The Future of Storytelling: How Medium Shapes Story

[Music] all right hi everybody and thanks for coming so for people who don't know who I am I run a game studio called shell games and I also teach at the entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University I used to be a disney at the virtual reality studio there and i wrote a book called the art of game design so today we're gonna talk about future storytelling now some of you younger people younger game developers may not be aware that the company you know is EA used to be called Electronic Arts it is said they changed the name when the irony became too much for them to bear there's a very different company when they were young they were a company that really really was focused on how do you create great deep meaningful experiences and they would talk a lot about how are we going

to create the future of storytelling and one of the phrases that came up often was how what would it take to create a game that would make people cry they would they would talk about questions like this and that was a long time ago we're talking about 30 years ago and how are we doing in terms of our incredible epic great storytelling I think there's been some progress but still I don't think the world takes us very seriously not seriously like they take the stage and great immortal stories on the stage Shakespeare stories are incredible there we liked them so well that even though the language has moved on we still tell them the same way because we're afraid to touch it literature certainly we know that there are great great amazing novels and even film has there are things in film that people say that is a

great story that is truly epic classic storytelling that may last hundreds of years and how we're doing in games yeah yeah yeah one of these things is not like the other unfortunately right you know so we're what aren't we going to have a Shakespeare of games are we going to have games that are like this game was told so perfectly and so well that 200 years from now when people play it they need to play it exactly as it was is that going to happen is that a thing or is that just not possible with our medium there are weaknesses that our medium has and we need to face up to those because if we're going to get better at this we're going to have to confront them one of them is a problem of verbs so right now we have videogame verbs they tend to be things like running and shooting and jumping and climbing and throwing and punching you watch a movie it's a different story

there's a lot of verbs that edit that are different talking and negotiating and arguing and pleading and complaining and you'll notice the difference here is a difference that is goes there movies verbs are up here and a lot of the videogame verbs are just down here we're really good at the below the neck verbs we got those it's the above the neck verbs that we are missing and can we get those into our games if we can find ways to get those it's going to make a big difference so that's the first problem second problem people talk about theater they talk about comedy and tragedy you know we suck at tragedy it's not really a thing for us if we're doing interactive Romeo and Juliet what happens oh my god she died well let me go back to the checkpoint we're gonna fix it up there we go straightened out go up right I'm not saying doing tragedies impossible in video games it's just hard

and does everything have to be tragedy no but it is interesting to think about when people look at the greatest stories of all time they often point to tragedies and say yes this is a truly great story and it would be sad if that area of greatness was was off-limits to us so a third problem is this problem of a unification of wholeness of unity all great stories the ending is foreordained by the beginning when Cinderella is all filthy in the fireplace like there's no option for this story other than for her to become the the princess at the end this story makes no sense if she's like forget you stepmother and gets a job as a waitress around the corner in our little apartment and lives kind of mediocre labor afternoon oh that sucks that's a lousy story that story like the first five seconds of the story determine the ending and when you have interactive stories can we really have that and still have greatness that may be our biggest challenge of all that we

have to confront a lot of people see in this movie this is an incredible movie Hamlet - and I'm going to show you a clip from it because I think this clip better than anything else summarizes the way the great storytellers of the world look at video game storytellers so in just to set this up the guy who runs this drama club at school has gotten complaints from parents who are pulling their kids out of the play and goes to visit one of the the parents goes to visit the parents of one of the kids yes our concerns about the play of a different nature if it's the sex and violence I can totally tone that down now we're fighting those then what is it and we merely expressed our absolute distaste for a sequel to it is arguably the greatest play in English language not to mention the quality of the writing which is quite low well no offense but what the hockey

party you know well I've published nine novels I have a PhD in literature my wife is a painter she currently has an exhibit at the Guggenheim and B Bob okay then help me fix my play I'm trying to save drama you have Hamlet using a time machine to stop Gertrude from drinking the poison to stop or feed deer from drowning you're taking the tragedy out of the tragedy I just wondered why and Hamlet won everybody has to die it's such a downer I mean if Hamlet had had just a little bit of therapy he could have turned everything around everybody deserves a second chance yeah and I think mostly we look like that right because that's what we do we take we create ridiculous stories with zombies and monsters and time machines and there's and we always

set it up so that no matter what there's going to be a happy ending and it's a challenge for us so as we break this down one of the things I often talk about is this notion of the elemental tetrad that all games have four components obviously we're talking about story here and we it's I'm not saying hey is it are we challenged by making great games of course we make great games there are great day there been great games for thousands of years and we're gonna continue to make great games I'm specifically focusing on the question of is it possible for games to have truly great world-class story and meshed in them and we've had some good ones but I don't think we've had anything immortal yes and so if it can come it's going to come because our medium is going to change in some way and I think it probably won't because of the changes in aesthetics I think it's going to be either changes in mechanics or changes in technology and

