Two Models for Narrative Worlds

I gave a talk at the University of Southern California’s Entertainment in the Interactive Age event, held at the Annenberg Center in Los Angeles. I was on a panel with Janet Murray, author of Hamlet on the Holodeck; Tim Schafer, designer of Grim Fandango, and Ken Lobb, veteran producer at Nintendo.

The Annenberg Center has put up transcripts of the whole thing, including the question and answer session at the end of the session I was in, and at some point will have streaming video of the events as well. In the meantime, I’ve taken their transcript of my largely-off-the-cuff remarks and matched them up with the slides I had prepared to try to recreate the experience. I’ve also corrected some minor errors (mis-heard words, that sort of thing) in the USC transcription.

Next Generation article on the event

When I originally prepared the slides, my intent was to give a talk that was fairly dry and academic, presenting the different narrative models that have been used in games thus far. But after seeing the first day’s worth of panels, I felt I had to re-do my talk to suit both the audience and the major issues that were manifesting regarding narrative as the different speakers presented their thoughts. So that morning in the shower, I made some rough notes on a printout of my slides, and what resulted was the notes you’ll see in the slides.

Because I did the whole thing off the cuff, I had no way to fact-check things. So I am just about positive there are inaccuracies in the examples in the text of the speech. I don’t remember what Postman77’s exact illness was, I am pretty sure but not positive of the outcome of the story of the guild extorting players (and it may not have happened at the tavern I cite), and I know for a fact that the guy who said “I can run” isn’t the guy who won Vor’s contest, because he posted his story after the contest had ended–so please forgive the inaccuracies that arose from doing zero research and improvising the speech, and try to focus on the spirit of what is said, and not the details.

Celia Pearce’s introduction of me comes first; then you can click on the link to get to the slides and transcript. The transcript is right below the slides.

Raph was one of the original designers on Ultima Online. He’s now working with Verant on the Sony–, I mean, the Star Wars Galaxies project.

He also has a really amazing website which is linked to from our website, which is one of the most comprehensive tomes on online community role-playing I’ve ever seen in my life. So that’s the other, that’s sort of the New Testament after Janet’s book that everyone should take a look at.

And we’re just getting him hooked up here. He’s part of the Verant Mafia that’s here at the conference. Verant is a great company, because they work at three different locations, and so they actually practice what they preach, which is quite remarkable. They function completely in the mode of what they create.

Take it away, Raph.

Two Models for Narrative Worlds

Hello. Uh-oh. How many people out there know me? It’s a little scary. All right. Let’s see if we can get a picture up. So, I have to admit, Hal and Warren, and Janet, and everybody stole a whole bunch of things that I wanted to say today. So, this morning in the shower, I completely recrafted my entire presentation. And my understanding is that most people are, in fact, capable of holding two things at once in their mind. So, I’m going to present you with a–, since we’re here at an academic conference, I’m going to “problematize” my presentation. And it looks like it already happened, since we don’t have a picture. [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] What do you know.

So I’m told most people can hold two things at once in their mind. So, welcome to a palimpsestic meta-narrative. Because read this, and I’m going to be talking about something else. [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] And the interactive game will be you get to try to put together what I’m saying with what’s on the screen. All right, I design massively multiplayer online games, virtual worlds. I’ve been doing it since 1992. Started out in text, moved on to graphics around 1995. However, in a previous life, I acquired an MFA in creative writing. Linear narrative is near and dear to my heart. And one of the great tensions, and by the way, I apologize, yet another picture of the Sims. One of the great tensions creatively is how do I reconcile those two things? Because they are radically different from one another, yet can be seen as existing on a spectrum. So, while I was in grad school, one of the things I was exposed to was hyper text.

Let’s see. How many people recognize the names Michael Joyce, Stuart Moulthrop, Jay Bolter? That stuff. Text-based hyper-spaced stuff, usually constructed with a program called Story Space. Lots of things, like “rhizomal structure,” which means you get stuck in little loops of boxes, going around, getting the same piece of text over and over again, problematizing the narrative. I also had a history of playing games, and in fact, at one point I did a presentation for the class where I stood up and explained that one of the key dates in the history of academic hypertext was the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons, which kind of got me in trouble with my professor.

So the thing that Story Space to me conveyed, more than anything, more than the tool itself, certainly more than any of the works done within it, was actually the title of the piece of software. The story provides a space. And the title of this–, you know, the subject of this panel is, it’s about space, right? It’s about how the spaces do things. But the thing is, in an interactive environment, metaphorically speaking, identity is also part of a space, behavior is part of a space, right? Those are also the choices.

