has to be a cohesive set bound by alliances and rivalries that will hopefully not end up looking too manufactured.

To provide for the ability to allow groups of varying sizes to play the scenario, I’m planning to divide the cast into three tiers. Only when the first tier of characters has been occupied will the second tier become available, and so forth. The additional tiers will each carry along their own sub-plot, as well, to accomodate the increased number of players and the need to keep them occupied. Of course, this makes my relationship chains even more complicated. In a small game, I don’t want players feeling they are missing crucial connections because the second and third tier characters aren’t present. However, I don’t want second and third tier characters feeling like they are being left out of the primary story and are simply playing out their own little tale at the same time and place as the primary group. Admittedly, I have not yet wrapped my brain around how to accomplish this yet. I’m focusing on the primary set at the moment, and it may very well be that the idea of a flexible cast may have to be discarded down the line. If it comes to it, I’d rather provide fewer players with a cohesive plot then simply create empty opportunties for greater numbers. It’s not a good storytelling experience if it’s not a meaningful storytelling experience.

Egri’s book has been invaluable to me, giving me guidance not only for this project but some ideas on how to improve my prose fiction as well, and I very much want to write up a summary/review for this site. I haven’t actually finished it yet — while the theory is great, his presentation drags sometimes — but given I’m not engrossed in any novel-reading at the moment, maybe I’ll turn my attention to re-reading with annotations, so that I can put something practical together for others. We’ll see!

“Sometimes the universe really does talk to you,” I said.

“No, the universe always talks to you,” my friend replied. “Sometimes you just listen.”

What the universe seems to have in mind for me, at least this week, is the creation of interactive narrative. I’ve had a strong interest in the field ever since my early MUSH playing days, back around 1994 and ‘95 (yes, I do remember the Internet before the World Wide Web — I’m that old), though it was probably 1998, about the time I read Hamlet on the Holodeck, that I first began to think of “interactive narrative” as something I could persue as more than an idle hobby, but as a serious evolution of media and storytelling. Family obligations — not unwelcome ones — delayed any serious efforts towards, until the universe whacked me upside the head by tossing me in the path of Skotos.

I used to think it was just an extremely fortunate cooincidence that my long-defunct web pages on unicorns turned up on web search for NarniaMUSH. I’d forgotten the page was still online, or that it mentioned I’d once played a unicorn on the game, so the email from a Skotos employee asking why NarniaMUSH had closed came from out of the blue. I was enthralled with what Skotos was setting out to do, and jokingly told the person that had contacted me to let me know if they were hiring. They were local, more or less, so there was a real possibility of getting a job in their customer support department (or Customer Experience, as they call it). But when they contacted me again it was to ask if I was interested in actually designing their flagship game.

It was a totally unexpected offer, but I snapped it up. I found out later that one of their primary reasons for asking me was the essay on CamelotMUSH that I’d written two years earlier. I wrote that essay for an Arthurian track at a Popular Culture conference, but was unable to actually go and present it, so the paper just sat around collecting virtual dust until Skotos called. I didn’t think about it at the time, but maybe it was just the universe trying to push me in the right direction: if I hadn’t written that paper, I might not have ever been employed by Skotos, or help build Castle Marrach.

That was all four years ago, now, four years that has very much been dominated by Castle Marrach. Now that it’s entirely behind me (or nearly so: a few threads remain) I’ve been casting about for the next creative sinkhole, er, endeavor. While I’ve thought about embarking on another interactive project off and on, marked changes in my personal life seemed to indicate that a more solitary venture: writing stories, a novel, maybe some hypertext.

Until the unverse started poking me this past week. It started about a week ago, when my visiting sister and I went to the local game store, which happens to have huge collection of RPG books in stock. On a whim, I looked to see if they had a supplement I’d heard of perhaps a month or two before, addressing the topic of gender roles in roleplaying. It wasn’t on the main shelves, so I wandered away, but then noticed they had some bins filled with books as well, and sure enough the one I was looking for was there. My sister was nice enough to buy it for me.

Next came a series of conversations with a friend of mine (the same one quoted above). He was thinking of rejoining Castle Marrach, and as we discussed the state of the game versus the potential we both felt it had at one time, he managed to stroke my ego a good deal, complimenting my abilities as an interactive storyteller, and my potential as contributor to the genre. The conversation culminated in a serious discussion about whether or not I should actually undertake another project, wherein I admitted that one of the major reasons I hadn’t commited to one was lack of a compelling story. I was interested in experimenting with ideas, testing concepts I’d learned over at Castle Marrach, using a small-scale project as a testing ground for a larger project, and Chris Allen of Skotos had made it clear I was welcome to use their resources to build something if I wanted. But I just hadn’t found a story idea that I felt was worth pursuing.

