作者：Christian Nutt

作为加州Santa Cruz游戏和娱乐媒体中心的董事，Michael Mateas的目标是有计划地解决游戏的故事叙述问题——这是他的使命，该中心目前的工作也是在这一目标指导下进行的。

但他在《创造游戏的未来》的座谈会上，他并没有提出任何一种行动方法。相反地，他呼吁开发者不要再争论游戏是否应该有故事，而是把精力放在做出好游戏的工作上。

他表示：“我们确实准备放弃无果的交互故事和玩法之争了。一定程度上，我们已经做到了。”

Michael Mateas(from vimeo.com)

结束论战

他再次阐述了学者和设计师们的争论——游戏是否应该有故事。最后他揭露了一个讽刺的事实：纠结于这场论战不仅毫无意义，而且会干扰人们的实际行动。

他指出：“我们都知道玩法和故事之间一直存在根本的冲突，这是我们经常讨论的。故事似乎处于游戏本质的对立面。数十年来，这些激烈的论战——游戏中是否应该加入故事，始终困扰着游戏设计领域。”

“然而在这个严酷的背景之下，我们正在目睹交互性故事的复兴。许多人创作了出大量成功的交互性故事，甚至有些人已经在玩它们了。”

他列举了许多成功的例子（游戏邦注：他提到了《行尸走肉》、《Cart Life》、《Howling Dogs》和《Spec Ops: The Line》）。

“独立和主流游戏显然正在兴奋地尝试交互性故事问题的各种解决方案。”不是继续争论，而是研究并评估游戏本身。他说：“这是不是一个有趣的审美目标？是的！我们就这么做下去。”

什么管用就用什么

Mateas认为必须把争论放在一边，并接受这个猜想“也许故事中存在更广阔的游戏体验的空间——你可以玩的、可以供你玩的、不一定是游戏的东西；这个更广阔的空间就是互动体验。”

支持这一猜想的充分理由是：即使你争辩说这些故事严格地说来并不是游戏，但是“故事的修辞和技巧正在进入游戏的核心结构。”

“人们总是想捍卫故事与游戏之间的界限，不容许二者模糊。但我要说，‘让它模糊吧！’这也许是一种有意义的创新。”

这就是消解“严肃的哲学争论”和“人们正在做的许多有趣的工作”的矛盾的办法。

他指出，问题是许多设计师正在为交互性小说想一个统一的定义——“故事的唯一定义和允许我们将故事互动化的办法和理论框架”。“围绕故事的争论止步不前，我个人认为就是因为这个理论并不存在。没有所谓的“故事是什么和如何处理它”的概念存在。这是一种“非常程序化的思路。”

相反地，他认为：“那些从事交互性故事的人正在做的事正是借助那些来自其他媒体的可靠的叙述传统”，那些传统已经够丰富了，足以成为创作的基础。

利用现有的模型

他指出，我们具有现成的结构模型，如“英雄之旅”。但不是像电影那样，单纯地套用那个框架来叙述故事，而是要采用更加有趣的方式——“构建一个让系统对玩家作出让步的系统。”

他的说法的基本前提是：“我打算构建一个‘英雄之旅’的深度程序性模型，在故事水平上对玩家行为做出丰富的反应，让玩家可以创造他们自己的体验。这就让故事变成可以玩的，更重要的是，可以重复玩的。”

但现成框架的适应性并不意味着你可以单纯地遵循任何叙述形式，而不深入考虑使用它会对游戏产生什么作用，无论你的设计方法是什么。

许多电影的结构套路是这样的，主人公一心想达到某个目标，但达成这个目标的过程总是受到各种阻碍。然而，现在大多数游戏“并不是提供持续强化的、戏剧性进展的结构。在制作玩法系统时，如何让玩法系统允许和保持这个进展活动，且不借助于普遍存在于玩法中的失败重试功能”，是一个有趣的挑战。

