How to integrate Unity and Twine.

EDIT, 16 May 2013: Unity has changed their Browser to Web Player communications, but just a little. Basically, you don't use "getObjectById()" anymore, you just use "getUnity()" to get a reference to the web player -- more details here.

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Okay, I'm one of those people who thinks the problem with interactive fiction is that it's not sexy enough. However, I think IF, as a mode of interaction, is extremely powerful and is quite possibly light years ahead of whatever we're doing with narrative / meaning in the latest 3D whiz-bang video games.

Then one day I realized -- I could combine the CYOA tool Twine with the web player export of Unity, and the two could possibly hook into each other through Javascript. Turns out, they can.

Unfortunately, the project I used it for -- well, it didn't really work out -- but maybe someone else can use it?

The Unity Web Player has a useful method Application.ExternalCall() that can call Javascript methods on the web page. Similarly, you can call SendMessage() from a page script to call a method on a specific GameObject and even pass strings into Unity. That's the gist. If you need more help / my code snippets, a more detailed guide is here:

Rule Databases for Contextual Narrative... and spelling bees.

Valve's Elan Ruskin gave a fantastic talk at GDC 2012 on using "Rule Databases for Contextual Dialog and Game Logic" -- basically, the implementation behind the dialogue response system in Source games, most recently used in Left 4 Dead 2 and DOTA 2. I'm surprised more people haven't picked up on it because I think it presents some really effective research on procedural narrative systems.

A lot of game logic / narrative resembles a flowchart, especially with the advent of visual scripting systems like Unreal's Kismet or Twine -- resulting in this deeply entrenched concept of branching structure. Authoring and changing these individual branches is usually very expensive.

Mass Effect 3, minutiae

Spoiler free. Here's stuff I thought while playing the latest and hottest "guns and conversation" game:

THE GUNS

• I had 300,000 credits and didn't know what to do with it. Upgrading guns seemed pointless (the bars barely budge in the stats readouts) and clicking on stuff in a menu with little visual change or feedback was unsatisfying. Seems like the gun upgrades were a last minute feature that could've used another GUI design pass.
• Functionally, all squadmates seem pretty much the same (1 crowd-control ability, 1 buff, 1 debuff) except Liara who has significantly less health. It doesn't really matter who you bring, which I somewhat liked, because that meant squad choice was based on narrative and characterization instead.
• My Shepard had a "biotic charge" ability that lets her fly across rooms through cover, tackle enemies, and completely recharge her shields; combined with other bonuses, the cooldown period becomes negligible even early on. I didn't feel particularly smart when I figured out how overpowered this ability was -- I felt like the balance was broken. 
• Well, I don't think anyone plays Mass Effect for the gunplay anyway. It serves an aesthetic purpose: to make you feel like you're fighting in battles. What baffles me is spending time developing a multiplayer game that capitalizes on the weakest, least interesting part of the series?

THE CONVERSATION

• Again, I chose a LadyShep who decided to romance her secretary. From watching the YouTubes though, the GayMaleShep stuff seems pretty well done and even a little cute. (see above) I wish I had had the faith to stick it out with a MaleShep through the entire trilogy, but the male voice actor is just so much worse.
• Given the heavy proceduralizing of conversations, BioWare does a really smart thing during cutscenes: it cuts to different cameras frequently so that your brain better processes the discontinuities. The dialog doesn't sound as disjointed if there's a visual cut in time. (see above)
• Some weird player to player-character dissonance when my Shepard always confesses how much she misses Ashley, when I'm wondering, "Ashley who?"
• They kept all the core design from Mass Effect 2 and instead pooled all their resources into art, which I think was a smart move: there's a lot of variety to the levels, and the abundance of scripted animations turned stale conversations in a hallway into "getting dinner" or "going out to the bar" -- functionally, nothing is really different, but the new narrative context does wonders.
• When the characters aren't blathering on about the price of war to the point of parody, there's some genuinely good writing and characterization going on -- well, Garrus and Liara mostly. The "military stud squadmate" NPCs (Kaidan, Jacob, and the new unexplained mildly hispanic guy) are still awfully boring characters with amazing normal maps on their pecs. I guess Alistair really was the anomaly in a milquetoast lineage of Carths.
• I like how RPGs always have the "endgame" moment; a character literally tells you that the endgame is beginning, all side quests will be disabled, and you must confirm whether you're ready. It kind of breaks the fourth wall (assuming you really care about that) but at the same time you appreciate the game signaling itself to you. It's such a uniquely game-y thing to be able to read and understand what the game is actually saying beneath the thin narrative skin.

