[pa's affect]

Testimonial Review Page - Excerpts from Part Three

Chapter 3.2: Perspective

Computed perspectives can displace us further. They can take us beyond the boundaries of the real world and insert our disembodied viewing presences into modeled, fictional worlds - three dimensional worlds that once were, might have been, will be, or are projected forward by designers, imagined by film directors, sought by visionaries, proffered by disimulators.
- William J Mitchell

Giotto's ideas of perspective suggest that a viewer must be in a particular place at a particular time for an idea to be properly conveyed. It was a form of representation that bridged the foreground to the background and the context of the environment to the decisions, opinions, or understandings of someone in that environment. It was a fundamentally architectural mindset. It was a fundamentally architectural perspective. But he was a narrative painter.
Many graphical conventions that employ perspective also have narrative equivalents. Consider as an example the relationship and similarities between foreshortening and foreshadowing. Both of these conventions give a protracted and condensed sense of what is ahead. They are both a telescoping of information. Foreshortening says "Here is what is ahead in space" and foreshadowing says "Here is what is ahead in time."
Conversely, most written narrative conventions that employ perspective have graphical equivalents as well. Examples include the first and second person representations of characters, or "breaking the fourth wall" in theatre and cinema.
	/--- img - 3.2.0aa: photograph of early 1900s
	european theater audience
	
Consider the members of an audience. We're at a play, Shakespeare again, maybe Romeo and Juliet. These audience members sit in the theater and look forward. They can't move very much. They're sitting at a distance, each facing the same direction, looking into a dollhouse or menagerie. The audience is in a removed point of view. The playwrite is aware of this and so he or she develops soliloquys or monologues in an effort to indicate the individuals' perspectives, thereby shrinking that inconvenient distance between the speaker and the listener. It's a tradition older than the language you're reading right now. Cinema - the art of the motion picture - started to change this by packaging the audience into a tiny box called a movie camera. Suddenly the audience was able to swing up into the face of the character in question. We suddenly reduced the distance and changed the point of view, or perspective, from one that was staid, distant and removed to one that was saturated with motion and right in the face of the protagonist, antagonist, or environment. The dollhouse, or menagerie, came closer to being the real thing.
	/--- img - 3.2.0aa: cinema audience of
		the 1950s or 1960s, preferably american
	
This all had to do with the position of the camera in relation to the characters and the events of the story. The camera is an interpretation of space, but of 3-dimensional space. This is just as a page is an interpretation of 2-dimensional space. Nowdays we might think of space as a dataset. If we consider standard cartesian coordinates such as X, Y, Z and Rotations we can think of a camera as an interpretation of information. With these thoughts in mind the camera becomes a kind of tool for interface design. Not only is it useful for interpreting 3-dimensional data, it's also useful for telling stories. The camera in a 3-dimensional dataspace is a great device, therefor, for interactive forms of narrative. It follows to consider that interactive narrative forms will inherit the rules of cinema - the cuts, pans, and crossovers as well as the actors, contracts, and paparazzi.
	/--- note: These six items will all be quite
	different in the coming years. The stars of
	the future are beginning to show their shape,
	and they still appear human. Consider AnaNova,
	Lara Croft, or the grandfather of Idoru Stars,
	Max Headroom.
Chapter 3.5: Examples and Interviews
The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.
- Oscar Wilde

