My Great White Game
For my first real entry, I'm going to discuss my Great White Game. It seems like a good idea to get that off my chest, so to speak, to free me to work on other, more realistic things, and also to help provide context for my other ideas. This game has seen several incarnations over the years, and is more of a general idea than a specific design, though I have done some conceptual design on various aspects of it. My other reason for getting this out there is that it serves as a foundation to the rest of what I want to accomplish - this is the base idea that's behind most of my other ideas, and the one that I feel I'm working towards. Almost every smaller design I work on has some piece of this within it. As I design, I usually have this goal in mind, and I try to fit one small piece of this in each design I do, as a way of researching and teaching myself about my eventual goal. I'd also like to point out that this is a design for an electronic game, not a tabletop one.
So, without further stalling for time, I present to you: my Great White Game.
The basic idea is simple: A game that allows for dynamically generated plotlines with dramatic structures that change each time the player starts a new game. Like many simple ideas, however, the actual implementation is a huge endeavor. Let's go into some detail about how this all could be made to work.
You have a player character designed completely by the player, including his goals, dreams and hopes, loves and hates, fears and phobias. You have a richly detailed world with NPCs that go about their business independent of the player. And you have a delicate balance of power between rival factions. Now take that world and shift the balance - find the point of maximum pressure and give it a shove.
To use a classic example, say you've got a fantasy kingdom. The player creates a young Prince, far down in the line of succession, with a desire to be King. He loves his father, but hates his older brothers. So the game creates the following situation: The King is getting old. His children all want to rule after him, and they'll each do anything to get that chance. The only thing holding them back from trying to kill each other off is their ailing father. So how do we start the plot in motion? The King dies under mysterious circumstances. Everyone suspects everyone else, and starts trying to ensure that they'll be the one who ends up sitting on the throne.
Again, easy enough in principle but the hard part is in teaching a computer how to set up such a situation and where to apply the pressure.
Key to this design is my concept of "plot space." This is an n-dimensional space where each axis is a component of the story - some variable that we're interested in tracking. The health of the King, whether or not the secret plans of one of the Princes has been revealed, the player's current standing in the rank of succession, etc. The in-game situation can be mapped onto this space at any time according to the status of the various elements of the game. This leads to a concept of "plot distance," meaning how far the current situation is from some desired condition.
Keeping that in mind, let's come back to our game - starting from the sudden shift in the status quo, the game begins to do three things: it simulates the events of the world, based on the personalities and goals of the various NPCs and factions, it reacts to player input in such a way as to try to draw the player into the unfolding chain of events, and most importantly, it directs the actions of the NPCs and factions to manipulate the direction of the overall chain of events toward a series of goals that will result in the creation of a dramatic arc. When I mentioned the bit about the player having complete control of his character's goals and so forth, this is where I was going - rather than doing what a game like Morrowind does and dropping the player into a plotline that they're free to walk away from if they're not interested, we allow the player to define his character's interests and goals, and the game creates a plotline around those. If the player begins to move away from that set of events, the game does what it can to pull her back in, but if she gets far enough away from that plotline, the game begins to set up new ones around the player's actions, using the NPCs and factions in the world along with the player character's defined goals and so forth.
I'm only part of the way to understanding how this can be made to work. So far, I've been able to work out how to tell a single story, with certain defined plot points, that the player can move through mostly in their own way. The designer charts out some points in the plot-space through which he wishes the story to pass. The game then takes stock of its NPCs and uses them to move the plot toward the desired points. The player will be affecting the direction of things, but certain events will always happen. I don't completely like this, but it's a step in the right direction.
So there you have it: the basic concepts behind my Great White Game. There's a lot more that I could go into detail about, but I think you get the general idea. If anyone has any comments, I'd love to hear them.
Read More...
So, without further stalling for time, I present to you: my Great White Game.
The basic idea is simple: A game that allows for dynamically generated plotlines with dramatic structures that change each time the player starts a new game. Like many simple ideas, however, the actual implementation is a huge endeavor. Let's go into some detail about how this all could be made to work.
You have a player character designed completely by the player, including his goals, dreams and hopes, loves and hates, fears and phobias. You have a richly detailed world with NPCs that go about their business independent of the player. And you have a delicate balance of power between rival factions. Now take that world and shift the balance - find the point of maximum pressure and give it a shove.
To use a classic example, say you've got a fantasy kingdom. The player creates a young Prince, far down in the line of succession, with a desire to be King. He loves his father, but hates his older brothers. So the game creates the following situation: The King is getting old. His children all want to rule after him, and they'll each do anything to get that chance. The only thing holding them back from trying to kill each other off is their ailing father. So how do we start the plot in motion? The King dies under mysterious circumstances. Everyone suspects everyone else, and starts trying to ensure that they'll be the one who ends up sitting on the throne.
Again, easy enough in principle but the hard part is in teaching a computer how to set up such a situation and where to apply the pressure.
Key to this design is my concept of "plot space." This is an n-dimensional space where each axis is a component of the story - some variable that we're interested in tracking. The health of the King, whether or not the secret plans of one of the Princes has been revealed, the player's current standing in the rank of succession, etc. The in-game situation can be mapped onto this space at any time according to the status of the various elements of the game. This leads to a concept of "plot distance," meaning how far the current situation is from some desired condition.
Keeping that in mind, let's come back to our game - starting from the sudden shift in the status quo, the game begins to do three things: it simulates the events of the world, based on the personalities and goals of the various NPCs and factions, it reacts to player input in such a way as to try to draw the player into the unfolding chain of events, and most importantly, it directs the actions of the NPCs and factions to manipulate the direction of the overall chain of events toward a series of goals that will result in the creation of a dramatic arc. When I mentioned the bit about the player having complete control of his character's goals and so forth, this is where I was going - rather than doing what a game like Morrowind does and dropping the player into a plotline that they're free to walk away from if they're not interested, we allow the player to define his character's interests and goals, and the game creates a plotline around those. If the player begins to move away from that set of events, the game does what it can to pull her back in, but if she gets far enough away from that plotline, the game begins to set up new ones around the player's actions, using the NPCs and factions in the world along with the player character's defined goals and so forth.
I'm only part of the way to understanding how this can be made to work. So far, I've been able to work out how to tell a single story, with certain defined plot points, that the player can move through mostly in their own way. The designer charts out some points in the plot-space through which he wishes the story to pass. The game then takes stock of its NPCs and uses them to move the plot toward the desired points. The player will be affecting the direction of things, but certain events will always happen. I don't completely like this, but it's a step in the right direction.
So there you have it: the basic concepts behind my Great White Game. There's a lot more that I could go into detail about, but I think you get the general idea. If anyone has any comments, I'd love to hear them.
Read More...
posted by Brendan at
11:34 AM
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