The Shapes in Your Story: Narrative Mapping Frameworks

[Music] [Applause] okay awesome I did not know right clubs happening I'm excited maybe I can redeem myself this year since I came in they're really close if last time okay so thank you I'm pleasantly surprised to have this bigger crowd when I saw the crowd outside the other room I was like okay I'm forgotten thank you for not forgetting me so Who am I I'm a narrative design researcher is this loud enough we're good okay the long answer is I'm a film student turned a web designer turned art student turned comic screenwriter turned programming teacher and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah turn their design researcher this is why editing is important point is I did a lot of stuff came around to narrow design and now that's what I call myself

because explaining all of this is tough but who are you so just show of hands who here has written any interactive narrative worked on a game anything okay good who's designed interactive narrative okay I may get to skip ahead a lot on a lot of lives here who's a mapped and interactive narrative like actually made maps for it okay a few of you okay I'll tell you guys when you can fall asleep in and who's coded and interactive narrative yeah some of your coding hands I always love those okay twine okay other tools okay awesome I stuffed has been some time what yeah well 20 can't count anyway okay so

as you saw from a troller slide I have a lot of different things that I do in life and have done but the one that I figured I'd focus on today is this annual challenge that I have where every year in January and March I get 60 new digital media graduate students most of whom have had one program in class one visual design class zero credit writing classes and 75% of them are in their first year of speaking English full-time so it's a bit of a challenge the last bit was kind of an accident we thought it would be really cool to make our program more international and we learned careful what you wish for because our program is very international and it's super cool but it's a challenge so over the course of 12 weeks with these relatively fresh faces I asked them to create an interactive multimedia narrative that is not a simple choose-your-own-adventure it must not be game first which is to say it has to be really about story it

has to be a good experience the first time you play it not necessarily a positive one but an enjoyable in whatever sends one engaging and it must invite replayability oh and also they have to learn three act dramatic structure learn character archetypes learn basic screenwriting cinematography editing and directing principles in the same 12 weeks but somehow out of all of that it's the prohibition against choose-your-own-adventure that seems to actually freak them out the most which really confused me but that caused me to go down this line of research so then they go home and think about it and at least a quarter of them actually come up with something kind of brilliant usually things that would take at least a year to produce but brilliant ideas usually we end up teaming the students up into groups of four or five and we try to build small parts of those projects trying to get them to scale back expectations and sometimes they don't

and we get some glorious train wrecks I should say I have not time to these remarks to do slides so these are not necessarily the glorious train but often there are some amazing moments of insight and some accidental brilliance probably some intentional brilliance too that we don't recognize till later so the weird thing is that again and again during the project students come back to this idea of how do you give me any trouble choices without it being choose-your-own-adventure and you guys know the answer to this and we give them examples ranging from alabaster to the zombies of The Walking Dead and they say so we just have to add some action to our usual adventurer maybe a minigame so then we go to F and G used to be facade now it's Firewatch for F G being gone home of course which students especially latch on to which I find incredibly gratifying and then they all decide they're going to make a story

about memories triggered by objects and therefore that must be amnesia and therefore we end up with 14 proposals for stories about amnesia and at first we kind of wondered if this was maybe just because the starting point for new writers interactive fiction is the last game they played but then we realized because my main co-teacher and I are with it in a decade of each other a lot of these reminded us of games we played like way back when we were kids so we actually began to wonder if maybe the problem was that a lot of our students don't have a sense of video game history but that seemed kind of odd because a lot of our students are in their early 20s but we also have some that are near retirement age two-thirds of them come from China India North Africa South America there's such a diverse range of cultures and experiences and games that could influence their stories we wondered why did a quarter of the projects keep ending up being detective stories or anisha stories so this is

