Multiplayer Interactive-Fiction Game-Design Blog

The iron law of reality

20 July 2005

by Mike Rozak

When designing a virtual world, the topic of "story" vs. "game", or narratologist vs. ludologist, continually surfaces. It is an inescapable problem: People want to interact with a story (which includes intelligent NPCs, a world designed to maximise the telling of the story, and coincidences galore), while they don't want to accept the consequences of a story (lack of free will).

The more I ponder the problem, the more I conclude that it's endemic to reality, not just virtual worlds.

I already wrote up some thoughts in Story and plot vs. freedom in virtual reality. Here's a quick summary:

1. 
   In a world (a collection of physics, geography, etc.), there are practically an infinite number of outcomes for "what happens". Star Trek likes to call these outcomes "alternate realities".
   
2. 
   Most of these outcomes (alternate realities) are uninteresting to the reader/player of the world. What makes an outcome (un)interesting is reader/player specific, but I investigate the idea in an Evolutionary explanation for entertainment, along with many other writeups in DRT.
   
3. 
   A story is a narrative chosen from one of the more interesting outcomes (alternate realities) that can be produced by a world. Since the author of a story is also the inventor of the world's physics, geography, history, etc., he has a pretty good idea what outcomes are possible and which lead in the most interesting directions.
   
4. 
   A game leaves all the choices up to the player. Unfortunately, a player doesn't know much about the world. He might know the physics, but he doesn't know too much about the world's geography and characters, or where the character are and what they're doing at any point in time. The result is a series of choices that usually result in uninteresting consequences, since (after all) most uninformed choices lead to uninteresting outcomes.
   
5. 
   What the player really wants is a world with choice, where every choice leads to an interesting outcome; which is a combination of a story and a game.
   

1. 
   If a player is expected to make choices that usually result in interesting outcomes, the player must know a fair amount the world he is in.
   
2. 
   The more the player knows (or the more intelligent the player), the better the player is capable of determining if a choice is a good choice (or a bad one) based on a "how interesting is the outcome" metric.
   
3. 
   If the player can clearly identify a few best choices, weeding out lots of really undesirable ones, the player is suddenly faced with fewer choices. As I pointed out in, Choice, a choice that is obviously bad isn't really a choice, since no one will chose it.
   
4. 
   Therefore, a player who increases his intelligence/knowledge in order to be able to make choices that result in interesting outcomes ultimately finds that he has no/little choice.
   
5. 
   An experience without (much) choice turns into a narration. Frank Herbert pointed out this dilemma in the Dune series, where the prescient Mua 'Dib was left without choices.
   
6. 
   Narration does not work well as a game because (a) games are supposed to be about choice, and (b) television/movies are inherently better at narration than games.

   NOTE: A good narrative has interesting outcomes that are not 100% predictable. A good author never gives readers exactly what they expect, perhaps an "imaginary number" version of choice.

   
   
7. 
   Thus, players that learn enough about the world to accurately predict its outcome (and reliably produce interesting outcomes) don't enjoy the world because they have no choices. Players that cannot reliably predict the outcome don't enjoy it either because most choices will result in uninteresting outcomes.
   
8. 
   There is a fine line between a predictable world with interesting outcomes but little choice, and an unpredictable one with lots of choice but uninteresting outcomes. Raph Koster's book, "A Theory of Fun", comes to a similar conclusion, that gameplay is about understanding the pattern, getting bored, and moving onto new patterns.
   

All is not lost though; it is possible to mix oil and water, and story and game. Unfortunately, the methods are not always palatable.

Table-top RPGs successfully mix story and game; they do this by designating one player as a game master (GM). The purpose of the GM is to create the world, play the NPCs, and adjudicate the rules. Because the GM has so much knowledge about the world (which is mostly made up on the fly anyway) and is friends with the players, the GM can tailor the experience for the players. Basically, the GM tries to make the outcomes of the player's choices as interesting as possible.

Most of the time, the GM's subtle manipulation of reality is gladly accepted by the players because they realise it's producing a more interesting experience. Once in awhile, the GM's maneuverings annoy the players to the point where some storm out of the room. They (usually) come back though because the players are also bonded to the GM by friendship. They trust that his decisions are in their best interest.

GM's don't work terribly well in virtual worlds because (a) they cost too much to hire one GM per six players, (b) 10,000 GMs running around the world with 60,000 players is bound to result in conflicts between the GMs, and (c) players will (in)correctly blame their or another GM of favouritism.

Theoretically, a very intelligent AI could be written that would solve all of these problems. Unfortunately:

1. 
   If the AI were more intelligent than the players and/or knew more about the world (including all the world's players), it could subtly manipulate the world to maximise the players' fun.
   
2. 
   To know what was fun for each player, the AI would need a psychological profile of each player. It would have to know how to produce in-world events that would be interesting for the profile.
   
3. 
   A successful AI would create a world in which players had full freedom of choice, and which most choices would result in interesting outcomes (to the player). The AI would also be able to juggle the conflicting interests of the 60,000 players in the world.
   
4. 
   Unfortunately, many/most people don't like being manipulated. If they think they are being controlled, they either rebel or find ways to control their controller.
   
5. 
   Additionally, while players don't claim favouritism from stupid (contemporary) AIs, one intelligent enough to run a world could be attributed with favouritism.
   
6. 
   The solution is to hide the AI so that the player's don't have proof that it exists; make the AI work "in mysterious ways". How the AI's development team gets hidden is "an exercise left up to the reader"... which means that I have no clue how it would be done.
   

More unknowns than knowns

While discussing GMs, I glossed over another trick that can be used to mix story and game. If the world is filled with more unknowns than knowns, the GM (or AI) can always pull a deus-ex-machina and claim that events just happened by chance.

It happens all the the time in the real world; you're on holidays in the Grand Canyon and just happen to run into an old friend. A penny happens to by lying on the ground, presumably fallen out of someone's pocket.

Storytellers ostensibly despise this device, although they still use it. They do disguise it though, by describing why a character's friend was also in the Grand Canyon, or who dropped the penny just 10 minutes before. It amounts to the same thing.

One technique for introducing unknowns into a world is to fill the world with armies of NPCs whose job it is to drop pennies or cause "coincidences".

Fractured reality

If five people witness a car crash, police will hear five (or more) different descriptions about what happened. You could attribute this to the human brain's inability to remember details when it wasn't paying attention (which is the likely cause), or you could claim that all five people were accurately describing what they saw; they just saw different and conflicting events.

With 60,000 players running around a virtual world, at least one thousand of them will want to be Sir Lancelot (or Napoleon). Unfortunately, reality dictates that only one can be Sir Lancelot and one can be Napoleon.

The solution?

Fractured reality; Allow players to be Sir Lancelot (or Napoleon) in their own eyes, turning them into Don Quixotes. So long has their delusion is not crushed by the chance meeting of another Sir Lancelot, they'll be fine.

On a more subtle scale, players do not have to see/perceive exactly the same things. A dropped penny might only be visible to the player that is supposed to pick it up.

Fractured reality explains where all the pens disappear too, and why you always find your glasses on the table that you just thoroughly searched two minutes ago.

Ultimately, what does this mean?

I'm not sure, but here are your choices...

• 
  Oil and water can be mixed in solution using soap.
  
• 
  A proof for the existence of a virtual god.
  
• 
  Yet another deeply random thought...