Making Choices Matter

By: Joey Mazero (Narrative Designer)

For the last 1.5 years, I have been the Narrative Designer on a small indie team named Crimson Ink Games, which is made up of about 6-10 students. Our team was formed as part of the Game Design program at IU, where the goal is to build and launch a game in around 3 semester's worth of time.

Our team's game is called The Shadows That Linger, a point and click murder mystery game set in post-Great Depression America. Upon joining the team, my job was to take the linearity of the game's narrative and make it systemic. Throughout this development log I'll be talking about the trials and tribulations of doing such a task, and highlight what I've learned so as to help anybody out there trying to accomplish implementing their own systemic narrative.

So, first thing's first. What is a systemic narrative?

While there is no official definition of what makes up a systemic narrative, one can take the term at face value and gain most of the meaning. Simply, a systemic narrative is any sort of narrative structure that is made up of or contains systems. In other words, it's when the story of a game happens not because of the player, but rather reacts to the player's input and adapts itself accordingly.

In other OTHER words, it's when the player is able to make choices! 

To my knowledge, there are a few different kinds of narrative systems. A linear narrative is one that stays the same, no matter the player input. A branching narrative is one that branches based on the player input. Of this type, there are branching narratives that bottleneck, and ones that don't. The ones that don't bottleneck would end up having their own unique conclusions every time. There are variants of the branching structure that can be utilized, but these are the most basic forms.

Lastly, there are procedural narratives in which the narrative content at each node is uniquely generated based on player input. The narrative of these games will always be unique by virtue of their randomness.

Why go systemic?

In my opinion, systemic narratives offer an element of surprise-and-delight that linear narratives can't. While one may be able to more closely hand craft a linear narrative, I think that where video games shine as a medium is their interactivity. To use that to its fullest potential and push narrative to new heights, we must have our narratives cater to a player's choices. In this way, the player becomes less of a passive observer and more of an active participant, which naturally increases the immersion. If we are creating systems to react to player choice, we encourage emergent narratives.

Emergent narratives are stories that are produced naturally by working systems. These are the moments that are unique to the player's playstyle; Moments that another player might never come across. This is by virtue of the systems working in the background of the game that have a set of rules that react to the player's input. The simplest example to look at would be the aforementioned branching narrative style. It might be the case that only a small percentage of players end up at the node at the bottom left because of their unique choices. This is why systemic narratives are so beautiful - because it is the first time in storytelling that the person experiencing the story has autonomy that shapes the story itself.

My goal for the narrative

The Shadows That Linger is a game that takes place in the Bennett Estate, where a cast of 4 characters live. After the mysterious death of one of the inhabitants, it is your job to take on the role of Ilana Edwards and solve the mystery. It was my goal to create a narrative system that was based on two things: the solving of the mystery, and the player-character relationships.

The way that I did this was to have the narrative system react to the mystery-solving mechanics in the game as well as the dialogue choices. When the player had made a discovery using the mystery-solving mechanics, I made the conversations with the characters reflect that. The same went for the dialogue choices - the characters would remember the way that the player treated them. 

There were six possible endings that the player could arrive upon based off of a few things. Firstly, whoever the player accused would be dragged down into the "spirit realm" by the deceased person's ghost. That would leave two characters, who would then react to the death and each other's company. How they would react was determined by if they had solved the mystery past a certain point. If they hadn't, the remaining characters would blame each other because of the lack of evidence presented. If the mystery had been solved, another check was made to see how the player treated the characters as they were solving the mystery. If the player had used the characters as a means to an end or treated them badly, then the remaining characters would blame each other because of their distaste for one another at that point. If the player had treated them well and brought the characters together, then an ending where the characters look at the situation in a different light would be triggered.

Setting Up Variables

Clues

There were a set of variables that the narrative system operated off of. There were the clue variables, in which the system would keep track of each of the pieces of evidence the player had found. This would be used in dialogue checks where, if the player had found something, that they could then talk to a character and find out more information about that item.

Events

The event variables tracked whether or not the player had experienced a certain event in the world. This could be anything from a storylet that involved the player getting into an argument with another character to a single dialogue option. These variables would be used in later checks to make the characters and the world feel more reactive.

Clue Combinations

Within The Shadows That Linger, there was a clue bank that contained clues and quotes that could be combined together to gain more information on characters or the mystery. I wanted to track these too, because these combinations would be the triggers to events that  would bottleneck the story into a linear sequence. For example, whenever the player made the combination that told them where the body is, I would then trigger the "Digging up the body" scene, in which the player would excavate the body.

Shadow and Character Points

Finally, the shadow and character points were points that were tracked throughout the entirety of the game. Very simply, the more dialogue choices the player chose that objectified and mistreated the characters, the more shadow points they would gain. Conversely, the more times the player would show the characters empathy and kindness, the more character points they would gain. This was my version of a simple relationship meter with the characters. It would be used to determine how characters would act towards you and each other at different points in the story.

Creating Reactive Characters and a Reactive World

Something that I realized throughout the development of this project was that the most natural dialogue is reactive dialogue. This is dialogue that happens for a specific reason, such as reacting to a shift in the world state. Whenever certain events would happen in shadows, such as Lorraine running away to hide in the bathroom, I would try and reflect this in dialogue. Whenever Lorraine went to hide, the characters would react in dialogue sequences such as, "Have you seen Lorraine" or "We'd better go find where Lorraine is, she must be spooked.". A simple thing such as this can make the game world feel so much more alive.

Similarly, I would have characters do a little quip at the beginning of a dialogue sequence. If the player's relationship with the character was strained, the quip would be something like, "Hell's bells. It's you again?" instead of "Oh, hey there Ilana! What can I help you with?" if the relationship was thriving. These, along with many other checks, would influence the way the characters and the world state were presented to the player.

Reactive Narratives Rock!

In conclusion, I think that reactive narratives are the bee's knees. The more closely we can marry a game's mechanics with its narrative, the more reactive and alive the characters and story are going to feel. Even just introducing systemic elements into already linear narratives, I think, would make a world of difference. I hope that others can eventually start to see the value in thinking more heavily on not just the story, but how the story is delivered.