territory that's been covered there are still I'm sure many awesome amnesia stories to be told and I love a good mystery but we wanted to kind of see if maybe there's something else they could do so this is the point when I actually started looking at their Maps such as the one over there on the right I'm sorry the left and I started looking at sort of classic adventure maps that's actually part of planet fall I believe on the other side there and we realized that basically we'd been sort of treating their story maps as site maps so they were basically kind of saying oh well we're gonna put something in ret so it'll be a web page so we'll make home pages you can see home page over there and that wasn't really giving a sense of story or a sense of place but when we tried to actually get them to map out things in terms of place then we ended up with basically well I wish we ended up with planet fall but you know we

ended up with sort of maps and basically we would end up with the classic inventory oriented adventure game kind of thing that is great and I love playing but again since this class was interactive narrative we wanted to sort of do something more which is why I wanted to do this talk because I really wanted to sort of show a situation where we're really pushing on this idea of no you can't make a game I mean I would love it if I could tell the students haha just kidding gugak games down because I love playing the games they make but instead have to be the mean teachers like no this quarter no games so as I mentioned we were trying to have them work with existing tools and with a tight time crunch we discovered that they often work just sort of using the tutorials and saying oh well since the anthem tutorial has hit points then we have to have hit points and that must be how these things work so it was sort of a strange variation on the whole language shapes thought thing I don't know if you guys went to the session yesterday about writing if English is your second

language but here we had two cases of English as the second language plus programming as a second language so it was kind of a pain but then we had the overachievers I've seen it and my cake [Music] so these two groups which I just put side by side to show quick clips produced a fully interactive top-down prototype and a fully produced cutscene in the first week of the project so we're expecting you know sketch prototypes and these students are jumping ahead to this but it's actually the advanced groups that I was more worried about and why I really wanted to do this mapping thing okay another quick survey question who's played a really good looking game that just didn't make sense okay who's been sorely disappointed by a

game that you know has some amazing programming behind it or some amazing ideas and it's just awkward yeah okay so my secret shame I've never finished heavy rain it's the only game where I've ever actually given up and read the walkthrough and watch the YouTube videos because I just could not deal I love a lot that's going on in this is not a bash heavy rain session in fact one of the things that I had to cut from this talk for length is a reengineering of heavy rain that some students and I have been trying to work on it's a theoretical exercise we're not gonna actually like make it but we think there's enough good stuff in there but the point is it's difficult as I'm sure many of you can appreciate in fact this is sort of the remnants of that part of the talk that I took out this is was our starting map for how heavy rain works and without going to details and there

are no spoilers in case you haven't played it in the last six years in which case get on that but the dark area is actually the only part where there's really a lot of evidence that you're having an impact on the world there's sort of the minor touches that happen in the first part and that's roughly three-quarters of the story that takes place with you only sort of having these sort of cosmetic changes and being led through the story and by the time you actually get to that part where it's super amazing what's going on you've cut off your finger you've come to crying baby you've migrated pizza you've set the table you run around like a madman like five times and so in my case I just didn't make it to the end just out of curiosity how many people did make it at the end of heavy rain awesome you're better people and I am said this cuz that's saying for this crowd but good stories have a beginning a middle and an end and the reason we

worry so much about mapping or at least I do and my group does is because we want players to reach the end or at least a stopping point where they feel happy usually basically as long as they don't rage quit and they say okay I'm stopping because I appreciate what's going on here I'm okay if they don't get to the end so this next part is the part where I might fast-forward a little bit I decided I would sort of go through some of the basic shapes that we look at just to sort of do a quick orienteering guide and then do one bigger worked example at the end time permitting so show of hands people who were familiar with the diamond structure okay loops in stories just saying I'm sure many of you know okay well good so the diamond which was actually brought up yesterday and

