Teodric's Credo of Digital Narrative

Teodric Abstract: This is my - Olof Ekström's, a.k.a. Teodric - statement, my vision, of what computer games need to do to realize some of their potential as the continuation of evolving human communication, interaction and carrier of narrative. The next step in the story of storytelling. Actually, this text is just the beginning of the story, as it was written to serve as rationale for the Haven project. Given time and inspiration, this text will either be added to or supported by other texts.

The Credo should be seen as background to the Haven project . Further information about my general position on various issues related to the project in general and programming, software and computer games in particular may be found in the Q & A document.

Availability: Public

This document contains material not yet sorted or categorized.

Sections: About Communication - Immersion - Goal - History - Why This? - Partners - Final words - Copyright

About Communication

For all we know, mankind has been telling stories since language appeared. Cave paintings may tell of a hunt that went well or badly or be wishes or prayers for a hunt to go well - it doesn't matter in this context: whatever the painting were for, there can be little doubt that whoever made them also talked about their hunt and remembered it for a long time. Surely, that age had stories. At least from then on, there have been stories, story tellers and listeners. Our need to tell and listen to stories seems to go very deep. Music, graphical representations of hopes or memories, and the spoken word were all the means mankind had to tell a story.

For many many years, story telling probably didn't change much. Stories went through generations, and story tellers developed tricks to remember them by. Then came the written word, and the book and with the first civilizations came the first mass communication.

Literature has been around for 4000 years at least. Authors have been telling stories, the stories have been retold and reprinted. Printing really changes little in the nature of the work itself, it only makes it possible to reach larger audiences. Photography, sound recording and motion pictures add new types of works. In terms of intensity and the power of communication, they are powerful, but still very similar to the book as far as who can use them and who can consume them.

In all of these media, the last 250 years have seen a lot of investigating the limits of the media. The forms of the novel, theater and poetry have been thoroughly explored. Music and film are areas that still experience real discoveries in a way literature has not done since the early 20th century.

With all these media, the nature of the storyteller and listener are still intact.

When computer games first appeared, they had the nature of solitaire games (the type you play on your own with a deck of cards). Adventure games added a storyline. The heritage from arcade slot-machines brought adrenalin rush games and action. The medium that results from these things is a straight translation from literature, music, and motion pictures to the computer arena. It is, like motion pictures in their infancy, a new way of presenting a story and at times a very impressive and exciting one. There have been attempts at making this medium more unique and to move the limits of communication and creativity, but so far they are not very successful.

The era of online games is interesting. Where previously each player played their own game and saw slightly different events occur, they now participate in the same chain of events and see them from slightly different angles. To some extent, they can all affect the outcome.

Persistent worlds is mostly a way to affect the size of the creation offered to the consumer.

Game-play: The persistent worlds released so far typically combine the types of challenge found in a single player game (a sequence of challenges, like the Ultima or Tomb Raider series - the role-play/mystery or action nature of the game is irrelevant in this context) with the typical multi-player action game (like the Quake, Half-life, Unreal, Starcraft or Diablo multiplayer gameplay - an experience of adrenaline or aggressive cunning). Some efforts have been made to incorporate the gameplay of RTS or sim games into persistent online worlds. The possibility to play the persistent game in a "non-winning" fashion (typically trade skill game-play) is in itself a sim-like quality.
Customer retention: The online nature of the persistent worlds make them easy to upgrade and expand, and allows for an easy path to sell add-on content, to evolve, patch and upgrade.
Sense of achievement: The persistent world also establishes the consumer as a developer or creator of a value - the character played develops powers and experiences, and becomes an attractive thing to control.
Social context: Finally, the persistent multiplayer games offer a social interaction heritage from MUDs, games where social interaction played an even bigger role and for many participants were the main reason to take part in the game.
Social context as a competitive ranking. Cf FPS game ladders, status in avatar representation and customization etc.

In terms of story-telling, the online game offers a story-telling opportunity - the producer of the game can in theory easily tell a story or give a performance to the participants. In reality, this is not feasible for economic and logistic reasons. The massive number of participants does not allow the producer to reach enough customers with such events without spending vast resources. Worth noting is that a genre of multiplayer games designed to fill this very purpose is evolving - Vampire: the masquerade and Neverwinter Nights both use this dungeon master/story teller nature.