What games can learn from Sleep No More (part 1): the death of environmental storytelling.

Part 1 contains VAGUE SPOILERS, as if your friend had gone to Sleep No More and told you about it, or as if you had read a news article about it.

Although there have been many past theater productions that have done generally what it does, Sleep No More is what's going to be most prominent in history. It's basically a 5 floor tall, 100 room haunted house with dancers wordlessly performing a loose adaptation of Macbeth throughout the maze -- and you and everyone else are wearing masks, staring and shuffling silently through the halls. It transforms contemporary theater and dance into something relevant for people who'd otherwise see little value in it.

I value it mostly for its interaction model and the ways it uses architecture in specific ways; it is what happens when outsiders use level design concepts better than video games ever have. First I'd like to debunk what I consider to be the "conventional reading" of it and its relevance to video games, as argued by game critics.

Dear Esther

From the Wikipedia article on "cut-up technique," emphasis mine:

A precedent of the technique occurred during a Dadaist rally in the 1920s in which Tristan Tzara offered to create a poem on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat. [...] Gysin introduced Burroughs to the technique at the Beat Hotel. The pair later applied the technique to printed media and audio recordings in an effort to decode the material's implicit content, hypothesizing that such a technique could be used to discover the true meaning of a given text. Burroughs also suggested cut-ups may be effective as a form of divination saying, "When you cut into the present the future leaks out."

See also "unreliable narrator," "lyrical poetry," and "ludodiegesis." Though some people would rather argue that poetry is supposed to be straightforward and accessible and worth $10 of some arbitrary unit of entertainment?

I imagine it'd be fairly easy to rig Hammer to make custom Dear Esther levels. Coming soon: "Dearer Esther."

On process intensity and procedural narrative: either don't try, gameify, fill a plot, be bushy, tell a world or pass the buck?

For my master's thesis (no, not Pilsner, though I still like the idea and I'm going to re-work it more as a single player puzzle game) me and my design partners are trying to tackle a Holy Grail of video game design: procedural narrative. We're crazy stupid for trying.

How can a computer generate, whether in-part or in-whole, a meaningful narrative?

Back in 1987, Chris Crawford coined the term "process intensity", or "the degree to which a program emphasizes processes instead of data." Greg Costikyan used this idea to analyze what he argued was the low-hanging fruit, the data-heavy applications the game industry was and still is pursuing, such as more polygons, more shaders and more uncompressed rendered cinematics, etc. He proposed Spore as a new hallmark in procedural generation... then two years later, we all actually played Spore and wanted to forget a lot of it.

I still think the idea is important though, and I want to use it as a lens to analyze approaches to procedural narrative.

Liner Notes: Handle With Care... and borscht

SPOILER ALERT: "Liner Notes" discuss levels in Radiator. You should play Radiator first -- or if you don't care, read on.

I took a creative writing course while working on Handle With Care. Stealing a page from Marc Laidlaw, I wrote a short story to help me decide on a tone for the mod, a story I completely forgot until I was cleaning out my room just now.

As an exercise, I think it helped me immensely -- as a story, I don't think it holds up very well because Dylan's arc / reasons at the end never really come out and the parenthetical monologue thing is a bit gimmicky. However, I still like the ending quite a bit.

Anyway, I just thought some people might be interested in seeing how the story began and how it changed into its current playable form (which I'll detail more in a later post.)

