作者：Frank Cifaldi

Emily Short花了大量时间思考如何在电子游戏中采用独特的叙事模式。

十几年来，她不仅编写了大量交互式小说，而且还致力于试验多人在线交互式叙事模式。

今天，我们与Short共同探讨了游戏故事的发展方向，以及向多个玩家讲述生动故事的方式是否可行。

我坚信，相信你也认同，如果充分探索交互式模式，它将会成为最强大的叙事媒介。

（笑）我们有望在接下来的2000年内实现。

game narrative(from rockpapershotgun)

没错。而且我相信我们会实现这个目标，但如果还未做到，我们要如何制作出如经典小说般的动人体验？

尤其是如果你能够接受不同于小说故事的动人模式，那无疑证明我们已经做到这点。当然，我已体验过囊括难忘情节的游戏，它们总会引发我的思考，逐渐意识到游戏世界的运行方式如此强大。

我认为Anna Anthropy的《Dys4ia》是这方面的典范。它采用倒叙形式带你进入情境的方式有点不同。你可以通过互动表达发自肺腑的情感，但在其它媒介上却难以实现。

一直以来，你都在Little Text People与Linden Labs中试验多人叙事模式的可行性。那么在多人模式中可以采用单独的动人叙事体验吗？

怎么不可能。如果你打算制作强大的多人叙事模式，理想上应探索人人在进程中扮演的重要角色，这不仅指能够施加技能或突袭，或加入RTS战役的角色。这得顺应章节的发展，由角色决定，探索原由。

事实上，我们的项目并不打算向超级艺术品发展……这可能带有贬义口吻，但我的本意并非如此。就我看来，它并非一款美术游戏。然而，我认为无论是双人模式，还是大型多人游戏，我们都有可能去探索玩家面对同种情境的不同视角，实际上人们总会为自己的行为找各种借口。我认为，我们可以制作出探索不同世界观的有趣作品。你可能会回到进程，从另外角度重新体验，而后理解另一视角。

在单机游戏中制作具有强大复杂情感且主题鲜明的故事颇具难度！你可能会从基础方面入手。但我认为你拥有相当大的发挥空间。

设计师总会碰到操纵方面问题，比如平衡操控玩家进程与赋予自由感。我相信，即使在单人游戏中也难以解决这类问题。

我想这涉及到设计问题。我尚不确定是否有简单的解决方案。也许你会说可以一半采用约束模式，一半采用开放形式。无论如何，这都是有效举措。

该问题在多人游戏中会不会更加棘手？

从某种意义上说，其难度更大，但从另外层面看，它们又属于同种问题。如果你构造的故事包含某些自由方面，或是支持玩家自主推动内容发展的机制，那么可能多人游戏中对某个玩家的限制或多或少会影响到其他人，因为有些具备不同技能的玩家会发生变化。那可能会形成平行体验。因此从某个方面看，这将增加1.5倍的工作量。由于还应考虑到玩家之间的互动性，否则他们之间将无法形成有意义的互动。

有时我会思考MMO游戏中失败的叙事模式，比如NPC会传递大量感性内容，借此将你引入故事中。而另一方面，你与角色的互动则由人为操控，即使他们倾向于采用角色扮演模式，但仍免不了遭到批评言论炮轰（即使他们已进入角色），由于故事套路已安排妥当，那么你与角色的交谈便无多大意义。

这确实会令人失望。由于其它玩家可以源源不断地传递动态内容，因此作为作者便不必操心内容创作，但系统却无法认识到这种相互影响方式。在一定程度上，我在此次访谈中提到的项目可以采用野兽派风格解决该问题，即强迫你采用模拟器。

一方面，这种方式确实可以抽离还未融入起始阶段的角色扮演。当然，由于现在人们可以在此之前创建自己的对话，这表明他们可以提前准备一个与你预想有点出入的角色。借此融入自己的个性。

然而此时，他们并不打算讲述模拟器还未记录或是非重点内容。你不得不赋予它们某些意义。但我们在游戏测试后发现，人们强烈要求知晓的有趣评论竟然来自好友，而非AI。这种额外意识可能会赋予游戏额外意义。

似乎我们将难以在多人游戏中控制故事节奏，比如戏剧性故事中的山丘与山谷。那是否是错误的思考方式？

我并不这样认为。我认为节奏问题也十分重要。有时，如果叙事片段较为简短，那么故事节奏操控将更为容易。同比控制玩家不断登陆退出，围绕活跃的游戏世界运行，操纵简短故事将更为简单。

