Testimonial Review Page - Excerpts from Part Four

Topic 4.2.1: Designing the System

In Austin, Texas the designers, writers, and developers of IonStorm work towards the second release of their BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award-winning game DeusEx2. At IonStorm these designers use a process that is relatively straightforward and familiar to the schools of game design, software design, and cinematic writing. They start large. They begin the project with early meetings. These meetings include the individuals that have the most experience, passion, and investment in the game and start with widest perspective: the global view.
Then they narrow that perspective. When they start a new project they hold a pre-production meeting and discuss the story, the setting, the characters, and what tools, or capabilities, the reader will have in the game. This is a useful approach because they're not putting the story ahead of the interaction design or vice versa. They look over the technical implementation. They try to get everyone involved. They try to get both sides of the collective brain - the creative and the technical - talking to each other.
The project begins with a director, a producer, and "discipline leads" - the folks that keep an eye on a practice area such as graphic design or networking - and as the project continues they snowball more people in as needed. This ensures that the design is straightforward in the beginning, the concentration is focused, and the budget small. While doing this early conceptualization they don't need to be building diagrams of use-case or narrative flow. As with any writing, the process is a distillation. It's a refinement of the details of the total concept and the imaginative exercises - the visual process - of understanding those details. What is different about the way that they write for interactive narrative is that in these early meetings they are developing a world view, so the refinement of the details isn't linear because the way the story is told isn't linear. Checklists and databases need to be kept, but this maintenance isn't an issue of writing a narrative art, its an issue of producing a world-view perspective. 
	/---img: 4.2.1aa - deus ex snapshots of the dock with a character on it
It's night at the dock and a boat sits in the water. It's a relatively industrial environment, and the authors and designers of the story want readers to have room to explore, but finally, the authors want the readers, for the sake of the story and of the gameplay, to get in the boat and drive away. The authors begin this development by looking at what might be done on a real dock, and how to attract attention to the boat for most everyone that passes through this node of interaction.
The end result is a narrative line that allows some looking around and exploration, then a relatively fixed and linear passage to a new node of interaction. Harvey Smith, the Project Director and Lead Designer of DeusEx2 calls the narrative structure of the story a "string of pearls." His point is that the narrative line has nodes of interaction that are balanced with lines of dictation, or "interactive bottlenecks." Readers need guidance at occasional points to keep the narrative line intact, and, as we've seen, these moments of constraint help guide any interaction. Stoplights do the same job. Interaction requires constraint just as narrative requires imagination. If there was no bottleneck it would become total action and the narrative would run the risk of disappearing. 
	/---note: 4.2.2bb - This is what, in 1.5.3, we've previously termed a Nodal story structure.
A goal for IonStorm is to see that the pacing and timing of the game are driven by the player, not the author. As Raph Koster terms it, this is an "expressive" approach. Its more interesting for the player if this is the case. While the author or designer might feel otherwise Smith notes that "designers are smart to turn over the creation to the player."
But finding the right balance is important. As any software developer, they check their work as they go. For IonStorm, there are two real tests to their success.
The first test is the user testing. In one instance a woman was starting the game and rather than take the anticipated route of getting off the dock onto the boat and driving the boat to the nearby city she instead stayed on the dock and began to experiment with objects there. She threw a barrel into the water. She stood on the barrel. She got back on the dock. She shot the barrel. The barrel exploded. She jumped in the water and swam under the dock. She got back onto the dock. She followed a rat. At first this caused some concern among the interaction designers who were watching over her shoulder because they assumed that the cues they had given her to follow (such as the nearby, idling, boat at the end of the pier) were missed and, subsequently, her experience was boring. On the contrary, she loved the exploration. Her time in this node of interaction simply allowed her the chance to build a different experience for herself. 
	/--- img: 4.2.2cc - ionStorm studios 01
	/--- img: 4.2.2dd - ionStorm studios 02
	/--- img: 4.2.2ee - ionStorm studios 03
	/--- img: 4.2.2ff - ionStorm studios 04
	/--- img: 4.2.2gg - ionStorm studios 05
	/--- img: 4.2.2hh - ionStorm studios 06
The second test is the story testing. They ask a second person to watch the game as it's being played byt the first person. This observer, removed from the interaction, if still engaged in the experience is a sensitive weathervane to the movements of the narrative. If the observer's attention is still on the game without having the experience of control and exploration, IonStorm knows they've got a solid narrative structure.

A Good Design

A good design is one that solves more than one problem with a single solution.

In contemporary narrative, when so many forms of design have been woven together, a narrative designer has to weave at multiple looms. The best interactive narrative designers need at least cursory familiarity with interface design, graphic design, interaction design, and information design. Let's not forget story structure, graphic composition, animation, camera cuts, lighting effects, and the knowledge of the thread of technology used to weave these together. Most designers that are involved in interactive narrative have backgrounds that cover at least three or four of these disciplines. It seems to be a characteristic of digital designers; they work in multiple arenas. But the process of design can be murky, especially when stirring in so many different ingredients. Fortunately, interactive narrative can be developed by following formula that, like any discipline, can be spelled out and, if followed, will at least frame the appropriate questions, if not answer them.