你如何制作一款让“玩家对其有影响但永远不会碰壁”的游戏？那正是他所说的挑战。

Mateas表示，进化心理学家如Lisa Zunshine正在研究叙述的认知模型，游戏也可以借鉴这一模型。“我们的心态一直在改变，许多认真模块——问题解决和再现心理都可能解决这个问题。”

“通过给这些模型注入精确的、纯粹的信息形式，故事叙述就可以挖掘利用某些特定的认知模型。这些模型是大脑中的乐趣按钮——我们可以感觉到虚构之美的认知能力”。

当然，还应该更深入地研究类型常规。

他提议道：“我们看Harlequin出版的言情小说就可以充分理解这种言情小说的套路结构，或者看当代侦探小说等。”

“玩家故事”的问题

他强调，最重要的是真正理解你正在构建的模型。许多游戏非常接近小说，特别是以模仿的方式。关键是找到“一些特定的传统，并意识其在互动故事系统中的存在。这才是能让你进步的东西。”

许多开发者通过“让玩家创造自己的故事”来回避这个问题——“我认为（让玩家创造自己的故事）不错，我有兴趣。”这是他们的努力前沿。

但这有一个极其重要的区别：“我担心的是采用这个方法并不是让创作者放弃权威，而是逃避责任。”Mateas认为，“任何承载一系列活动的体验，之后你可以叙述给其他人听”，甚至看洗盘子也是“可以叙述的”。只是，那是非常非常无聊的故事，没有任何意义。

任何听过别人讲述他们的MMORPG冒险的人都可以复述它。

“通过把所有糟糕的东西放在他们眼前，如果那就是我们让玩家讲述自己的故事的意义……那么‘让玩家讲述故事’的概念也太弱了，简直不值得让作为设计师的我们正眼一瞧。”

根据Mateas所言，重要的问题是，你希望让玩家讲述自己的故事，那么你要构建什么特定的叙述传统？既要允许玩家讲述自己的故事，又要让玩法系统和互动方法对他们作出妥协，你要怎么做？”（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）

Time to move on from the gameplay vs. story debate

By Christian Nutt

As the director of UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Games and Playable Media, Michael Mateas aims to solve the problem of game storytelling procedurally — that’s his mission, and the work the Center is undertaking is generally along this line.

But in his talk this morning at IFOG — Inventing the Future of Gaming symposium — he didn’t champion any one way of doing things. Instead, he urged developers to ignore the debate around whether games should have stories and get to work making the best story games they can.

“We’re really ready to move beyond these sterile debates on interactive and gameplay,” he said, “In a sense, we’ve arrived.”
The End of the Debate

He spent time recounting the debates academics and designers have — on whether games should have stories at all — with a certain wry humor borne of the fact that he clearly finds the debate tiring, and a distraction from actually doing work.

“We all know that there’s this often-discussed fundamental tension between gameplay and story. That story seems the opposite of what games are supposed to do. These quite heated religious battles have haunted the game design community for decades — around if and whether games should have stories in them,” Mateas said.

“Yet against this grim background we’re seeing a Renaissance of work in interactive storytelling,” Mateas said. “We’ve seen creators create a lot of interactive stories that work, in the sense that people are playing them.”

He took a very broad view of what work is being done (Among other games, he alluded to The Walking Dead, Cart Life, Howling Dogs, and Spec Ops: The Line.)

“Indie and mainstream games are happily and visibly exploring many solutions to interactive storytelling,” Rather than continue the debate, look at a game, he said, and evaluate it: “is it functioning as an interesting aesthetic object? Yes, it is! Let’s move on.”

It’s Important to Take What Works

Mateas argued that you must put that debate to the side and accept that “maybe there’s this bigger space of playable experiences — things that you can play with, that afford play, that aren’t strictly games, and there’s a bigger space outside of that that are interactive experiences.”