Cassie's talk about all choice no consequences basically is the title of her talk all choice no consequences you give the player choice you then give them a result from the choice and then maybe you give them some choices in this case I chose to use a little emoji because it seemed like there is no choice why not and you go back to the thing you're at so they're great because you don't break your story but at the same time some writers and players hate them because they want to break their story if you do this you're sort of in this safe zone of okay I'm just kind of leading you along through my story now because every choice you make might customize what happens a little bit but not too much but I bring up the diamond because you know it seems like kind of an obvious loopback technique in the time saver it's often underappreciated for the things you can do with it such as giving the player a different way of interpreting the same events or giving

players a choice between the right Road if you believe in having a right Road in your story and of the hard road so maybe you're trying to make a fail-proof game maybe you don't believe in having you know the death thing going on in your games or maybe you want to go back to the days of infocomm and infinite saves and restarts I wouldn't mind that sometimes but anyway so maybe you give the players one way through where they just do the right thing they solve the puzzle whatever you're on and then the other way is okay you got to do a whole bunch of stuff you're gonna get there this is that sort of diagram out it's sort of a silly example because I wanted to just keep these super simple and get to the actual meaty stuff so the diamond here sort of reads sideways although you start at the top with you have to choose correctly and from there you can either choose wrong or right if you choose right you're fantastic and you miss out

on going on your fabulous quest if you wanted a shortcut in the game great you've got it on the other hand maybe it's punishment for the player being wrong so suddenly you have to go on this quest and you refuse to do it so that you're in the dungeon but then you're given a chance to redeem yourself so now it's sort of a redemption story like you know you've seen that you're a bad guy in the eyes of the king so you're gonna go on his quest or maybe you during the escape the dungeon and so now you decided that you're going to redeem yourself in the eyes of people and go on that redemptive quest so you might end up on the same quest three different ways but in one sense it's you volunteered in another sense it's you've sort of been enslaved into it and in a third sense you've decided to do it for you know your own sort of anti heroic tendencies so your point of view of your motivation for the quest changes a little bit and you don't actually have to you know write any additional code or anything you've just sort of thrown in a couple of extra writing options and tada you're

fantastic for whatever reason you thought were fantastic so the kind of stuff that I do with my students that drives them crazy we play games like spot the diamond and it's not the two things that are diamond shaped is a hint I'll just have you guys look at it for like ten seconds there's actually a couple of them so this is a pretty simple story map so there's not a lot going on but you'll notice those aren't really diamond shaped and this is actually one of the things that the part of my research we're not gonna get to today is getting into which is sort of Auto remapping to try to find these shapes in maps people draw so you know when you draw a twine map and it's a mess maybe you're just trying to get all your squares to line up nicely or not have too many crosses and our concern is more let's try to actually pull out these

shapes that appear that might point to something going on your story that is desirable or not desirable and those of you who have done graphics programming can probably appreciate it's a pain in the neck to try to get a bunch of objects to move and respect each other's space and so on and our prototyping has been using OmniGraffle which while a lovely tool is not great when you get into like hundreds and hundreds of junctions on top of each other anyway so here we have these shapes that are not at all diamond-shaped but there's actually two ways here where in one direction the player goes off to the side and then down and and the other player goes over and down and then back up but in this case it's not really up they just moved the node down there so there's a lot of tricky stuff to be done with directional 'ti as far as where are you trying to say the action actually is taking place but if you follow the arrows which again is part of what we're trying to automate then you end up realizing okay well pretty much all my

choices are going to end up sticking me in this middle section here where something happens but there's also something else going on here that is not so good and that is a loop so loops are fantastic when you try and hit every branch in a conversation tree although they can make your NPCs sound like dimwits when you have the you know could you tell me that again and they sometimes cause the player to realize that he or she is not making a difference in the world at all so once again in the interest of simplicity although there are many complex examples on my website here's sort of the basic loop you have to make a decision okay I did it great okay do you think we did the right thing hey we have to make a big decision again okay I did it great oh we're gonna loop so obviously there'd be a way out of this loop but it can be really frustrating if you're at

