http://www2.hawaii.edu/~ztomasze/argax
©2007 by Z. Tomaszewski.
The design of Marlinspike also owes much to certain existing interactive drama systems.
Marlinspike's actions and events are much like Chris Crawford's verbs and events as used in his Erasmatron system (Crawford 2004). However, unlike Crawford, I make the distinction between world-level and story-level events. Instead, Crawford only concerns himself with the story-level. (For instance, his verbs take only characters as subject or direct object.) Additionally, any character can be the subject of Crawford's verbs, while all Marlinspike deeds are player-centric. Finally, Crawford's system is largely decentralized, with the rules of system (specifically, inclination formulae) determining how characters respond to the player's actions. As such, his system has no significant model of the plot beyond an event history and certain global variables.
The process of stringing pre-authored scenes together at run-time based on scene preconditions has also been used, among others, by Grasbon and Braun in GEIST (Grasbon & Braun 2001; Spierling et al. 2002) and by Mateas and Stern in Facade (Mateas 2002). Neither approach includes user actions as atoms in the story model, however. Instead, user actions within a scene (or within a beat, as Mateas and Stern call their story atoms) simply determine the outcome of that scene.
Marlinspike uses a much more flexible story model than either Grasbon and Braun's Propp-based morphological approach or Mateas and Stern's tension-based story arc model. While this hopefully means a system more adaptive to user action, it also means that Marlinspike dramas may not be as well-structured in terms of rising and falling tension.
Fairclough's (2005) OPIATE system includes a similar dynamic casting of characters into roles based on affinity for the player's character. However, OPIATE used case-based reasoning to build complete storylines at once. If the player failed three times to cooperate with a storyline's required choices, that storyline would be put on hold and a new one generated. Instead, Marlinspike strives to incorporate any important user actions into a single (albeit multi-threaded) story-line generated piece-by-piece.
Building on my own previous work with a scene-based approach (Tomaszewski & Binsted 2007), the Marlinspike design includes both scenes and user-entered actions as equivalent story atoms. Additionally, in the process of reincorporating past actions when selecting the next scene, it is possible to reveal to the player exactly how their actions are impacting the story. For example, an NPC may refer to the previous event that resulted in their assumption of a role that is now relevant to the current scene. This is intended to offer the player a greater sense of story-level agency than existing systems.
Another step towards greater user agency is that Marlinspike always gives the player a chance to act before starting the next scene. This is meant to avoid long strings of non-interactive scenes, a problem that plagued an earlier design (Tomaszewski & Binsted 2007).
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Argax Project : Dissertation :
A Rough Draft Node http://www2.hawaii.edu/~ztomasze/argax |
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Last Edited: 13 Mar 2011 ©2007 by Z. Tomaszewski. |