Let us consider the situation where someone is directing events to others, and use the terms performance, performer and audience.

The current game technology easily allows any traditional one-way media to be emulated as a second level of the game. A story can be told, or a game could allow a motion picture to be replayed. The application must be designed from the ground up to allow anything but the most static content - the easiest choice is to allow anything that can already be delivered to a player as "a file" - this means graphics, text, audio or motion pictures can be delivered.

Let us now consider meta information and replay.

The story teller games mentioned above might be extended to allow some sort of meta-content (application data describing content entities and events structures) to be transferred. A captured sequence of events from a game would allow a replay or performance of an event from the game to be explored and consumed by the audience in the same fashion as the game itself. This really poses no great problem. It is mostly an issue of logistics (such as available bandwidth and secondary storage) and economics (cost of bandwidth, attractiveness and sellability of the product). This is the first point that the Haven project aims to solve.

The real challenge lies in allowing the story teller in the persistent world.

Allowing to assume the story teller role in an online multiplayer, persistent world setting
Allowing any number of story tellers to compete for actual outcome and script of events
Mediating the outcome of conflicting stories
Regulating story tellers to make sure they fall within some limits

With those problems solved, the digital content medium will have reached a new level. This is the second point that the Haven project aims to solve.

When the above two problems are solved, the stage for computer games will have moved from the spectator-performer relation of classic theater on to the relation of live roleplaying and improvised theater. It will also have publishing properties similar to motion pictures or commercial music publishiing with opportunity for add-on and tie-in products. Compare it to an orchestra with an audience, giving a performance - the changes proposed would parallel giving the entire audience if not to play along then at least influence the performance, and it would give each person in the audience a personal recording station for any type of media he wanted to publish.

The participant idea needs careful orchestration, of course. It's not possible to just let all players have it their way any way they like. The current ideas to solve this problem are mostly about peer rating and voting systems, and about regulating the influence of the decisions made by players or a subset of players.

Immersion

NIY

Credibility of the Creation

Flexibility - the creation should be able to model the chaos of existence.
Intelligence - NPC entities should be smart enough to be taken for human counterparts, if not in the Turing test sense then at least in pure sensibility and adaptability.

Accountability

The consequences of actions should not be easily avoided

Security

To the extent possible, a player should feel as safe in the online universe as in real life.

This is not an exclusive requirement - some players wish for an experience that is chaotic or violent. There is no need to preclude this type of creation in the framework, but it is clearly a special case (a simplification) of the more demanding general case.

Goal

My ultimate goal is something way beyond a "game idea". My goals revolv around sharing creation - creating stories worth telling, together with other participants. Supporting an online world with freedom enough to let a good story happen, rules made to ensure personal integrity, a media framework rich enough to be very immersive and outlets good enough to give the creative efforts of participants a chance to be heard outside the circle of this particular community. A crossover between improvised drama, live roleplaying, MMORPGs, film, literature and multimedia. That's my vision, but the road to it must go via many incremental creations. Step by step, I want to make the components for this a reality. (Buzz word alert? Sorry, I need to keep this under 5 pages. A full explanation would take at least 25, and I would probably want to be sure the reader had some intention to help me.)

Now - don't think I'm crazy. I know very well noone knows how to do what I want to do. I'm not completely insane - I don't intend to solve all problems at once. I don't intend to try and make a super title with a million dollar budget in my spare time, alone.

History

Over 10 years ago, I was sketching with a friend on a 3D first person, multiplayer game. A persistent world where anything could happen (although I didn't know those words then, and hadn't realized the role of databases - I was just happy playing around with sockets and Xlib programming). Yet when Doom came out and I first attempted the multiplayer game, I was completely unprepared. I didn't think it could be done yet, so I hadn't tried. (Nevermind that I didn't have the skill to do it.) Then some years later, WarCraft came out. At that time, I was outlining a real-time strategy game. Same story. I didn't have the skill to do that either.