Enjoy, or perhaps subject yourself to unimaginable pain:

"Oh Those Polish and Their Borscht"
by Robert Yang

What kind of a name is Roubicek anyway? (Polish?) I think it’s Polish, I tell him.

“Mmhm,” Dylan murmurs, burying his face in what must surely be a riveting article in that five month old issue of Men’s Health. (Quick six-pack abs! Seduce any woman any time!)

I bet she eats borscht, I say to the topless smiling guy with great abs on the wrinkled magazine cover. My Polish friend Allysia likes that stuff, but isn’t it just a shitload of cabbage?

“Mmhm,” topless inanimate smiling guy murmurs.

Then that lady with the six coats of eye-shadow says Doctor Roubicek will see us now so if we would please just head on in that’d be great thank you. Me and Dylan get up and walk over. I give his ass an affectionate pat but end up hurting my hand, slapping the car keys in his pocket.

“Stop it,” he whispers at me, “Just take this seriously for once.”

Poto and Cabenga: The Unspoken Story

First -- go play it. (image stolen from Rock Paper Shotgun, which cites my Facebook status as its source -- oh, journalism!!)

Second -- wow.

Look at the art style -- deep purples, a salmon-y orange, a magenta... almost no other game uses a palette like this. It's like a big "fuck you" to the grayed noisy wastelands of Gears of War. The flat cut-out layers work well for this type of game because platformers rely on silhouettes and clear space divisions between floor / wall / character. (Adam Saltsman explains this better than me.) So the art is pretty, unique, functional, and probably simple (but not easy!) to draw. Win win win win.

Listen to the sound -- when you collect a coin in Mario, why does it sound like that? Is that sound especially "coin-like" in itself? The sounds in Poto are similarly kind of abstract. Unique enough to be distinguishable, chip tuney enough to nod to the game's GAMMA / indie platformer roots. Speaking of abstractness...

Look at the characters -- what the hell are they? Some orange-yellow guy riding a purple platypus donkey duck thing. Does it matter? Their story is simply and masterfully told:

You (you being the orange yellow guy contrasting directly with the background, you being the rider, you being the only vaguely human thing) spend the first minute riding your animal. Both you and your mount move together as one, responding to the same button presses.

Then you're separated and the real game begins. One button controls both characters but in a pretty novel way that I haven't seen in many games. What results is a strange synchronization between both characters as they both move, still to the same button presses, but to a slightly different complementing rhythm to each other. In other words, they are dancing.

How do you know this animal is your friend? How do you know you have to be re-united? Because two people dancing, moving through the world together, is a beautiful thing. Because the controls and gameplay unite both of you and create a bond between both characters.

It's not some silly textbox pop-up saying "Poto cared a lot about Cabenga," it's a not a silly cutscene with the two characters embracing or one petting the other -- it's the controls and the gameplay mechanics that tell this story. It's what Ubisoft tried to do with the 2008 Prince of Persia re-invention, but ended up kind of failing. (I'm not saying textboxes or cutscenes are unilaterally bad, they're merely lazier and less elegant than, say, actually playing the game and interacting with your partner.)

The best part? It's fun to play and it's relatively challenging to master.

Anyway. The indie platformer has a lot of life left in it, so quit hatin', especially when they're as smartly designed as this.

Liner Notes: Polaris, its narrative + Thoughts on Player Characters

SPOILER ALERT: "Liner Notes" discuss levels in Radiator. You should play Radiator first -- or if you don't care, read on.

Previously: the technical design behind Polaris.

All first person shooters consists of two basic verbs: looking and moving. Mirror's Edge brought on a lot of discussion about the "moving" aspect of an FPS, and it seems we're headed towards some holy grail of body awareness with that - but what about the "looking" aspect? The "looking" verb usually has no cost associated with it, no power - it is a passive action on the part of the player, mere observation. So how about we attach some more significance to the act of looking in an FPS? Can "looking at stuff" be fun too?