The following interviews are presented to offer some alternative perspectives into the methods, means, and madness of building interactive narrative - specifically in 3D. As with the examples and interviews of Part 02, these interviews are edited only to the degree that makes them readable (some of the people interviewed are not native English speakers). I have chosen a range of people from theorists to developers in hopes of capturing some of the specifics of a field of general study. I was not able to accommodate all of the projects and people that are doing incredible and innovative work - this is merely a sample of an emerging industry.
These people work outside normal civilization; the stage for these stars are the rocky cliffs of development. Because I know most of these people as personal friends and work associates I can also point out that these rough environments of grueling development are their indigenous turf. They prefer the wild. In the eyes of these people, if it works it's obsolete.
3.5.1 - Interview: Marcos Novak.
Marcos Novak, one of the early homesteaders of virtual reality, is an architect who makes building that float. They're often generated from music. Marcos algorithmically analyzes music and then uses that analysis to generate geometry. That geometry is intended to be understood as a building. Marcos discusses his artistic and theoretical approaches to his work and underlines some important points on architectural narrative.
3.5.2 - Theater: La noche de Santa Inés
In Caracas in the early 90s, a theater project was installed in the collapsed basement of The President's Mansion. It allowed audience members to walk from one room to another and speak with the cast. Though not a digital project, all of the elements of a good interactive narrative are present. Anita Pantin, the producer and director of the show, assembled a group of local writers/actors and, based on a pre-existing Japanese play, developed an experimental theater production named La Noche De Santa Inés.
3.5.3 - Video Game: Deus Ex 2
Deus Ex 2 is the follow-on to the immensely succesful videogame, Deus Ex. After having won an award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, Harvey Smith, of Austin Texas, led the design of the next version of the game. He discusses some of his thoughts on how the game is built and what goes into the design process. A long-time game player and designer, his perspectives on interactive narrative outline some of what the futures of interactive narrative may bring.
3.5.4 - Installation: Is God Flat / Is The Devil Round / What About Me
Maurice Benayoun is a Parisian artist that works with interactive 3D graphics. His projects, spanning 12 years of development and concentration in procedural modeling techniques, have gained him an international reputation. Maurice reviews some of his work and looks into how databases can be not only visualized for narrative purposes, but use feedback from readers to generate new narrative structures.
3.5.5 - Internet: Ultima Online
Raph Koster, the lead designer of Ultima Online, who is currently designing Sony Station's Star Wars Galaxies online game, has been "making games for as long as I can remember." He started with a Sears Pong console and an 8-bit Atari. Armed with these dull weapons, by the time he was in high school he and his friends had formed a computer game company. They sold a game that was wrapped in a sandwich bag. They sold one. But it sold. The years passed and now Raph's ideas on the interaction between the author and the reader are helping define the art of interactive narratives today. In particular, his distinction between "Impositional" and "Expressional" forms of interaction.
3.5.6 - Mobile Phones: Top Agent
Mobile technology in the United States is still pre-natal. However, in Finland it has reached a toddling state that allows us to see some of its potential. While this case study is not about 3D graphics it is about 3D interaction because, in juxtaposition to what Marcos Novak is doing, it inverts the world of virtual reality into something that has been termed "Ubiquitous Computing." Top Agent is a narrative game that was developed by Orchimedia, a Finnish development agency, for a hybridized television, internet, and mobile platform and continues to be one of Finland's most frequently used mobile games.
3.5.7 - Development Tools: Virtools
In development, the loftiest of theories are carried by crude metal. The development team at Virtools has managed to distill multiple design philosophies into practical applications for development of interactive narrative. This is no simple task when you consider that this toolset allows teams of people to work on the same project at the same time. As Ludovic Duchâteau says, "the central nervous system of interactivity lies in the ability to program potentiality."