then the question remains which one is it do we have to wait around for technology to get better before we can have great stories or could it be there's just some simple game mechanics we haven't thought of that will help enable the infusion of great stories I think there are arguments for mechanics Phoenix Wright is a fascinating game the stories are interesting and engaging and it's not like we have haven't had crime drama games before we've had them since the early 80s they just were never very good and it was a clever mechanic that they figured out in Phoenix right they figured out a kind of a time-travel mechanic when you were doing the interrogation normally dialogue happens in a linear fashion because in the real-world dialogue happens in a linear fashion but in Phoenix right the the the testimony is laid out for you and you can scrub over it and go to any point and dig in and say wait a minute I see a contradiction here and when you nail that contradiction suddenly the testimony changes like that doesn't happen in the

real world but it happens here and it makes for a great game someone could have thought this mechanic at infocomm in 1982 and it would have been fine it would have been great but nobody thought of it it maybe there are more mechanics like this that will lead to better and great story time another one along this line is the invention of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 this game could have been invented a thousand years ago the ancient Greeks could have invented this game they had 20-sided dice I have seen them right but they didn't it didn't show up until 1974 no one thought to make a story game quite this way somehow and I always wondered what was it about 1974 that made people think of it the weird part is I figured it out 1972 hanta Wampus showed up in college campuses all across the country and here was the first dungeon crawl adventure where you could go and explore us a dungeon in a single-player game no one had done this before it was the week and

it was thin but it was the beginning and it made people say oh my god this is great what if this game was actually good what if they what if a human being took the place of the computer and I think that's past to be what inspired it because otherwise this coincidence is insane and so here you have the case of a game mechanic that was inspired by technology which is which is interesting Chris Swain from USC has an incredible prophecy about what will happen in the 21st century with games he argues that film was not taken seriously as a medium until it learned to talk it when it was a silent medium it was ads kind of for kids it's kind of silly we don't think it's seriously the stories aren't that great but once it learned to talk it became the literature of the 20th century is the phrase that he uses well what are gangs waiting for they can already talk we didn't talk all the time and he argues no they're waiting on

something else they are waiting to learn to listen and that once games learn to listen and have a conversation with the player that they will become the literature of the 21st century is his argument and I suspect this may be dead on right that if if we're going to have our Shakespeare of games it's going to show up this way so let's talk about some of the things that are standing on our way one of them is sensing emotion this is coming here take a look at this using a program called face API it's possible to track a person's facial features using nothing more than a standard web camera in turn we can use its information to drive the expression of a virtual character such as Breen here taken from the game half-life 2 this technology could allow players to accurately portray themselves online for use in multiplayer games or socializing applications if you're interested in learning more about this technology

whatever related work I've done please check out my website okay so puppeteering that's cool could be great for MMOs could great to great social experiences but this same technology is what will make it possible for a character to tell when you're surprised when you're yelling when you're smiling when you're frowning when you're frustrated we will be able to read that in a relatively short time probably within 10 years this will be something that will be a normal part of gameplay so that's one so now the next one is words now words aren't new here we got a new Pikachu what was this 19 96 I think big you could talk to Pikachu and give him commands it was perfect because Pikachu's a disobedient little cuss and so the fact that technology only work 20% of the time actually was in character for him but now you know we've got we got Syria here I'll do some Syria right let's let's let's check it out here if I can do it right

Merry Christmas serie right like alright so Siri knows what's going on right understood me no training and like kind of formulated in the semi intelligent response we are just at the cusp where this is going to start to be a useful way to interact with games but of course words aren't enough we have to not have to have meaningful understanding it's sort of cool that Siri understood that but someone must have custom programmed that and people say oh my god it's such an impossible problem we're never going to get there there have been people working on this for 30 40 years and it's piling up it's gonna it's piling up and it's going to get to a point where suddenly we're gonna have systems that start to work and there's a picture of Alan Turing people talk about the Turing test Oh it'll be so hard for it's no good unless it can really replicate a human really like have you ever seen

c-3po or data on Star Trek they would not pass the Turing test but it would be awesome to have a conversation with them it's okay to have characters that are intelligent but not all the way there even just the dog that bit that would behave intelligently would be exciting text adventures what the heck happened this was going to be it this was good a combination of novels and games the thing that was missing from text adventures that nobody talks about the reason I think the medium went away it's not just as graphics or cool right books didn't go away when television showed up there's still here the reason is that text adventures present a sort of a lie that prompt there says type anything and there's all kinds of things you type now nine point nine nine percent of the things that you would type it's like I have no idea what this is and so you played this game retry if you're all right what can this thing actually understand which doesn't feel very

