on writing games

interactively tangled

I find it interesting that we stop to think a bit more about the rules that change when we move from traditional linear narrative to interactive narrative.

And, since we were talking about sense-making, there’s a big property of dynamic narrative that I think is nice to bring to light.

“What is writing? Writing is telepathy.”

― Stephen King

Sense-making is an incremental process.

In traditional narrative, we start from a “blank sheet” (to simplify, obviously we never start from zero), and little by little our words are building the ideas that as authors we want in the reader’s mind.

This same property (the controlled construction of meaning by the author) remains in place if our game has a linear or branching narrative.

In narratives with branches, the complexity simply increases because the author has to take into account all the possible paths of the narrative tree, but the process of sense-making has a unique direction: at any given point, we can go back and know exactly what the player knows about the story.

Maybe not their interpretation, but we do know what information was given to them.

The real problem starts when we deal with non-linear narrative systems.

Here the trees transform into rhizomes (see comment about Deleuze below) and it is not possible to backtrack what the player knows or does not know, because there is no pre-established order of the flow of information.

I feel this is very abstract, so I’m going to give a concrete example:

MOTHER: What do you want to eat?
  (20%) APRIL: Vegan Chili
  (20%) APRIL: Lentil Soup
  (20%) APRIL: Tofu Stir-Fry
  (20%) APRIL: Curry
  (20%) APRIL: Avocado Toast

[...] The next day

MOTHER: What did we eat yesterday?
APRIL: I have no idea...

In this example, I’m using the probabilistic functionality of cuentitos: the lines that have a percentage are part of a “bucket,” from which one is chosen, in this case, all have the same probability (20%), but they might not.

As authors, we cannot know what they ate the day before when the mother asks, because that is randomly decided during the game.

We could, however, define a variable and react to the state.

MOTHER: What do you want to eat?
  (20%) APRIL: Vegan Chili
    set dinner chili
  (20%) APRIL: Lentil Soup
    set dinner soup

[...] The next day

MOTHER: What did we eat yesterday?
  APRIL: Vegan Chili Mom, are you losing it?
    req dinner chili
  APRIL: Lentil Soup Mom, it was very cold.
    req dinner soup
  [...]

Rabbit hole alert: For those who want to get a bit woowoo with this, this is a manifestation of what the post-modern philosophers Deleuze and Guattari call the Rhizome in the book A Thousand Plateaus.

Have you ever encountered this problem?

What did you do to mitigate it?