something like this this is a reduction project I'm currently working on I will be super impressed if anyone can guess what I'm actually reducing here and we can talk about it afterwards if you figure it out but this is actually only act one of this particular story and I'm actually not even done with act one I just had to finally two nights ago say this is going in as is so my apologies this is the cleanest version I had so far but as you can see there are a lot of sort of potential loopy areas I realize you can't see the air eight arrows very well but you can certainly see there's a lot of areas where sort of things dovetail back into each other and you can get stuck in the corner really easily so imagine you spend a bunch of time over there on the left side as a player and you're wandering through all these nodes and thinking I'm making progress and then suddenly you're back to hey you should investigate that same thing again really frustrating and kind

of you know breaks the reality of you're investigating this thing you have a competent team helping you so once again we'll do a little practice can you spot the loop so again I apologize the errors may be a little small these slides will be up on my website as well as from the GDC site so you can look at them later if you find this game at all entertaining by which you mean the game of spotting these things but if you look at the arrows you'll see that there's sort of a down over up loop happening on the left and on the right so basically we have to befriend that darn skunk which thinks sorry I know I know I was reworking these slides at 2:00 in the morning give me a break ok so you probably know if you're making these if you've been writing interactive narratives for a while but one caution I

have for people is that once you start actually mapping your work out instead of sort of having that mental separation of oh well I'm the writer and I'm writing my stuff and I'll just give that to the other guy who will do the interactions or whatever then there becomes this temptation of oh I'm a really creative person this thing connects to this thing and I can totally make this work and then suddenly you've made a whole bunch of loops you didn't mean to make which is in fact what happened here with this student project one member of a five-person group came up with some brilliant ideas at the 11th hour and put them in without anyone else knowing and yeah it was kind of ugly beta-test okay in the interest of time skipping ahead here so the zipper which is one that we named ourselves as far as I know which i think is kind of cute basically let's players make non make minor non story breaking choices until you're ready to deal with major ones talk yesterday actually did a really good job of dividing things up into sort of choices and major branches so this is

sort of the choice area and then at the bottom you have your major branch so it's basically an extended remix of the diamonds that we looked at at the beginning the difference is that with us you're at some point planning to have a major branch that actually is important like an avoidable death or an optional romance or something else where you actually want to sort of have where you sort of wanna have people having a real effect on the story so with the diamond you can extend or sorry the zipper you can extend the diamonds as much as you want and then branch only when you absolutely need to or when it's time to do it one example that people may not have seen of this is long story which is a really cute game that I only found recently which surprises me gives my job but it does a really nice job of sort of balancing the there's a little light mystery going on but at the same time you actually can

have a relationship with most of the major characters you pick your gender you have three gender choices and the game is very nice about accommodating any of those decisions in different ways so you don't just feel like it's you know hello Marcel you actually have some kind of like sense that the story is actually going where you want it to that being said there are a lot of places where the story ends up sort of branching back and you're saying well why am i back in this weird mystery that I decided I didn't care about because I'm more interested in my boyfriend right now but I mean it's that's the backbone of the story so you have to get back there eventually but what's really nice about long story is actually it's ironically very short episodes so I think with the time between episodes the long story folks are really able to sort of focus on let's make sure every relationship option is meaningful and different and cool and then you know we'll have the sort of mystery story

that just plays out as it does so it's an interesting shift in priorities that works really well with this sort of zippor structure because they can jump off when they need to into these other parts so I promise narrative mapping frameworks so this will be the new mapping frameworks bit in my last five minutes here but that's probably for the best because this part gets into the really dense stuff that I have a lot about online so I created map templates to try to get my students to not basically recreate Zork or insert last game they played with the idea being that these are just starting points the idea is that they fill in the blanks or the letter two blanks with story idea and they try to make the story that navigates you know it's kind of like when you're in grade school and you get the five paragraph essay and you're told you know paragraph one is your topic statement paragraph five is your conclusion same idea here the main idea