As Team ChMan organizes for another of their monthly episodes of Banja, they have to consider more than a single form of design. Starting from the bottom, they have a team of programmers that have developed a proprietary authoring and editing platform named "Epi_Editor." This is software that allows a meta-form of editing, integrating characters, camera cuts, background scenes, dialogue, and even the iconographic interface that runs along the bottom of the screen as non-player characters speak with the reader. These pieces of the design, each one parts of another form of design (illustration, dialogue, color, sound, etc), are all integrated. Just as the design of a classic form of narrative, but, in many cases, with far more complexity. 

	/--- img: 4.2.2ii - Banja Epi_Editor screenshot 01
	/--- img: 4.2.2jj - Banja Epi_Editor screenshot 02
	/--- img: 4.2.2kk - Banja Epi_Editor screenshot 03
	/--- img: 4.2.2ll - Banja Epi_Editor screenshot 04

Define The Requirements

The larger a project is the more requirements it has. Any time multiple millions of dollars are put together everyone working on the project is excited. And then they receive a list of requirements and moral takes a sharp nosedive. But the requirements - at least for the engineers and designers - serve as a design constraint, forcing some decisions and informing others. But everyone needs to know what the project requirements are at the early stages, so a tradition has developed in most software development areas that has been named a "Software Requirements Document" or "SRD" as its called at Oracle, Microsoft, and AOL, large companies that have long histories of staunch requirements.
Generally, a well-built SRD will contain items that are useful to interactive narrative design. The effort of an SRD is largely administrative, but a worthwhile exercise for a serious project. A table of contents might include, for example, the following: 

	Document Ownership (author, editor, etc)
	Table of Contents
	Introduction
	User and Target Segments
	Development Approach
		- Technology Development Method (do we build, buy or rent)
		- Market Analysis (who's the customer and why)
		- Competitor Analysis (who's the competitor and why)
		- Software Features (what the software does)
		- Business Objectives (how money is made doing this)
	Design Approach
		- Use-Case and Workflow (what information is used)
		- User Interface and Interaction Design (how people use it)
		- Visual Design (what the information looks like)
	Examples and Scenarios (specific citations)
The Software Requirements Document will be different for different projects, but the basic premise is the same: Define the requirements. This allows the group of designers and engineers working on the project to know what the goal is. If "Quality" can be defined as "adherence to the requirements" then you need to get those requirements on paper so everyone knows what's "good enough."
This is important because any design project is never, really, finished; its abandoned.

Investment and Interest

Investment and interest are at the very heart of interactive narrative.

Investment comes from a contribution. A reader may be invested in a story for a host of reasons, but its always because they gave something to the process of reading the story. The reader might be invested because she has identified with a character, because she has spent time reading the story, because she has spent time altering or contributing to the story, or because she's simply spent money on the book she's reading. These are all forms of contribution on the reader's part. As an author, allowing a reader to make that sense of contribution, that initial investment, is key to the success of the story.
Interest, as any banker will tell you, comes from investment. The more a reader invests in a story, the more interested they will be to see it continue and, likewise, to continue to contribute. If someone isn't invested in the story to begin with the interest will be little. Interest comes from a variety of places as well; the structure of the plot, the events of the story, issues of suspense and tension, mystery and release… all of these contribute to the interest of the story, but they will be magnified when a reader has a sense of investment. 
	/--- img: 4.3.1ff -circular diagram of interest / contribution / investment / interest cycle
So captivating a reader's interest will gain their investment. And, by gaining their investment, you will gain their increased level of interest. So the process is reciprocal. Establishing it at the outset of the narrative is the art of the difficulty. 
	/--- img: 4.3.1gg -BBS and chat rooms, a la WELL.
This is an easy cycle to see in most open-ended systems of interaction. Take a BBS (bulletin board service) or a chat-room, for example. People will get there and, in the early moments, generaly lurk as they would at any party, spying on the participants and eavesdropping. They're observing. At some point they start to talk and when that happens - when they have made this first deposit or this initial investment - everything changes. They've stated their opinions, they are interested in others' responses, they then have something new to say, etc. And so they come back the next day to see if the individuals that had the most extreme reactions to what they had to say are there as well, fearing or hoping for the same cues and responses. "Lurking"(reading but not investing your own opinions to the dialogue) doesn't count.
This is an outline of our Four Steps of Interaction from chapter one:
  1. Observe
  2. Explore
  3. Modify
  4. Change
But its also a narrative cycle. This narrative cycle of investment and interest confuses some writers because a denoument or conclusion to a narrative isn't immediately evident. They ask, How can we end the story if the goal of the story is one of increase? How can a character come to the end if they are building as they go? What (they ask fecetiously) kind of a story ending is dying? Other writers recognize that this is the same technique that has been used throughout the ages and that the addition of interaction merely allows for more investment and more interest on the part of the reader.

Mark Stephen Meadows // pighed