Then Everquest came out, and Asheron's Call. Both were so revolutionary in my eyes (UO never counted for me - I never got it because everyone I asked said it was unplayable when it came out. I was never aware of Meridian 59. I tried some MUDs back in the mid-80s but they never appealed to me) and both were, I thought, so very close to my dream game. After a while, they seemed so incredibly limited. They just didn't have a technical vision, they didn't try to break new ground in what the medium could achieve. Both had a market vision - they both hit the market window. (Arguably, EverQuest may be said to have had more market and less technical vision, and Asheron's Call the other way around.) But neither had the inventor and creator spirit. Granted, AC had many redeeming qualities technically (like loadbalancing and a zone free world - well let's forget about portals), but neither really tried to reach beyond making people play together. Both were still simple play-for-points games, and that they will always remain. I don't see anyone really reaching beyond that among all the MMO*** games in the market or in development today. No titles have tried to change the fundamental aspects of gaming. Some of the few really inventive projects is Project Entropia (which involves playing for real money) and various titles trying to extend the delivery onto other platforms like mobiles. There have been some interesting birds outside the MMO*** fold as well, like Majestic (which was shut down).

I've seen "my" ideas for games become reality without my help enough times for that story to feel pretty old (Haven't we all? But that's beside the point). I will wait for my dream game to come out and if it comes out, I'll play it and be happy. But until it comes out I'll be trying to get there myself as well. I don't believe I have a free ticket to fame, fortune and babes, but on the other hand I don't intend to give up or let my ideas just gather dust and let someone else make my dream come true. Not without trying.

When I was younger (much younger), I was convinced I would be an author. So was everyone around me. (I was a very serious young person - when it suited me.) Later, things happened that made me loose a lot of faith in the craft of putting words on paper, but I still kept the story teller soul. I'm still fascinated by the power of the narrative, and I still find a lot of joy holding others' attention and telling a story. (That might be the explanation to why I sometimes get a bit long winded and wordy.) Today I mentally compare my own search to that of movie makers of the last century. I'm searching for the soul of the next great medium. That's where I want to go. I have no idea if I have what it takes to get there, but then again, neither does anyone else and I certainly won't succeed unless I try.

Why This?

I've been telling anyone who wants to listen that I like to create games. That's not being very precise, I know, and this text is about trying to explain a little more exactly what I want to achieve. My hope is that this will convince someone that I'm interesting enough to work with, and that my ideas and vision are perhaps original enough to follow or join and not completely crazy.

I'm a programmer by trade but this text isn't about my exact skills in that area. I believe I can hold my own in the software field but even though I live to create software, I don't consider programming my greatest quality. It's just that circumstances force me to do a lot of it before I can hope to create what I really want to do.

While researching requirements for underlying technology, game content is like landfill. It's what I need to discover what I need to support. A technical spec is fairly useless if it doesn't cover an application. If I had my engines finished and waiting for a use, I'd set off creating an application spec by myself, but until someone does an engine I'm satisfied with, I'll be stuck thinking about what can't be done, technically, because I know that most people will put ideas aside if they haven't been done before and therefore the technical universe does not advance. (For any professional - I know very well the proper order of doing things. I'm just forced to do it this way until I can present certain key things and show them to the world. Until I do that, few will believe me, and alone I will never get anywhere) Thus, I'm always wearing the tech hat, to make the tools I think will be needed to release creativity. So I need to find someone who can think out of the box and dream up an application that needs my system and who can invent things that noone has done, and then make a game out of it.

Partners

I'm completely convinced I won't get far on my own. First of all, I work about 5 times faster if someone is listening to what I'm doing. Second, I don't have the skills to manage half the tasks involoved. I need a game designer, a graphics professional and a 3D modeling professional to help me get anywhere (I believe I have found an audio person already). A programmer or two wouldn't hurt either. But most of all, I need people to work with who don't get tired of the project after three months.

Final words

A lot more could be said - like why I don't try to get a job at some game studio or what I mean with those buzzy words up there, and so on and on and on - but for now I'll just ask that anyone reading this can set those doubts aside long enough to think about if they would have something to contribute and if it sounds interesting enough to want to take part in it.

Copyright Notes, Author Credits and Additional Information

This text was written in its entirety by Olof Ekström. For more information about the author of this page, see Olof Ekström's personal information in the Project Profiles document. For more information of the project this text relates to, see the Haven document outline here .

Bälinge/Uppsala, Sweden, July 2001-May 2002