This is why nearly all first person games are about shooting: it is the easiest way to make "looking" into something powerful. Hey, I'm looking at your head, and now I'm going to make it explode.

The mechanics of stargazing are about perspective: stars that are lights years and light years apart can appear to be next to each other, forming constellations -- except they don't really exist. It's only when we look at them that they do; that is, the act of looking becomes performative and it actually creates something.

That's what the narrator is doing: looking back.

So... What Does a Non-Interactive Video Game Look Like?

I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Hypertext.

But first, let's back up here: Lewis Denby issued his response in what Kieron Gillen termed an "experimental modder knife fight" -- and now, by virtue of being American and having been indoctrinated by a national myth that idolizes the "underdog," I too am also interested in side-stepping the debate of who's better because I've already won, so now I'm wondering about the same question that Denby's wondering: how can you have video game-like elements without incurring all those pesky expectations of a video game?

In discussing Increpare's "Home" and Tale of Tales' "The Graveyard," the always eloquent Emily Short analyzes such "non-interactive" art games...

The Implied Player

So while complaining about "Post Script" and the like, it struck me that these mods heavily rely on a certain notion of an "implied player" -- the ideal player, the one who won't mind walking across long stretches of terrain and who will listen to every voice over and read every note and ponder the deep meaning of everything. (I wish I could do this, but usually when I play I'm trying to pick everything apart.)

The closest comparison that I can think of is how literary criticism has held the notion of an "implied author" and "implied reader" for some time now...

Interactive = Choice

I've already told Lewis Denby: I think that his mods (and stuff like "Dear Esther"), these types of "walkthrough gallery" mods are kinda boring. It's not out of any spite, and I think he's a good writer - but I think it'll be useful to open up a larger dialogue on this type of game design when I complain about it. (If anything, it'll give his mods more of the attention that they deserve, yes?)

His main claim is that there exists an interesting, as of yet unexplored space between cinema and interactive media - and his implementation, as with Dear Esther, is to walk around an environment as you read notes / listen to dialogue. He thinks something compelled you to "press W" and explore an environment, and that "something" was a narrative unfolding in real-time before your eyes. I disagree with this, and here's why:

"What happened?" vs. "What is happening?" I would argue that gameplay and interactivity is about the present, about player-centric plot; these other types of gallery mods are about the past, about what happened already. Dear Esther is largely a passive narration of what already happened, as is Post Script. And to me, that's a much less interesting question and narrative hook.

Why doesn't the player have any narrative agency? Why isn't the plot about me? Note that this isn't an argument for nonlinear game narrative because linear games focus on the player too: In Half-Life 2, the Combine signal an alarm and start searching the city because of what you did. In Ico, Yorda follows and moves because you beckon her. The world and the characters are reacting to you because in this virtual world, you matter.

Vague narrative design theory. What compelled me to explore the environment wasn't necessarily an interest in the narrative; among other reasons, it was the simple desire to "finish" the game and make sure I didn't miss anything, the completionist streak that today's ubiquitous achievement systems exploit. And specifically, as a fellow modder, I also want to see what others are doing and analyze it so I can steal their ideas and make them my own.

For example, what I got out of Dear Esther wasn't that bunny-hopping across sparsely decorated terrain is emotionally meaningful -- instead, what I realized is that I too could randomize bits of narrative and let the player generate their own meaning out of it. (Something I did with my own mod "Handle with Care," where the engine generates a random montage of scenes at a point in the game.)

It goes against where most people are heading with games. Most interactive fiction, or "IF," has moved away from focusing on environment and plot -- instead focusing on characters as autonomous agents, systems of interaction, and depictions of consciousness. Marc LeBlanc's influential MDA framework and today's hottest indie "Art games with a capital A" celebrity designers, like Jonathan Blow or Jason Rohrer, emphasize game mechanics as the message. Compelling game rules reveal the authorial intent, whether it's a moral / social commentary / whatever.

And lastly, what I consider the greatest flaw of this approach and the main reason why I think it's a "dead end"...