My friend also pointed me to an RPG-design theory site that he thought I’d find interesting. Not only did it have a number of useful articles that supported concepts I’d already begun to recognize on my own, but it turned out that it was run by the author of the same book that I’d just started reading a few days before. Cooincidence?

The morning after the conversation with my friend, Chris Allen messaged me again, this time dispensing with his indirect approach and just asking flat out if I wanted to create and run a stage at Skotos. I was primed for it, of course, after the conversation of the previous day, and all it took was the kernal of an idea popping into my head like the proverbial lightbulb to push me over the edge. That was when i started to suspect the hand of the universe at work, and I asked Chris to give me a week to work up a proposal and consider a commitment.

As if to make it’s point final, I was led to the site of an individual who seems to be doing more or less what I wouldn’t mind doing myself: authoring a series of multiplayer, interactive narrative games and trying to make a living from it. I don’t know how successful they are for him, creatively or financially, but it’s a start. I believe that the more people who are attempting to produce this kind of entertainment with an eye to quality, then the more likely it is that people will be interested and thus grow the market even more. What I see when I look at this other site is the possibility that I can do it too.

So, what it looks like is that I’m going to building a stage for Skotos. A stage, in Skotos lingo, is more like a LARP than your typical MU*: it doesn’t run continuously but on a periodic basis. In this case, I’m looking at a short-run (one three- to four-hour session probably) scenario that can be repeated over and over again, with different players taking on the roles of pre-determined characters. Once it’s established, it should take very little in the way supervision to keep it running, so the commitment is short term instead of indefinite.

Oddly, the lightbulb idea that set me off was not a mythic or fantastic one, which themes tend to dominate the bulk of my creative work. Instead, I’ve chosen a western theme: cowboys, six-guns, saloons…which I suppose lends itself to a certain type of mythopoetica, but it’s certainly not an overt one. As a westerner myself, I’ve always been a covert fan of cowboy stories — films at least, I’ve only read a couple novels in the western genre. What especially appeals to me for this project, though, is the near universality of the genre. Most players will easily be able to slide into the provided roles without needing a lot of time to acclimate. I don’t know what the specific storyline will be, yet, though I suspect it will climax with a shoot out at high noon. In fact, High Noon is what I’ll be using as a working title.

It’s my intention to chronicle the evolution of this project here, supplemented by some more formal essays along the way. For starters, I’ve just got a simple to-do list, not everything directly related to High Noon.

• Finish the Castle Marrach “post-partem” essay
• Update this site, esp. with interactive references found in the past few months
• Try and finish off Promise — a longer term goal, but something it’d be nice to have done prior to getting totally caught up in something new
• Start some research into western themes
• Write a formal game proposal, including a developed premise and development needs
• Create an information organization scheme — we’ll likely use the Skotos twiki ultimately, but I’ll need something personal before then

  Runniing out of power: that’s it for now.

A quote, from a review of James Woods’ essay collection The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel:

What we should value instead, Wood suggests, is story-telling that illuminates in ‘units of character rather than in wattage of style’. The best fiction, in this view, does not tell us what to think; it shows us how its characters think, and so encourages solitary readers to bring other human beings closer within their grasp. In Henry James’s terms, it is the art of being ‘irresponsible’ - of allowing fictional characters the freedom to be as confusing and uncertain as ourselves, and of allowing us to approach them with the same mixture of suspicion and sympathy that dapples our everyday dealings with one another.

Only in this way can the novel shake off the spangled excesses of a Rushdie or a Wolfe and emerge as something stronger and more durable; only by ignoring fashion can a novel ensure that it remains relevant.

…It is this second kind of laughter that especially snags Wood’s attention: moments when the reader becomes aware that he does not know these characters any better than they know themselves, and so responds with that unsettled mixture of distance and involvement described by Gogol as ‘laughter through tears’.”

This struck me as being very similar to the situation in roleplaying. With no one person controlling the story, each character (as portrayed by individual players) acts independantly of any overriding plot or purpose. They are simply themselves, complex beings responding to other complex beings and to events as in ways that they don’t always understand themselves, and cannot be reliably predicted. It makes the story, as it evolves, much more true to life in that way, more reflective in the way Woods is insinuating novels should be.

There’s potential in this medium.

A friend, Eric, has challenged me to come up with a term to capture the multiplayer interactive storytelling experience. “Interactive fiction” has become too associated with one-person experiences, like the old Infocom Games (Zork, forex) or hypertext fiction. “Roleplaying Game” or “RPG” puts too much emphasis on “game”, and not enough on story. He suggested “epic crafting”, which I think is a bit intimidating, and also doesn’t include the multiperson authorship aspect of it. I came up with “Communal fiction” or “CommFic” for short, but he thought the word fiction wasn’t inspirational enough. Ah well, the proper term — catchy without being cheesy, thorough without being erudite — will emerge in due time.