Now, back when I used to work on muds, the kind of thing that I tried to do very, very hard was write these cool quests that people could go on in groups or by themselves, have this narrative experience. I recreated the entire saga of Beowulf, wove it together with the Ring of the Nibelungs near the end so when you went to fight the dragon, it was actually Fafnir, and you could, you know, go through the process of getting different kinds of swords, and the safe blade with the poison, and whatever, so you could go kill Fafnir and live through the whole saga. And at the very end, the Valkyrie would come down because you’d freed her from her imprisonment. Then the whole damn thing reset. But, you know, trying to do things whereby I was imposing these stories on people. They voluntarily stepped into them, but there they were inside this narrative structure.

So, there I was, I was trying to use my MFA, by God. [LAUGHS] That’s what I was trying to do. I was trying to tell the story within these spaces. I did one based on “The Jungle Book,” where I tried to tie the setting very much into the story. And there’s a moment in there where you have to bring the Lost City of Oodeypore back to life, and so you have to go get, oh, I can’t remember–, it’s like a seed that you have to get from the Rukh, and you have to bring it to the point of the cliff where you can drop it into the place, and then magically–, you know, this was in text, so it was easier to do than graphics–, magically, this wave of energy spread out from that point, and it changed the setting, which had been a ruined city full of the Bandar log apes. Each of the apes, “poof,” transformed into the people that used to live in that city. And all of the walls that had been tumbling and fallen down and rocky, craggy, whatever, all of a sudden came back solid and strong again. And the entire setting changed around you. And as you continued to play, slowly, the people who were walking around wondering what happened, popped like soap bubbles, and turned back into the apes. That’s story-telling via setting, and it’s a place where I chose to, you know, put them in a world, and they couldn’t avoid it. Right? I made them go through that experience. I was in control, by God, and it felt good.

Now, you know, we also often try to impose other things and constrain the space in other ways. We try to control the character, and we’ll tell them, “This is who you are.” Right? Kind of like at the beginning of the introduction, you know. “Celia’s imposing an id–, boy, I better live up to the introduction.” You know, we all feel that way, right? So, when I first started playing online games back in ’92, I had this character that I’d been playing in RPD’s for years, just years and years and years. Sometimes he was a bard, sometimes he was a thief. He was usually named Rusty or Dusty, depending on whether or not the name was taken. First time I logged into a mud, my wife and I were sitting there together, and we were, like, “Hey. What do you want to be? Okay. I’ve got this name. We’ll use that. Yeah, sure. Rusty, taken. Damn. Okay, Dusty.” “You’re gonna play the–,” “Fine, female.” And then my wife went and made her own character. So I’ve been playing Dusty ever since. Okay? And she’s female. And that is identity imposing, right? Whether we do it in the case of a game like this, where, you know, you’re stuck in a pretty damn cheesy spy story, or whether it’s in Grim Fandango, Tim’s game, or whether it’s, well, any other game where you are presented with a ready-made character, and as you embody it, you have to live out those ideals. As Dusty, I learned a lot playing Dusty. Getting, oh, everything from being sexually harassed to–, one evening, I actually went on a lengthy man-hating spree on chat, which really, really freaked out some of my friends.

The last kind of space that we often impose is behavioral. Now, I love single-player games. I love ’em. I remember sitting and repetitively shooting stupid little tanks in Laser Blast on my Atari 2600 until the million point score rolled over and turned into nothing by exclamation points. Not much of a narrative, I admit, but, by God, I made it. I remember sitting and replaying Deadline over and over again, so that I could ambush the mail delivery at 9:35 in the morning. Right? Because I needed that letter so that I could prove–, you know. I never finished that game, by the way. And, you know, sure. You know, the other side of me, my MFA half, I’m still waiting to play the game that makes me feel like, oh, Marquez’ “Man With Enormous Wings,” or something, right? That’s what, you know, I think a lot of people out here are daydreaming of something like that. Where’s our “Hundred Years of Solitude,” where’s our “Catch-22,” where’s our “Hamlet,” right? We’re a ways away, I guess.

So, there’s a whole other kind of space. And there’s a different kind of space, there’s a different kind of way to tell the stories. And I think this panel, in particular, is going to frame this tension between these two ways of telling the space. I’ve been sitting, you know, talking about this with Warren and Hal and other folks for a few days now, since we’ve been here, whether this is a story at all. So, you know, expressive space. That’s what I make for a living is expressive space, not impositional space, despite all my writerly desires.

And once upon a time, there was a guy named Vor who was quitting Ultima Online. I was lead designer on Ultima Online for more years than I want to think about. And he decided to quit. That’s not an uncommon occurrence, you know. We see it with regret, and then we say, “Oh, well.” He ran a cool little contest. He said, “I’m going to give away everything I’ve ever acquired in the game to the people who tell me the best stories about why I play UO.” And he gathered these on a web page. So, welcome to expressive space.