natural at all and that's gonna start to change we've got things like scribble Nauts with like what's fascinating to me about Scribblenauts this thing has you can type any noun like I think it supports 25000 nouns and like it shows up and you can use it you a bicycle a bicycle shows up and you write it around you tie bear a bear shows up and God shows up an atomic bomb shows up and these things all work and function and do what they're supposed to do if god's there and you also call it the devil God starts punching the devil in the face you know it's like everything is programmed and intelligent and that's cool but what's cooler is each time they build a game they can build on what they've made before and the vocabulary gets larger and richer let's talk about Milo remember Milo a few years ago let's take a look at this and reflect on this we've been experimenting with something here I'd like you to meet a boy called Milo is a character that can recognize us he can recognize our faces he can

recognize our voices he can recognize emotions in us and this is Claire she's going to introduce you tomorrow I am I like how you doing hi glad you ok actually I'm a bit nervous this is the first time that thousands of people are gonna see this Milo seems a little nervous too that may be because he was constructed of vapor and lies [Applause] right now that's right we know that because otherwise we'd be playing this game and instead if none didn't happen but that's fine it's what my law serves as a fascinating vision for us to think about and aspire towards the ability to have a one-on-one natural conversation where the character is something we haven't quite gotten to yet but it seems that within the next 10 years we should be able to do something like it and one

of the things that's really important about Milo is he you know he's got the speech but he's got something else he's got something that this guy doesn't have Mario is a cool character but he frustrates the hell out of me because every time I get a new Mario game and I open it up and I put it in you know and it starts out and he says to me Mommy and I'm like enter my name Mario my god we've been playing games for 30 years you don't remember man don't you remember when we met at Vinnie's pizza parlor right you and me we took down Donkey Kong it took like six weeks but we did it it was awesome and you don't remember you don't know who I am do you well like when Claire walks up to Milo Milo is like oh hey Claire you know how's it going he knows who she is and he remembers right now we've just gotten to the point

we're in persistent databases for each game why don't we have persistent databases for each character when I get a new game why not have the characters remember what I did in the last game and be able to talk about it and be able to show me videos of the things that happened from last time that's going to happen but someone's going to have to make it happen and that memory is going to be really important and it's going to happen in all kinds of games because imagine if every game you played with Mario he like had this this ongoing relationship with you and he remembered all the things you did from all the other games now let's talk about talking to characters because mostly when people talk talking to characters they assume oh we're gonna be talking to NPCs so let's look at they actually here's some talking that happens in Mass Effect 3 place her in protective isolation recommend gentle approach croghan is slow trust i'm commander shepard

alliance navy are you here to kill me of course god we're here to take you home why what am I to you you're the crow opens last hope you're the future of the Krogan race I'm fighting for that now notice this relationship when I heard they were gonna have voice in here I was like this is gonna be dumb either I'm gonna say it and the avatars gonna say it again which is stupid or I'm gonna say it Shepherd's just gonna stand there which is stupid but instead you say something and then Shepherd follows up with something else as if almost is if were two different people we're like a little team and I say something and he finishes my sentence right and it's like we're buddies which is a little weird we've not had that before well that's a weird relationship with an avatar but is it such a weird relationship with an avatar this is the relationship we've always

had you control an avatar and running him around and then Oh cutscene and he does some stuff and he's hot there he goes right all right and now it's me again it's him it's me it's him it's me we shift back and forth we're comfortable with this so it's not too surprising when it happens here so what I'm arguing is even though everyone imagines that who you're going to talk to in these games are the NPC's the quest givers and sure you're going to talk to them a little bit but I think the one you're gonna talk to the most are gonna be your avatar there's no facility in Mass Effect 3 to have a little chat with Shepard after that character leaves but like you sure would want to you know man that alien jerk what the hell was that I know I know are you kidding me right you don't want to have that conversation and so I think avatar is gonna start to be the wrong word and I'm envisioning a different word virtual companions is the word I start to think of this character who's there with you and sometimes your controlling and your working together as a team now

when I was a boy I went on a long drive with my father a long time and it's all quiet in the car we're just sitting there and all of a sudden he says if you had a friend who was a ghost how old would you want them to be I thought about it and I said well I'm seven so I think seven so we could play and stuff and he said yeah yeah the thing is so you're gonna get older and he's not and I said oh oh yeah I never thought about that he said yeah that's why you got to think about these things but turns out we do have to think about these things because that's a question normally avatars are made for a certain age and games made for a certain age and mmm if

we change and go away we're gonna lose that character and leave them behind we're gonna want these characters to change with us change and grow as we change and grow which will be a huge challenge for us as designers but damn if you can do that that is powerful that would be very powerful people may Brad Ender's Game there's an aspect of Ender's Game nobody talks about which is the fantasy game in there there's this game that people play it's like going into a little bit of a dream you enter this little fantasy world it's a very dreamlike and the adults in the game call it the mind game or the psychology game because it's designed to kind of help you confront the problems that you have but like in game form and the game sort of suss is out what problems you have and there's a quote in here you know Enders at one point says this game knows me too well and he can't he can't he can't face what he's dealing with and imagine being able to create a story that is where you have so much data