though is to get students to not think about programming constraints and that's why I wanted to present this to you guys as well the idea being to really make things visible it's really easy especially with projects like the two that I showed with my superstar students who created cool stuff in the first week it's really easy to have the coding members of the team get buried in this stuff so the writers don't really necessarily fully appreciate what's going on anymore or maybe appreciate it but sort of don't quite understand okay do I sign seven points to that do I send five points to that do I have to assign points what's going on here so with the mapping structures the idea is that we have sort of a more open way of visually communicating what you're trying to do and on the writing side the goal is to better communicate options and outcomes to your players as well they want actually see your map of course but if you can say oh well over here this is gonna have a major effect then you might build actually write something to inter

that so the one template I'm going to get to is this lock and key template which needs a new name so if you have any ideas let me know because it implies puzzle and it's not supposed to be just puzzles it's based just on the idea that the player needs to do X before Y can happen it's basically boolean logic for people who have trouble visualizing flowcharts and it's pretty simple idea the idea is you have these numbered nodes and any set that have the same number or one unit with L&U being locked and unlocked and caving the key so up at the top and the zoomed in version we have 2k and then we have 2l they can get us to 2k which ten lets us unlock to you and in this case I put them all near each other for space-saving but you can have them farther apart but the idea is that you actually have a way of saying do these two things are actually the same they're just spatially apart which might seem a little weird but this worked really well with one student group the group that actually did the really nice looking video they decided

to use twine initially and they actually entered the template into twine and then typed in their story idea and only after that did they say okay now let's actually start breaking this thing up and figuring out what do we really want to tell let's throw out this template idea and actually make it into something what's funny is all their scribbles on the left actually ended up turning into something on the right that looked very much like the map I'd originally give them them but that's actually the physical layout of the insane asylum the story is about a journalist investigating an insane asylum because we still can't quite get away from the broken people crazy theme of interactive fiction but I think it's actually kind of a cool thing so we'll go with it anyway but what was really cool here is that whether accidentally or on purpose they actually ended up sort of creating this physical landscape that mapped the mental breakdown of the woman sort of the if she goes one direction it's more into she's going to be imprisoned forever and if she goes the other

direction then she might get out but since there's this whole question of is she crazy or is she not throughout the story it was a really nice the mattock overlay you know with puzzles and stuff but it basically showed me they'd sort of learned something from their playthrough have gone home as far as like how to physically tell a story but in a much more subtle way even though what they were really doing here was sort of puzzle making so sadly we do not have time to play the game because I'm told I have one minute but it is online there's plenty more to see however see I knew this would happen this is the stuff that we're currently working on this is not a big walking ad for my lab which is the narrative lab at Northeastern but I do hope you guys will come visit stuff as we start to put it up since mapping is kind of a reductive process I forgot you to end by sort of doing the reductive thing on my own talk so that's the whole talk in sort of three things

the first two being things I hope everyone's doing the last one being my advice if you want to tell an entirely cinematic story well it's actually gotten cheaper now to make a movie than to necessarily make a good game so make a movie speculation about the future so we're still in the discovery phase and games like this games like gone home her story currently all still are getting comments like I've never played anything like this before each is unique experience because the story is so personal but when you reduce these games to the most basic mechanics hiding everything in plain sight through good level design they point towards a future in which everyone will have seen something like these games and that excites me because if everybody has seen games like this then maybe people will invent more games like this and this will become just a general medium for a critical comment maybe your game will be our generations Ulysses although hopefully that means your games an interesting and challenging work and not

that everyone says they'll read it even though they're not going to so finally exciting um over time götze Tories leave the player wanting more because they relish the experience and not because it felt incomplete unless the enemy was supposed to make them feel that way like this talk which is perpetually to be continued so this might look at Ori thank you because the Lowell Institute actually paid for me to be here and here is my contact info so I hope you will be in touch and thank you for staying over by one minute class dismissed you