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Emergent Narrative - Ed Jewett - 26-12-2010
December 23. (permalink) A couple weeks ago I wrote about computer games, and Crystal sent this post about emergent narrative, arguing for games where the story arises out of the player's decisions, as opposed to games that are scripted by designers. This is a fascinating and complex subject. Eskil Steenberg, the smartest game designer in the world, touched on it in this post, pointing out how difficult it is to make a game where the player drives the story and the story is interesting.
I think the greatest game yet made is Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, in which the overall story is scripted but there's also a large interactive world. But it's still easy to imagine how it could be better. What if you could make major changes in the story, like training Malon to fight and taking her with you through the dungeons? This could be done with a better artificial intelligence, and I think the next revolution in gaming (assuming the tech system doesn't crash) will be AI's powerful enough to manage the core story as an attractor, rather than as a script.
After that, the next revolution will be AI-moderated games with no core story at all, and no end. The attractor is the enjoyment of the players! You might have had a taste of this if you've ever played D&D, or some other pencil and dice RPG, with a really good game master.
But even the primitive games we have today are diverting too much of our attention from the "real" world of industrial civilization (which is itself a diversion from the biosphere). How much worse will it get as the games get better? This goes back to the Scott Adams line I always quote, that the holodeck will be our last invention. I'm going to call this Adams's law: A sufficiently enjoyable sub-world will draw away the attention needed to maintain the surrounding world. This leads to a law I've written differently before, and this time I'll write it as: A sustainable sub-world must serve the needs of the world that contains it.
So the attractor, in our hypothetical super-AI game, cannot be the enjoyment of the players... at least not for long. If the game is going to last, the prime attractor has to be the learning or transformation of the players, and they have to be learning or changing in a way that makes them more fit for living in the surrounding world when they go back to it.
If you've read this blog for long, you know the punchline: suppose we are already in that game.