I wrote this article for my friend Chris Charla’s hilarious blog http://incrediblystrangegames.com, but it’s only appeared on paper so I thought I’d make it public here.
Polygons for Plot
The games industry has settled on polygons as the fundamental primitive for 3d graphics, but is there an equivalent for interactive storytelling? The narrative alchemists over at Fail Better Games are on the trail of one, and their proof of concent is the award-winning social game Echo Bazaar. Echo Bazaar is one of the best-written games of the decade, and the company deserves the attention they’ve received for it. The interface of the game is a familiar Mafia-Wars-style text RPG, but its premise — that the city of London has been stolen and brought underground by bats — is twisted and compelling. Once inside, the player finds a universe as deeply compelling as the best fiction has to offer. [0]
But just as interesting as Echo Bazaar’s content, in my opinion, is its underlying skeleton. For the game, Fail Better designed a new structure for interactive storytelling called Quality-Based Narrative. As the designer of the second game that employed it, I’m very excited about the possibilities it presents for games with plot. Like printed choose-your-own-adventure books, it’s easy for non-technical writers to create, edit and collaborate on stories written as quality-based narratives. Yet the structure allows for truly deep and interactive storytelling that thus far has only been possible in more technically complicated text adventures. Serving as an underlying narrative design, quality-based narrative could make deeper and more truly interactive stories possible in many other kinds of games.
Quality-based narrative breaks down a story-world into parallel narrative axes called qualities. A player’s amount of a quality, represented by zero or a positive integer, represents his progress along that axis. For example, the main stats in an RPG — strength, intelligence, and charisma — can be represented as qualities that get more difficult to raise the further one ascends. In Echo Bazaar, one of the central qualities is Dangerous, which works much like strength in an RPG: getting from level 1 to 2 is easier than getting from level 19 to 20. And as the player advances in it, he unlocks new story content.
Most RPGs have one linear storyline, and as you increase in strength, power and wealth, you advance in the story towards a single winning conclusion. The power of quality-based narrative is that one can progress along many narrative paths at the same time. Minor stats can serve as auxiliary axes for storytelling: parallel paths to be explored at leisure. In Echo Bazaar, as you play, you may earn personality qualities like Subtle, Ruthless, or Admirable, which unlock new plot points or areas at various levels.
Qualities don’t have to correspond to stats. Many storylines in Echo Bazaar so have their own qualities that correspond closely to narrative progress: for example, troubled by vermin, or a finder of Heiresses. Having 1 of “a finder of Heiresses” might mean you’ve found a clue, but 2 means you’re hot on the trail, and at 3 you’re even closer. And even inventory in Echo Bazaar is a quality. Owning 5 bottled souls is just as effective a narrative axis as, say, a personality attribute, and many plot points in the game require having acquired items very similarly as they require levels of strength or reputation.
So while the surface gameplay of inventory, reputation, stats, quests and side-quests should sound very familiar to any RPG player, Fail Better’s brilliance is in distilling these game mechanics out of their individual implementations into their common narrative essence. Qualities are not broad or specific enough to accurately simulate physical properties such as group location or the contents of a backpack. But they closely represent the core of what’s going on inside a player’s head: progress along a narrative path. Getting stronger, getting richer, hunting an enemy, losing one’s mind, earning a sailor’s trust: all of these pursuits in a game, despite their specific mechanics, are also threads of an internal narrative. The quality-based narrative structure lets writers craft stories with those narrative paths as their fundamental primitive, without getting bogged down with the mechanics of gameplay.
The quality as the fundamental primitive for interactive narrative helps quality-based narrative embrace the strengths while avoiding the shortfalls of its antecedent structures. Printed choose-your-own-adventures, for example, use the page as their primitive, and lock pages together with static hyperlinks for choices. This makes the books straightforward for any writer to create, but fragile and prone to breakage during editing. More importantly, because every narrative path requires corresponding pages, it is difficult to reuse content in multiple ways. Most CYOAs end their story branches with death simply to keep the page count from becoming unmanageable. Interestingly, one of the key inspirations for Echo Bazaar was Fabled Lands, an adventure book series that tried to stretch the CYOA format to its limits [1].
Zork-style text adventures, by contrast, use programmatic constructs like rooms, verbs, nouns and NPCs as their primitives. While this allows for infinite flexibility, it makes code and content inseparable and therefore requires significant programming expertise in any would-be creator or collaborator. Mixing code and content amplifies the risk of experimental writing (should new writing ever crash a game?) and discourages collaboration.
Quality-based narratives have the potential to be as deep, flexible, and truly interactive as the finest text adventures, without the minefield of mixing code and content. In fact, the form lended by the structure has thus far only helped spur Fail Better’s creativity: they document on their blog dozens of entirely new patterns for stories [2] that exist within the framework imposed by quality-based narrative. And the fact that several writers have collaborated on Echo Bazaar speaks well to the structure’s improvement over the fragility of earlier forms.
As the first example of a quality-based narrative, Echo Bazaar is mostly a minimal overlay on top of its core narrative engine. But I think that by thinking of quality-based narrative as an underlying structure or CMS within a more complex game world, the narrative structure could be used to add narrative depth to larger games as well.
In a setup like this, qualities and pieces of content would form a base level of narrative progression and state tracking, woven into a story-world by writers using a CMS. Certain qualities or integration points in the structure could be tied with code into more complex gameplay systems like item collection, skill advancement, map navigation and social actions. As a result, writers working with a CMS can have a level of integration into key game systems that would otherwise only be attainable by making them learn a scripting language.
Many games already do something like this, but in a more special-case hard-coded kind of way. By redoing their narrative integration as qualities or a similarly general system, they could gain a flexibility that would help them expand the role and scope of story in their games. For example, Red Dead Redemption has an ‘honor’ rating, where villagers give you better prices if you’re a do-gooder, or shoot on sight if you have a reputation as an outlaw. This is essentially an embedded character quality — much more could be tied to even this one variable, from action options within the main story arc, to the availability of smaller missions, or others, within the environment of the game.
I think Fail Better Games has hit upon something special here: a totally new way of structuring interactive stories that has the promise of integrating authored, narrative plot with true player choice more effectively than has ever been done before. Echo Bazaar, the first game of the genre, stands by the quality of its writing alone, but I think, and hope, that its more important legacy will be in the raft of games that are inspired by it to incorporate deeper, more interactive, and more consequential stories.
[0] If you’re interested in the game’s dark, enthralling universe, check out this review:
http://resolution-magazine.co.uk/content/review-echo-bazaar/
or just play the game at http://echobazaar.failbettergames.com.
[1] FBG’s article on Fabled Lands can be found here: http://blog.failbettergames.com/post/Echo-Bazaar-Inspirations-Fabled-Lands.aspx
[2] This series of blog posts on Fail Better Games’ site does a nice job of delving a little deeper into their adventures in narrative engineering:
http://blog.failbettergames.com/post/Echo-Bazaar-Narrative-Structures-part-one.aspx
http://blog.failbettergames.com/post/Echo-Bazaar-Narrative-Structures-part-two.aspx
http://blog.failbettergames.com/post/Echo-Bazaar-Narrative-Structures-part-three.aspx
Thanks to Alexis Kennedy for reading an early draft of this article.