There’s a good reason for this: Even if you argue these narratives aren’t strictly games themselves, the “tropes and techniques are being brought into the inner circle of games.”

“Wherever boundaries blur you have people wanting to defend the boundaries,” he noted. “I’m saying, ‘Let it blur!’ This is how interesting innovation happens.”

This is how you reconcile the “grim philosophical debate” with the “lots of interesting work people are doing.”

The problem, he suggested, is that many designers have been trying to come up with One True Definition of what an interactive story is — “a single definition of what is story, and the magic approach and theoretical framework that would allow us to interactivize that story,” Mateas said. “The debate around storytelling has stalled because frankly I don’t think this theory exists. There is no such thing as ‘what is story and how do you solve it,’” which he described as “a very engineering mindset.”

Rather, he said, “What people who are working in interactive story are doing is to turn to specific historically grounded storytelling traditions” that come from other media, and are rich enough to build on.

Working from Existing Models

There are structural models, he said, like The Hero’s Journey. But rather than just telling a story using that framework, as a movie might, he suggested it might be more interesting “if you think about what it means to build a system where the system meets the player halfway.”

Here’s his basic premise for that: “I’m going to build a deep procedural model of The Hero’s Journey where players… create their own transformative experience,” with “a rich response to players at a story level. Where the story becomes playable and, importantly, replayable.”

But the adaptability an existing framework doesn’t mean that you can just grab any narrative form and follow it without deeply considering what it means to use it in a game — no matter your design approach.

Many movies are built on a structure where the protagonist single-mindedly works to attain a specific goal that keeps shifting away from him or her. Most current games, however, “are not structures that afford a continuous intensifying forward dramatic move,” he said. “How you build gameplay systems that allow and maintain this forward movement and don’t fall back on the failure retry models that are common in gameplay” would be an interesting challenge.

How do you make a game where “the player is having an impact but is never hitting a brick wall”? That’s the challenge he’s talking about.

There are also cognitive models of storytelling studied by evolutionary psychologists such as Lisa Zunshine, Mateas noted, which games could draw from. “Our minds have evolved, over time, a number of cognitive modules — problem-solving and representative mentalities that have evolved to solve problems,” he said.

“Narrative basically taps into specific cognitive modules by feeding those modules refined, pure forms of the information those modules were evolved to process.” These are “pleasure buttons in the brain — cognitive capacities that we can tap for aesthetic purposes for narrative fiction.”

And, of course, there are genre conventions to be explored in more thoughtful ways.

“Hey, let’s look at Harlequin romance novels and really understand deeply the structure of how Harlequin romance novels are structured,” he suggested. “Or we could look at contemporary detective noir fiction and do a similar thing.”

The Problem with “Player Stories”

He stressed that the important thing is truly understanding the model you are building on. Many games approach a fiction genre, in particular, in an ersatz way. The key, he argued, is finding “some specific tradition and realizing that in some interactive storytelling system. And that’s what allows you to make progress.”

Many developers cop out of all of this by putting “letting players create their own stories” — “which I think is good, and I’m interested in,” he said — at the forefront of what they’re attempting to do.

But there’s an incredibly important distinction here: “What I’m worried about is [using this approach] not as a way to abdicate authorship, but as a way to abdicate responsibility,” Mateas said. “Any experience affords a sequence of actions you can later narrate to someone,” he noted. Even washing the dishes “affords a narrative,” he argued. It’s just a very, very boring one. It has no arc and no meaning.

Anybody who has listened to someone recount their MMORPG adventures can relate to this.

“If that’s what we mean by letting players tell their own stories — by throwing any damn thing in front of them… that’s a really weak, weak notion of letting players tell stories, and it’s not really praiseworthy of us as designers.”

No, according to Mateas, the important question is: “What specific tradition are you building on that you want to let people tell their own stories in? How are you going to afford letting players tell that kind of story themselves while the gameplay system and the interactive approach has to meet them halfway?” (source:gamasutra)