作者：Frank Cifaldi

其实，我们仍然不知道如何适当地述说一个交互性故事。

当然，我们的电子游戏可以陈述出色的故事。它能挑战我们的理解力，让我们在读到某些优美的诗歌对白时潸然泪下。但游戏呈现这些故事的独特艺术风格（游戏邦注：比如一系列的决定和互动性）却仍让人难以捉摸。

这对单人游戏而言是个艰难的挑战，而将这种模式添加到多人游戏中更是难上加难。

这就是交互性小说家Emily Short与AI专家Richard Evans在Little Text People工作室从事的项目，今年早些时候，Linden Lab兼并了这家工作室。

在周二的GDC Online大会上，Short分享了自己在Little Text People从事实验项目中学到的一些设计经验，即目前她同Evans正在研究测试的由8位玩家同时运行的文本游戏。

interactive storytelling(from armchaircade)

1.人人都是游戏中的主角

即使是多人游戏，也应该让所有玩家觉得自己好像历经独属于自己的故事。不应该让他们觉得自己是个配角身份，或者他们在游戏中的投入无足轻重。

对此，简单的解决方案之一即围绕玩家编写故事。Short的游戏以整个团队的故事展开，而每个角色的发展方式各不相同。游戏同时设置介绍角色及其目标的序言，以及不同故事结局的后记，后者简要扼盖的是角色如何努力达到目标。

虽然这种做法看似有点累赘，但为了强调每个玩家都是主角，游戏就应该谨慎处理与特定角色有关的每个故事情节。比如，一段浪漫的情节会引发玩家的内心独白（只有该玩家可以看见自己的内心想法）。

2.富有意义的决定

必须让玩家体会到决定的重要性——即使是8位玩家同时体验游戏。

其中一种做法是，让玩家在游戏早期做出微小的个人决定，这样接近故事尾声时，这种决定就会对其余故事情节产生更深远的影响。

事实证明，这些微小的决定可让玩家获得更多乐趣，之后他们也能作出更大胆的反应。Short在游戏测试中发现，当玩家有源源不断的机会从事一些惊人之举时，他们只会拒绝。他们需要那些微不足道的决策来增加这些大事件的份量。

3.适当的机会

Short的幻灯片显示：“你不会有太多的机会向某人展示精彩画面。”

她在此表明，应该让玩家在适当的机会做出强烈的反应，即使这是不切实际的想法，因为“在现实与趣味的斗争中，趣味总会占上风。”

同时，我们不能忽视“精彩”时刻。如果某个玩家大胆地朝另一位玩家走去，他们必须做出反应，也许是升级（或降级）交际互动，甚至可能让故事朝不同方向发展。

4.只在特殊情况下采用联合决策

Short的游戏让玩家有机会如同一个团队般一起做出决策。这会成为引人注目的出色工具，然而过度采用这种方式只会适得其反。

联合决策只能出现在罕见的关键时刻，否则，你的角色会觉得自己微不足道，只会觉得游戏很重复和枯燥。

5.游戏中需添加丰富的内容

最后，Short表示，以Little Text People工作室的这种规模制作交互性故事离不开大量内容。

虽然游戏内在的AI会让故事写手获得一些解放（比如，它们不必构造对话分支），但Strong还指出，游戏若要让故事情节呈现丰富之感，就需要大量的写作内容。（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）

Making everyone feel like a star in a multiplayer game

By Frank Cifaldi

In many ways, we still don’t know how to tell a proper interactive narrative.

Sure, our video games can tell great stories. They can make us challenge our perceptions and weep openly as we experience some of the most beautifully poetic dialogue ever written. But the actual art of telling those stories in a way that is unique to games — as a series of decisions and interactions — remains elusive.

That challenge is hard enough in a single-player game, but add in multiple players and it becomes even more daunting.

That is what interactive fiction author Emily Short (pictured) — along with cohort and AI specialist Richard Evans — set out to do with their joint venture Little Text People, which was acquired by Linden Lab earlier this year.

At a talk at GDC Online on Tuesday, Short shared a few of the design lessons she’s learned from the experiments Little Text People has been conducting, mainly through an 8-player simultaneous text-driven game she and Evans have been working on and playtesting for some time now.

1. Everyone’s a star

Even in a multiplayer game, every player has to feel as if they are playing out their own personal, unique story. They cannot feel as if they are in a supporting role, or their investment in the narrative will fall apart.

One simple solution is to simply write around it. In Short’s game, every character has a different arc through the overall group narrative. They also have a personal prologue introducing the character and its personal goals, as well as an epilogue — separate from the shared story ending — that summarizes how things went for the character.

Even all that is likely to feel a bit tacked on, so to further emphasize each player’s starring role, the game is constantly watching out for moments in the story that could relate to a specific character. A developing romance could, for example, trigger an inner monologue seen only by that player.

2. Meaningful decisions

Players have to feel like their decisions matter — even if eight people are playing at once.

One good trick is to have players make small, personal decisions early in the game that, by the end of the narrative, will have had a deeper impact on the rest of the story.

In fact, it turns out small decisions leave the player feeling more empowered to have fun and make bolder reactions later. In playtesting, Short found that when players were given constant opportunity to do dramatic things, they just wouldn’t. They needed those small decisions to make the big ones more meaningful.

3. Buttered lobsters

“You can never have too many opportunities to throw a buttered lobster at someone’s head,” read one of Short’s slides.

What she meant by this was that players should have adequate opportunities to have strong reactions, even if they’re unrealistic, because “in the fight between realism and fun, fun always wins.”

“Buttered lobsters” are also moments that just can’t be ignored. If a player makes a bold move to another player, they have to react, perhaps escalating (or deescalating) a social situation and possibly even taking the story in a different direction.

4. Joint decisions for special occasions only

Short’s game has opportunities for players to make decisions together, as a group. This can be a wonderful dramatic tool, but use it too often and it loses its impact.

Joint decisions should only come at rare, key moments, otherwise you risk making your characters feel like they’re not the star, and you risk making the game feel repetitive.

5. Lots of content

Finally (and unfortunately), Short says making interactive narratives on a Little Text People scale requires a lot of content to work.

While writers were helped a bit by the game’s underlying AI (they didn’t have to, for example, write dialogue trees), in the end Strong says the game required a lot of brute force in the form of a lot of written content in order to provide a sense of narrative richness.(source:gamasutra)