about the player and what they like and what they're into that you can craft a story that is like just perfect for where they are age wise and development wise and interest wise that would really really powerful so what platform is all this stuff gonna happen on everyone wants to know what platform or platform where the story games gonna be what's the right platform for story games because I'll tell you right now all platforms are not created equal when it comes to story and the right answer is stop thinking about platforms platforms are the wrong way to think about the world you should think about the world instead in terms of venues right where people use things because that's gonna stay the same where people use stuff will not change it is a rock you can build around the platforms will change with the but the venues won't so here's the four venues of the home one of them is the heart right this is the living room where the family gathers to kind of do these sort of public things the second one is this kind of anywhere the in-between space this is where people play mobile games right now it's a crappy place for stories there's

the reading nook this is what I want to be really alone in really private and by myself and it's quiet and it's very quiet and this is a obviously a good place for stories and then a fourth one is to workbench right this is where I'm going to go I've got a thing I want to achieve and accomplish this is where PC gaming lives people treat PC gaming differently than these other places because it's workbench mentality I'm gonna do this hard thing and I'm gonna dig in and I'm gonna drill in it's different than the reading nook it's different than the hearth right so when people say we're gonna bring we're gonna bring steam to the living room really is that really what you want to do know what you want to do is make an easier way to have steam in the in the in the workbench so where's good for stories no not anywhere anywhere is bad for stories that's why story games don't work very well in mobile and the hearth is okay but not good for story games because it's boring to watch somebody else the story game the reading nook and the workbench are the places what are their

what are their respective platforms the reading nook wants tablets and the workbench wants something like the PC but what it will continue to be the PC is the pc going away I think I'll tell you what's coming this son of a is coming HMDs are gonna come back and you know what they're good for they are good for storytelling because they are incredibly intimate there's just you and the world and you were just in there and there's nobody else in there I think our rich I suspect in the next 10 years our richest story games are going to show up in this medium and notes this does not belong in the living room this is a work bench or a reading nook medium this is not a living room medium okay so how do we do which verbs well here in the future I think it's going to come if we can talk to characters suddenly we got above the neck verbs and it's exciting how we

doing on the tragedy well I think if you've got a virtual companion who's been with you for 10-15 years and something horrible happens to them and they get killed or they just get sick EU and they leave because they're fed up with your crap oh my god right that would be you would have tragedy in games and it would be freaking powerful how about unification everything coming together is technology going to fix this I'm not so sure about that that's still a hard unsolved problem so does that mean we can't can we have a Shakespeare of games and I think that we can but I think our Shakespeare is not going to be so much a teller of tales although they will be a teller of tales but they will be a crafter of characters someone will have the understanding of human psychology to make a character that you will bond with and want to stay with and want to have part of your life on all of

your platforms across all of your games and a companion through life think about how when you chose a username when you were I don't know what 14 probably and how you still have it today and you will probably still have it when you're 65 because that's the way we craft identity think about how those little toys that you put on your little cubicle are the same ones what you had when you were 8 you're gonna have the same virtual companion who goes with you through your whole now what happens when we die what are we gonna do with these characters think about world of warcraft world of warcraft got ten years on it that games not going anywhere it's gonna be there twenty years thirty years what should we do with the characters when the players die should we bury them and have a little funeral service or maybe should we pass them on to our descendants and think about a world where the best way to get to know your ancestors is by

inheriting their virtual companions because the companions will be able to tell you the stories about everything this person ever did and all the good times they had and everything that happens of your of your grandfather and great-grandfather because these will get passed down a long long time and I know that sounds kind of weird and it sounds kind of sci-fi but tell me how this will not happen this is exactly what will and must happen and who's going to make it it's going to be us this stuff's not going to come from Google or wherever it's gonna come from game developers who figure this out and who practice because we're there first with Siri there first no Hey You Pikachu was there first with this so we're gonna be out there first and these game characters are going to weave into our regular lives and it may well be that we spent a lot of time talking in these virtual companions cuz why would you just talk to him in the game why not just be like

hey Mario what's the weather tomorrow and he'll tell you all about it cuz he's used to talking to you anyway we may spend more time talking these virtual characters then we talked to anyone else and that doesn't sound healthy right and maybe it's not and it's one of these things we're gonna have to work with and figure out so while it may have some downsides I still continue to believe that having some somebody who's there with you and who cares about you and is willing to just be with you all along your journey no matter what has to have some value so I'll end up by leaving you with this goodbye Sarah [Music] and remember family should you need us yes should you need us for any reason at all

I need you hug it you do I don't know why but every now and again in my life for no reason at all I need you all of you oh you do well why didn't you say so [Applause] thank you very much everybody have a great GDC [Music]