显然，在严格限制的故事中，节奏与叙事变化操纵更为简单，比如，“这是一则紧凑故事，它大约持续45分钟。其分支故事会是这样，这样……”同比玩家可以自由出入的世界，多人体验模式更易掌控。人们可能会以自己的沉浸方式编写故事，你可能无法控制，也许也没有这个打算。

假设交互式故事讲述模式是我们共同力图改进的内容，就你看来，我们应先解决哪方面问题？

有趣的是，几个月前，Chris Crawford也问过我这个问题，而当时的答案确实令他感到失望。我认为你会有同样感受！

我并不认为我们会致力于同个目标。如果当真存在，那便是提高玩家与角色在不同方面的交流方式。

但对此问题我也无能为力。在我着手研究的项目中，地图模式因项目规模、复杂性与程序内容的不同各有差异……这并不因为其中某个为正确途径，最佳产品，或是其它着手制作的内容统统消失。而是因为针对不同美术目标，不同体验类型，与不同表达方式，应采用不同工具。

如果我们真打算推动前沿发展，那我们应探索所有方面，而不是局限在某个点。

我们提高交流方式，制作出可行工具。显然在此会遇到财政压力，这总归是个挑战，但从某种程度上看，我坚信，采用创意方式有利于无资金来源的独立开发者，门外汉，还未上市的开发商，无法访问特殊资源的开发人员。这便是我们脱颖而出的方式。我们探索特殊内容的渠道。

虽然你提到在此不存在问题，但从你的解释中我明显感到问题的存在，即缺乏多样性。

没错，游戏市场缺乏多样化，它们并不理解我们采取的不同叙事模式。而我的目标是，希望尽可能多的人们可以采取有趣的讲故事形式。

我们需要游戏行业人士，独立开发者，首次因英语媒体课堂而编写游戏的人们。我们需要这些人才，我们应培养，鼓励，宣传这一理念，这有时会奏效，有时则不会。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Interview: What’s next in game narrative, with Emily Short

by Frank Cifaldi

Emily Short spends a lot of time thinking about how to tell stories in ways that only video games can.

Not only has she been writing works of interactive fiction for over a decade, she also has been working on an experiment in multiplayer interactive online narrative for Linden Labs, which we reported on earlier this week.

We sat down with short to discuss where game stories are going, and if telling a compelling narrative with more than one player is even feasible.

I’m of the belief, and I’m sure you probably are as well, that interaction itself is possibly our most powerful storytelling medium, once it’s been fully explored.

(laughs) Sometime during the next 2,000 years.

Exactly. And I do think we’ll get to the point, if we’re not there already, where we can have as moving of an experience playing a game as we might reading a canonical work of fiction?

That’s definitely possible already, especially if you can accept that the way it will be moving might feel different from your experiences with fiction. I’ve definitely had experiences with games that, in their way, were as memorable as things that caused me to ask questions about myself or about other people, or realize things about the way the world works that were profoundly powerful.

I think Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia is an amazing example of that. It puts you into that situation in a way that just a written memoir would be a little bit different, a little bit distancing and not as visceral. And there’s a lot that you can convey as a visceral experience through interaction that’s hard to do in any other medium.

You’ve been experimenting with multiplayer narrative with your work at Little Text People and Linden Labs. Is it possible to have that sort of solitary, moving narrative experience while playing with other people?

I don’t see why not. If you’re going to do a powerful multiplayer narrative, then ideally you want to explore in a direction where everybody is having significant agency over what’s going on, and it’s not simply a matter of the characters each exerting a skill. It’s not a raid, it’s not people teaming up in an RTS or something. It’s about your charter making decisions, my character making decisions, exploring why.

Our project wasn’t really headed in this kind of super artsy direction… which when I say it sounds pejorative, which I do not mean at all. It wasn’t meant to be an art game, I guess is what I’m saying. But I think there’s a lot of potential in the idea of two-player games or larger multiplayer games to explore the different perspectives that people bring to situations, and the fact that people have different reasons for why they do things. I think that very interesting games can be made exploring contact between strongly contrasting world views. Where maybe you come back and replay the game from the other side, and that’s where you understand the other perspective.

Doing emotionally powerful, sophisticated, thematically meaningful material in single player is already really hard! So you sort of want to do your beginning level homework first. But I think there is space there.

Designers have always had that sort of puppet master problem, of trying to find the balance between leading a player down their directed narrative path versus having them feel freedom. It’s a problem I don’t really think we’ve come close to solving even in single player games.

I think that’s something you have to embrace as a design issue, rather than running from it. I’m not sure there’s a simple solution to it. You can either say I can make the constraints part of the point of this work, or you can say I’m going to make the openness as part of the point of this work and I’m putting it on you to mean something. Those are both valid structures.