Topic 3.5.5: Case Study Four: Ultima Online
http://www.uo.com/
Raph Koster, the lead designer of Ultima Online, who is currently designing Sony Station's Star Wars Galaxies online game, has been making games for as long as he can remember.
He started with a Sears Pong console and an 8-bit Atari. Equipped with these tools, by the time he was in high school he and his friends had formed a computer game company. They sold a game that was wrapped in a sandwich bag. One. But it sold.
As most serious game designers, the popular line of games issued by a company named TSR heavily influenced Raph. Through junior high and high school Raph rabidly played Dungeons & Dragons and Star Frontiers. He and his friends would develop their own pen and paper role-playing games and this eventually turned into a Dungeons and Dragons campaign that lasted for "a good number of years." Toward the end of this period of their lives they eventually moved away from the rules and dice, turning the game into a freeform role-play narrative.
There had been several attempts at graphical MUDs, such as Lucas Film's Habitat, but these didn't really offer more than preliminary promise. By 1995 there was something in the air and suddenly multiple graphical MUDs started to appear. Worlds Away, Dragon Spires, and Meridian 59 (which Raph claims as "the first real graphical MUD") were first-person perspective games that were using roughly Doom-caliber graphics. But there was nothing with any real impact.
Until Ultima Online was launched.
MEADOWS: How was the story organized and written?
KOSTER: The Ultima games already existed so it wasn't an original fiction. It was a matter of hooking these pieces together and we needed to pick and choose which time period we wanted and how to justify an alternate universe. The Ultima games were the longest running series of computer RPGs, started in 1991. These games are about ethics. Instead of slaying monsters you had to behave in a particular way and be a good guy - you had to give money to the NPCs that rewarded the players. A complicated series of systems developed around this. We had to find a way to combine games that were heavily narrative "hero's-journey" type games with heavily simulated multi-user environment games. Then we had to splice these two together.
Fortunately the Ultima mythos made it easy for us to generate parallel worlds. Which was good because we had to launch multiple worlds because the user base was so large!
We were able to split the narrative line at Ultima3 while still having many of the things that players found familiar from the standalone games. So it worked out alright.
MEADOWS: Can the game be diagrammed? With a dramatic arc?
KOSTER: Ha! There was no interest in keeping a cohesive story structure! We had things we called "Events" in which game administrators... Here's an example: I wrote a series of riddles in verse that we scattered all over the game and I wrote fragments of short stories that we published on the website and we would come into the game and act out "Events" over a global channel. If they were paying attention to the website and they were online as the event was happening they could see the story going by and they could participate by solving riddles and locating the clues. This was difficult to do and almost every time we did it people solved it remarkably quickly or would change the outcome of the game.
MEADOWS: So how would they change the game? Can you give me an example?
KOSTER: This is a good one. This was during beta testing, before we'd even really gotten started. Lord British, one of the key characters, appeared with all his counselors and his jester up on the parapet of the castle, above the crowd. One of the people in the crowd - one of the players that were there at the event - cast a magic spell that caused a fire on the parapet and lord British accidentally walked into it - and he died! It was outrageous. This was huge news inside of the game but it was such a surprise that it turned into "THEY KILLED LORD BRITISH" in the industry news. So it was a harbinger of things to come as to how quickly the expressive freedom we gave to players mucked with the story!
And that has been the ongoing challenge ever since. To this day, any online game that tries to run events find that people will always do the unexpected. It's not a surprise. In any form of interactive storytelling the audience will derail rather than cooperate with a scripted plot.
The point to online games is to surrender control, but players really crave narrative.
MEADOWS: So if the players crave this thing that they keep messing up, what's the solution?
KOSTER: Well, there's Imposition and there's Expression. We [designers and authors] can choose to be Expressive in one way but that often means that we won't be as Impositional as a result. See, online games tend to fall over on the Expression scale - a traditional role-playing game is Impositional - it says you are this person, then they reward you very specifically and they put you in a specific place. In an online game you can roam and decide who you are and we might tell you how to behave but not that much. So it's a big difference.
The SIMMs is a very expressional game, for example.
Online games are constantly balanced on the line between these two, which makes them very different from desktop games. The most fruitful way to do storytelling online in the way that players crave is to hold a mirror up to their activities and do what I call post-facto storytelling.
We talk about a-priori storytelling which is telling the story before the events of the game happen. And then we also talk about post-facto storytelling in which the events of the story unfold as the game is played. post-facto is what we do in real life when we mythologize and do memoirs, biographies or history.
It's the shaping of events that did not have a narrative arc into something that satisfies a story.
MEADOWS: Then what makes for a satisfying story?
KOSTER: Players still want a traditional arc. They want the same thing that the other media have but online environments are without ending and there is no temporal and somatic bound. There's a classic example from Ultima Online.
There was this place called Kazola's tavern - a player-run bar that was out in the woods in a wild area and for some reason it was very popular. It was a very pacifist community. They just liked to hang out and talk. It got a lot of recognition and so one of the game administrators noticed it and, as per game policy, he "Blessed" it. He designated it as important to the game. Which instantly made it the most valuable piece of real estate in the game. This attracted the less pacifistic crowd who came over, started killing people, and tried to take over the tavern. They came in and circled the tavern and there were fights and everything. It got ugly. What ended up happening was that many of the role players gathered together to fight off the bad guys. They stood out front and defended the place. And they made it!
This story of Kazola's Tavern became one of the key myths of Ultima Online. Different sides repeat this myth of what happened in different ways. The pacifists tell their side, the more unruly biker-band types tell their side of it. Good myths lend themselves to interpretation. But this took nine months to go by, and no one, as they were experiencing it, thought it had any kind of dramatic arc whatsoever. It's only on looking back on it that we shape it into a story.
MEADOWS: So while it happened it was a narrative, but the thing that made it a myth was the interpretation and the opinions of the people involved? Is that it?
KOSTER: Yes, definitely. It was a kind of mirror they made for themsleves.
MEADOWS: What can be done to help shape interaction into a myth, or a story?
KOSTER: First is to make sure the players have real emotional engagement. This is important. Second, the environment has to offer scope for actions that are significant enough to affect changes. The biggest final step to make it into a myth. The myth is a mirror that's held up to it.
You have to give the players "Affordance" - a term I've recently heard used - "Affordance" defines what scope players have to make changes and do things. These games offer a lot of that kind of thing.
Everquest for example has a lot of static content and narratives that are built into the game. When you walk to a certain location on the map and say a particular word to a particular person they will give you the same response all the time and do something like prescribe a task. This is a classic modus operandi and it's a very impositional narrative. It tends to be unforgiving and players recognize that it's static or at least cyclic real quickly. They get frustrated that they're not affecting real change in the environment.
It carries them along but most narratives that people get interested in are about changing the state of something.
People tend not to like narratives where things ... well... don't change.

Mark Stephen Meadows // pighed