So, one of the stories. Once upon a time, there was a very pleasant little tavern, the Serpent Cross Tavern. Players could build buildings in U-O. Players could set up these structures, and they made them into their own, and they told their own private mythologies and told their own private stories in ’em. One day, this group of people called S-I-N, “sin,” that was their guild abbreviation, decided that they were going to walk around all the player-run taverns and extort money. They formed a Mafia. And they went from tavern to tavern, and they said, we’re going to destroy this place unless you pay us. And they came one day to the Serpent Cross Tavern–, you know, they were really boastful about it. They destroyed a whole bunch of role-playing hotbeds, came one day to the Serpent Cross Tavern, and found an army waiting there that creamed ’em. Setting. Expressive setting. That could not have happened without the ability for players to reshape their space and create a location for a narrative.

Possibly the best known myth of Ultima Online is the saga of Kazola’s Tavern. It was another player-created environment. But it was not just a player-created environment. It was also a player-created identity. Kazola’s Tavern stood for everything that was good about role-playing and pacifistic play in Ultima Online. They got together, they tried to form a police force, you know. But the fact is the cool dudes, the jerks, the people who talk with half-numbers, like phone freaks, those people were constantly harassing it, because, by God, it was the most valuable piece of real estate in the whole damn game. What happened there was a giant conflict between two forms of identity, two ways of representing yourself in the environment. And what it made was a myth. It made, you know, this was the giant mythic struggle of the killers versus the builders in made flesh. And, by God, that story has been told and retold by people within UO so many times now, because it resonates so deeply with who they are.

There was a fellow named Postman-77. He had some kind of neurological disorder. Basically, you know, he was painfully shy. He couldn’t go out in public. He, you know, he twitched and shook all the time, and it was very hard for him to keep a job. He was constantly embarrassed. In U-O, he started playing, and he found, “Hey, I can–, you know, nobody can see the twitching.” And that was pretty liberating for him. But more than that, it started shaping his behavior. He was one of the people who defended Kazola’s Tavern. He was one of the people who fought against the Mafia people. He was one of those people who tried to organize. And he had to start learning organizational skills, and he had to start putting together groups of people who would work with him, and pretty soon he found, “You know, I need a web page in order to coordinate this stuff, and I need to learn leadership skills.” And he got some leadership books. And, well, now he runs a web-design company, and acts as a consultant, because he transferred the learned behaviors that the game was reinforcing into real life. Okay? So now we have expressive behavior.

So, a priori versus post-facto storytelling. In other words, some stories we get to shape in advance, and some, we shape after the fact. So now, here comes a little metafiction bit. I just lied to you. None of those three stories were from, “Why I Play U-O.” None of them were from that. But it doesn’t matter, does it? I mean, they’re still good enough reasons, they still fit within that framework. That’s “after-the-fact” storytelling. That’s people gathering together events, shaping ’em, editing, discarding stuff, throwing ’em around and putting them together into a story anyway. Art is a mirror to life, right? And it’s just a question of when we decide to hold up the mirror.

In my past life as a writer, I was really concerned with naming boundaries with how we enforce you be something other. And, you know, there’s a lot of potential for games that are about imposing things on people, about, “Hey, you get to experience what it’s like to be in Colonial Williamsburg.” Or, alternatively, maybe you get to experience what it’s like to–, you know, this is kind of scary–, run a concentration camp. You know? Games can do that. These stories can do that.

At the same time, I often go nuts in “rhizome land,” where I don’t know which way to go. Right? Trying to make plot-node engines, and learn about narratology, or whatever. And, you know, how do I prevent the situation of the seven year old girl who logged into UO and had a pet bunny, and some guy just walked up and gutted the bunny in front of her, and waved the meat and the hides in front of her, and went, “Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah.” You know, that’s not why I built the game. But it’s still a possible expressive space. And it makes for a pretty frightening story.

The real story that won Vor’s thing was a guy who was in a wheelchair in real life. And he had a very succinct answer. “I play UO, because in it, I can run.” So, on some days, I think to myself, “I’m astounded that people could write that story, a one-sentence story, and convey so much within the context of this. And that they are imposing that world view of the game on me. Wow.” On other days, I think to myself, “Maybe I wrote that. Wow. That couldn’t have happened without the things I put into this game. That’s really cool.” Bottom line, I’m just glad the story exists. Right? Because we learn by story, we grow by story. What I’m giving you here, what I’ve just told you are some of the formative myths of online spaces. Right? And I don’t care who the hell wrote them. Thank you.