作者：Jason Bakker

《Wayward Strand》是与众不同的。它是以70年代的澳大利亚一家医院为背景，并发生在一艘最初来自德国魏玛的飞艇上。这是一个实时故事。它就是一个虚拟互动剧场。在这款电子游戏中玩家所扮演的是一个生活在成人世界中的十几岁少女。

我们很难找到去讨论《Wayward Strand》及其开发的契机。但对于我们的这款游戏来说，一个最显著的差异元素便是其实时架构。

在实时故事中，不管玩家/读者/观众是否与之互动，它都会对他们的输入做出回应。就像在我们的游戏中，当玩家角色与现实世界中的角色进行交流时，实时故事便会做出明确的回应，当玩家控制他们的角色在现实世界中的位置并通过出现在特定场景和事件中的某一部分而将自己的故事版本融入其中时，实时故事便会做出含蓄的回应。

我们的影响

实时故事并不是故事游戏常使用的架构，但也绝非第一次出现。最显著的例子便是Smoking Car Production的《东方快车谋杀案》，这是一款以一战前的东方快车为背景的冒险游戏。

The Last Express(from anruan)

虽然游戏广受好评但从商业范畴来看却是失败的。《东方快车谋杀案》是关于实时故事叙述的一次引人注目的尝试。正是因为玩了这款游戏才让我开始考虑实时故事所具有的潜能。

而《Wayward Strand》实时故事的另一个灵感是来自电子游戏世界外部。在过去几十年的后现代戏剧运动中，观众不再是被动的，反而变成了表演中的积极参与者。而戏剧公司Punchdrunk便是这种“具有沉浸感的戏剧”体验的倡导者（游戏邦互：例如互动戏剧《Sleep No More》和《The Drowned Man》）。

我们团队中的一些成员去观看了《Sleep No More》并获得了一些具有启发性的体验。《Sleep No More》有许多突出面，如真实感，即不管是表演者还是观众将共享同一个空间；表演如何进行以及观众如何成为其中一部分的神秘感；将你自己所目睹的零散事件拼凑成一个故事（你自己的故事）的神奇感。

而最后一个元素也是最让我们着迷的内容，即探索故事空间并被推动着去做出自己的结论的感受，这也是我们想要在《Wayward Strand》通过实时故事框架而实现的目标。

设计局限

在现实世界中设置带有心跳，节奏等具有生命的玩家角色并不是什么新鲜事。我想这是许多初出茅庐的游戏设计师都想去做的事，但这在模拟RPG领域却非常罕见。

出于这些原因，并且因为《东方快车谋杀案》可能是我能够列举的唯一一个实时故事案例，且它在制作过程中出现了加班和超预算等问题，所以我们只能谨慎地去明确设计局限性并努力实现目标。

其中的一个局限便是《Wayward Strand》故事设计的固定性。与模拟RPG不同的是，我们的故事并不是源于系统模拟，它是100%定制的。就像在互动小说中，基于玩家的选择可能会出现多种不同的场景或结果，但这里却不存在模拟控制角色行动或故事结果。而因为实时属性以及多个故事线程同时发生在游戏中的不同领域，探索故事的体验便仍然是受玩具所驱动的。

《Wayward Strand》中的另一个重要设计局限便是玩家代理的级别。在大多数游戏中，玩家代理拨到11时你的玩家角色不仅能够做出自己的选择，同时也能够代表其他角色做出选择。

而我们真正感兴趣的是当你向下拨时会发生些什么。如果你是作为一个拥有有限代理的角色（即拥有去影响世界改变的有限能力）会怎样？从游戏中的编写角度来看这真的是一个非常有趣的领域。即通过让玩家切身考虑对代理具有特定约束性的角色，我们便能够让他们站在世界上其他角色的特殊角度去看待事情。

尽管玩家能够对游戏中的故事做出影响，我们同样也可以呈现出一些独立于玩家角色的故事，即让玩家在此扮演观察者的角色。就像在生活中，人们并不会总是围绕着你旋转，有时候他们甚至不会去考虑到你。

还有最终一个局限便是时间。我们希望尽所能去维持玩家在《Wayward Strand》从开始到最后的游戏体验（2个小时左右，即大概是一部电影的长度）。这对于我们的整体游戏设计具有重要影响，即不仅能够确保互动足够简单，能够创造出基于该时间范围的故事，同时也能够创造出你在一开始不需要花太多时间去理解的角色。这也非常符合我们希望拥有较少的补充内容的目标。添加更多内容到游戏中并不能拉长其长度，只是去拓宽可能性空间而已。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转发，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

On Real-time Stories

by Jason Bakker

Wayward Strand is a lot of different things. Its setting is an Australian hospital in the ‘70s. It takes place on an airship originally constructed in Weimar Germany. It’s a real-time story. It’s virtual interactive theatre. It’s a video game in which you play as a character with limited agency – a teenage girl in a world of adults.