Is this problem even more daunting in a multiplayer game?

In a sense it’s a harder problem, and in another sense it’s the same problem. If you’re building a story that has certain points of freedom, or has certain mechanics that allow people to push how things go one way or another, most likely in a multiplayer game, the constraints that apply to one person are more or less going to be the same restraints that apply to everybody, with some variation for people having different skillsets and that kind of thing. There’s likely going to be parallel experiences. So in a way, I’d say it’s one and a half times as much work. Because you do have to account for the interaction between people, or else you’re not going to make there be a meaningful interaction between players.

Something that I tended to think was unfortunate about certain MMO storytelling… you get these narratives where the NPCs have lots of really emotive things to say to you, and they want to throw you into this narrative. Then on the other hand, your interaction with the characters played by humans — even if they’re inclined to play it in a very role-playing way and they’re not running around shouting trollish remarks and that sort of thing, even if they’ve entered into playing that role, because of the way it’s structured, none of the conversations you ever have with them are ever going to be acknowledged by the story as meaningful pieces of the story.

And that seems weirdly frustrating. You’ve got other people who are the greatest possible source of dynamic content to the material, you the author did not have to create this, but there’s no way for the system to acknowledge that interplay. To some extent, the project that I was describing in my talk solves that in a brutalist fashion by… forcing you to go through the simulator.

On the one hand, that actually leeches out the possibility of anybody role-playing anything that hasn’t been fed in in the first place. Now of course, because at least because it’s possible for people to create their own dialogue overrides and so on, that means that they could have, in advance, prepared a character who is a bit different from what you might have expected. So that is sort of the channel by which their personality could enter in.

But in the moment, they’re not going to say anything that’s not being tracked by the simulator, that’s not being scored. You’re forced to make these things meaningful. But what we found with playtesting was that people responded surprisingly strongly to knowing that the funny remark that was said in the room was said by their friend and not by an AI. And that additional awareness gives it an extra significance that you might not have had.

It seems like it would be incredibly difficult in a multiplayer narrative to control the pacing of the story, the sort of hills and valleys of dramatic storytelling. Is that possibly the wrong way to think about it?

I don’t think that’s the wrong way of thinking about it at all. I think those pacing issues are really important. In some ways, you make it a lot easier for yourself to do this if you keep the pieces of narrative short. Telling someone a short story, it’s a lot easier to control the pace of that than if you have people logging in and logging out and running around a continuously active game world.

Obviously it’s a lot easier to control pacing, to control that kind of narrative variability within a tightly constrained, like, “This is a tight story, it’s going to last 45 minutes of your life. The possible branches are here, here, here, and here.” That’s a much more manageable multiplayer experience than a world that people drop in and out of. People are really kind of making their own level of engagement with the story in a way that you can’t entirely control and maybe don’t even want to control.

Assuming that interactive storytelling is something we’re all collectively working toward trying to improve, what one thing do you think we should all be tackling and possibly trying to solve?

It’s funny. Chris Crawford asked me this question a few months ago, and I frustrated him with my answer. Possibly I will frustrate you as well!

I do not think there is any such thing as the one grail we should all be searching for. If there’s something we should all try to do, it’s communicate with each other better about the different things that we’re trying, for several reasons.

I really do not think that there is one silver bullet to this. In my own projects, in the things that I’ve worked on, which range all over the map in terms of project size and complexity and how much it’s procedural… it’s not that one of those was the one right way, and the best possible product, and all of the other things I ever worked on sucked. It’s that there are different tools for different artistic aims and different types of experiences and different types of expressiveness.

And I think if we want to really advance the frontiers, then we need to be exploring all of those things, not just one of them.

We need to be talking to each other better, and we need to be making tools available as much as we can. Obviously there are commercial pressures on this and it’s always a challenge, but to the extent possible, I’m an enormous believer in having creative tools that are available to indies with no money, to people who are not part of the industry, who do not have a stake in it, do not have special sources of access. Because that’s how we get the additional voices that we need. That’s how we get exploration of the kind that might not otherwise happen.

You’re saying there’s no one problem, but what I’m maybe hearing from your explanation is that there might be one, which is a lack of diversity.

Well, there’s a lack of diversity, but there’s a lack of an understanding of the different ways we could be going with this. What I’m aiming at here is, we want as many people doing as many interesting things with this as we possibly can get.

We want industry people, we want indie people, we want people who are writing a game for the first time as part of their media English class. We want all of that, we want to foster it and encourage it and communicate about it, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.(source:gamasutra)