While at the Festival International des Jeux I managed to catch some time with
Both his video games and other projects heavily lean on interactive narrative, so given the chance to pick his brains on the topic I couldn’t resist. We started off with a question on procedurally generated fiction, running through to the latest approaches of systemic game worlds.
Interactive Fiction to Systemic Worlds
The creators of interactive fiction (IF) are thinking about branching narratives (one of the options in my earlier article on
This is where analogies with programming come in. IF provides a decision tree which players walk (or iterate, if you’re the type to save the previous page in the books) through to try and find the optimum solution.
“In the 80s, especially around the middle of the 90s, people were experimenting with interactive fiction in object oriented environments.”
- FibreTigre
Naturally, this then developed further on the digital side as object oriented programming (OOP) languages and concepts became more common. With OOP, instead of creating a decision tree to move from scene to scene, an object could be defined. The object would have a collection of attributes and methods allowing different interactions, such as a wooden chair being able to burn, or a key unlocking a door.
At this point the developers are having to create every object (or at least templates) manually, and define their interactions. We have another step before we get into the third generation of IF, where we move to systemic games.
In a systemic game, rather than defining each object, challenge, and puzzle, we define a world. This world comes with its own set of rules, physics, and even entities with motivations and feelings. They’re then left to interact with each other, and the player. The best two examples of this, and the classics, are Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft, with Nintendo’s Zelda: Breath of the Wild providing a more structured example with a storyline and plot build-in.
Systemic games can be surprising, and bring challenges. Dwarf Fortress is famously complex and open-ended, with failure always an option in fire, flood, plague, invasion, starvation, suffocation, magic, apocalypse, and just about any other possible way your horde of dwarves could die horrible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5Ct81vsjiM&embedable=true
To take one of FibreTigre’s examples, for a mystery game instead of working with a team of writers to build up the mystery, characters with opposing motivations might be released. They might never encounter each other, which raises problems for your game, or they might resolve differences. Superficially at least the world is outside the control of the developers, which is why many systemic games trend towards open world sandbox approaches. To shape a story the way the developers want the world itself needs to be tweaked, with events baked in to drive the narrative forwards.
Where does ChatGPT come in?
Since it’s currently at the peak of the hype cycle, and given his previous book on AI, I had to ask FibreTigre his thoughts on bringing in a technology like ChatGPT or another large language model (LLM) to enhance the storytelling and conversation capabilities.
This is far from a new idea. In 1998 The Digital Village released Starship Titanic a game that proudly touted an AI chatbot that could have conversations with the player. While not up to the complexity of ChatGPT, the SpookiTalk natural language parser was surprisingly effective at building immersion. The story was set, but the option for open conversations made it feel otherwise.
Naturally I had to ask about FibreTigre’s thoughts on ChatGPT for storytelling within games. While there has been a lot of hype about the immersion and creativity an LLM can bring to a game, it’s important to note that it’s currently untried and untested in this context. More importantly, we don’t know if there’s a glass ceiling for this approach which will prevent it from maturing.
Currently FibreTigre describes it as a child telling stories - simplistic, not necessarily consistent, maybe completely unrelated to the world. Whether it will grow and be developed to the point where these become consistent and usable remains to be seen.
Even implementing ChatGPT in games may not be helpful, given the difficulty of generating prompts. While SpookiTalk’s limited capacity made it fairly straightforward to work through conversations anyone who has tried to generate output from ChatGPT they want will know the frustration of trying prompts over and over with minor variations.
On this, he believes the problem is more down to the user experience (UX) rather than the output. It’s a problem that will need to be solved if LLMs are going to be the key to more interactive, immersive games and storytelling.
Why is Storytelling So Important?
Given my own interest in tabletop games, scenarios, and narrative structure, I have to ask FibreTigre whether an aim is to move towards something with the same freedoms as a good tabletop roleplaying game.
After a brief segue into worldbuilding, running tabletops, and writing novels, we cross topics with the Metaverse, and what it might mean if it’s ever realised.
The Metaverse
The metaverse is still poorly defined (or at least debated). FibreTigre has very clear ideas about what a true metaverse will be which calls back to the original source - Snow Crash from Neal Stephenson. In the book, as in FibreTigre’s description, the metaverse is a fully realised world with its own laws of physics, it’s own constraints. Games, events, areas, can be built automatically incorporating these rules - similar in many ways to many of today’s more powerful game engines.
The game built within the metaverse doesn’t matter, as those laws can be tweaked or overriden as needed, but ultimately the world is consistent and fully realised separately from anything implemented within it.
Only a little way from FibreTigre’s stand with Elder Craft he points me towards another exhibitor Menyr. They are working on a hybrid of metaverse and tabletop roleplaying which he recommends I look at. Input from those running games is required, but I can quickly see how the capabilities are rapidly approaching what he describes as the metaverse.
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