It has been difficult to find an entry point to talking about Wayward Strand and its development. But one obvious element that is a differentiating factor for our game (which is also what we’ve spent the most dev time on thus far) is its real-time structure.

I’ve touched on what a real-time story is previously; it’s a story which plays out regardless of whether the player/reader/watcher interacts with it, but nevertheless is reactive to their input. In our case the story reacts both explicitly, as the player character converses with characters in the world, and implicitly, as the player controls their character’s location in the world and stitches together their own version of the story by being present at a particular subset of scenes and events.

Our Influences

Real-time narratives aren’t a common structure in story-focused games, but it has been done before; notably in Smoking Car Production’s The Last Express, an adventure game set on the Orient Express in the days before World War I.

Critically acclaimed but commercially ill-fated, The Last Express is a fascinating experiment in real-time storytelling – you can read interviews on its development here on Gamasutra. Reading about and then playing The Last Express is probably what first got me thinking about the potential of real-time narratives.

The other key inspiration for Wayward Strand’s real-time story is outside of the video game world entirely. In the postmodern theatre movement over the past few decades there has been an exploration of audience not as passive viewers, but as active participants in the performance. This “immersive theatre” experience was pioneered by theatre company Punchdrunk in interactive theatre pieces such as Sleep No More and The Drowned Man.

Several members of our team (most recently Russell and I, earlier this year) have been to Sleep No More, and it is a revelatory experience. There are several elements that make Sleep No More singularly brilliant – the physicality, both of the performers and of you as the audience sharing their space; the mystery of how the performance works and what you’ve become a part of; and the imagination-sparking magic of piecing together a story – your own story – from the fragmented sequence of events that you personally have witnessed.

It’s this last element that excites us the most – that feeling of exploring a narrative space and being encouraged to draw your own conclusions – and that’s part what we are aiming to achieve with Wayward Strand through this real-time narrative framework.

Design Constraints

The idea of placing the player character in a realistic world with its own life – its own heartbeat, pace and rhythm – isn’t new. It’s something that I think a lot of budding game designers imagine creating, and it’s been a bit of a white whale for some time in the simulation RPG space.

Because of these reasons, and because of the fact that The Last Express, one of the only examples of a real-time story we can point to, went way over-time and over budget during production, we have been very careful in choosing our design constraints to keep our goals achievable.

One of these constraints is the fixed nature of Wayward Strand’s narrative design. Unlike a simulation RPG, our story does not arise out of a systemic simulation – it is fully authored and bespoke. As in interactive fiction, there may be multiple possible scenes or outcomes that can play out based on player choice, but there is no simulation governing character behaviours or story outcomes. However, because of the real-time nature and the fact that there are multiple story threads being advanced in different areas of the game at the same time, the experience of exploring the story is still player-driven and highly variable.

Another important design constraint in Wayward Strand is the level of player agency. In most games player agency is dialled up to eleven – your player character is in full and complete control of their situation, not only making their own choices. but often making choices on behalf of other characters as well.

What we’re really interested in what happens when you turn down that dial. What happens if you play as a character with limited agency – limited ability to effect change in their world? This is a fascinating area to explore from a writing perspective in a game. By putting the player in the shoes of a character that has specific and understandable constraints to their agency, we’re able to give them a unique and often unseen perspective into the lives of other characters in the world.

While the player is able to exert some influence on many of the stories in the game, we can also present stories that exist totally apart from the player character, that they experience as an observer. Just as in life, the situations that other people are in don’t revolve around you, and sometimes don’t even concern you.

The final notable constraint is time. We’re trying our best to keep the experience of playing Wayward Strand, from beginning to end, under two hours long – roughly the length of your average film. This has a significant and deep effect on our design of the game as a whole – from keeping the interactions as simple as possible, to developing stories that can be told within this time-frame, to creating characters that you don’t need to spend hours with to begin to comprehend and empathise with. It also fits well with our goal of having as little filler as possible, regardless of where on the ship you choose to go to at any given time. Adding more content to the game doesn’t make it longer – it just widens the possibility space.(source:gamasutra)