Thread by @instantiator

London Interactive Fiction Meetup tonight, with @emshort

What are storylets? You have some content, with some prerequisites such as inventory items, skills or other things - and that content has an effect on the world.

The storylet structure lets you find a story within a larger world. Each beat can be unlocked as you progress.

Imagine a Pride and Prejudice game with a number of storylets, each with prerequisites and effect... A lot of things we associate with progress in other gameplay can be applied to storylets as a mechanic.

Who makes the decision about what happens next? Perhaps the game, by bringing you storylets based on how you're doing per your stats...

At the other end of the spectrum, perhaps the player makes choices such as deciding to explore the dungeon or putting other cards into their deck...

Not all storylets need prerequisites and effects but to have a game system with agency and narrative, at least some of them will have to.

Example: a storylet with a prerequisite of progress = 1. Its consequence is to increase progress. Another require progress = 2. Using this stat, we create structure.

Why would you do this or work with these conventions? Building content in this fashion makes it expandable. Others can contribute events to the story. Mods can integrate with the story... It gives the writers freedom and flexibility.

There are some tools you can use. Tiny QBN is much like Twine, giving you some of these concepts to play with. Ink and Yarn will give you some of those branching features and in combination with Unity you can specify exactly how this works in a game world.

Traditionally, Twine expects you to be explicit about what's coming next. Tiny QBN helps you to apply the rules and filter/sort/randomise the options for upcoming events and storylets.

Emily works with index cards to clarify the prerequisites, the content and the effects - to help play through the narrative and get a sense of the flow of it. It can form the basis for a design, or even a paper prototype of a game.

Thinking about rolling your own or hiring somebody to do it? Emily has some good advice about what's important to consider... emshort.blog/2017/05/25/mai…

So... Setting up story beats.

We're putting together a story. There's a 48 hour poker game, in Vegas. Nobody goes in or comes out, and the way to escape the burning building is to win... ♠️♥️♣️♦️

So what events are there?

The heat, the sprinklers, the drunkenness, a romance, a shooting, cheating, a horse at the table, revelations about who started the fire... 🔥

... people play some poker ...

a great bluff, some terrible luck, someone bets a fire extinguisher...

... someone has the wrong ticket, somebody's taken really ill, the police show up, somebody joins the game late, somebody makes a break for it, the dealer makes a mistake, 2 players recognise each other, a hidden message on a card, news crews arrive ...

What's keeping people in their seats? The sheer amount of money? Glue?

There's a lot of implicit state information in these events already. Some are about the state of the game, some are based on the progress of the fire, some are about the relationships between the players themselves...

So... eg. What has to be true for the dealer to make a mistake? Dealer has to be in the story, and not dead. The dealer is accepted as the dealer. There's a hand in play...

What has to be true for somebody to win? Player is playing, there's still a reward to win, player not dead... Some other rules might apply. The effective of a storylet is a reward, which may be related to the stakes on the table.

How about when the police show up and the players need to hide the game. What needs to be true? The game must have started. The fire hasn't progressed to the point of interfering with this. The effect isn't clear - perhaps it branches. 🚨

If they do find out, what happens? A dramatic save? Perhaps the fire starts. Perhaps someone sets the fire because they're found out... 🔥i

If they don't find out, what happens? Do they keep returning? We create a sense of ongoing risk... 🚨

If someone bets their ring? 💍 What was needed for that. Someone doing poorly enough to need to do that. Does it only apply to characters addicted to gaming? Could it be conditional - any character with these features can do it. Can the game use that character in other effects?

The fire itself. 🔥 What comes before it? You might gate that on police arrival. You might want to think about pacing. Perhaps the characters feel the warmth before they become aware of it.

You can also much more explicitly model dramatic tension. How much peril is this character in? How many times have they tried to get their goal? Each time can we unlock more and more exaggerated things they have to do to get there...

Behind each of these moments, then, are a bunch of rules that guide the story. Some of them we know already - how many chips people have, etc. You don't have to model poker accurately. Think about how invested characters are in the round, character attitudes, danger...

Elements that are always true needn't be in the model. Do we want to commit to some things that really only appear in a few storylets?

Styles of stats... A progress stat tracks how far we are through the story. A long narrative arc could have mini plots, side quests, and self contained little stories with their own progress stats.

Sometimes the game world itself provides that progess stat without explicit modelling.

Secondary stats - things about the player, characters, the game world, or resources. In our example, the resources might be the cards or poker chips our character has.

They needn't be tangible - they could be favours or social obligations...

A menace is a stat that the player doesn't want to increase. Similarly a menace can unlock different pieces of the story. 🔥

An example of this might be the game world forcing a mandatory storylet, eg. the fire is so bad, or the dealer has made such a bad mistake...

An interesting use of menace might be to throw the first hand to lower the expectation of the other characters (menace).

Traditional choose-your-own-adventure game branch styles can work with storylets. Perhaps a time cave structure is better suited to vanilla Twine.

You can build storylets that work with cyclical stats, too. This can give the player some anticipation and agency about events they know will recur...

What if an episodic piece of the story is a romance with another character? That can be advanced by other parts of other storylets.

Some stats that drive the game... An exercise!
♣️ Tournament progess... 1 to 5
🔥 Fire progess... 1 to 5
💰 A side-stat, the player's wealth... 0 to 100
😐 Trust at the table... 1 to 5

We're applying events as the game progesses...

There's a lot more we can do structurally...

There are a number of different structures of storylet sequences. How do we structure them into a narrative that's satisfying to play?

There are a number of things to think about. If the confrontation scene is a single beat, does it have the weight it deserves? The player spends a lot of time doing low stakes things...

We can change up the confrontation scene, add some increasing risk, add possibilities that the player can go too far or wind up in trouble.

We can add a beat between the wheels...

Finally, we could remove the final cost from the aftermath to keep it satisfying for the player.

Once you have the structure, that's when you write.

The play it through. Does the player know what to do next, what they need next? Do we want to add some elements to balance out mechanics? Are repeatable storylets with repeatable effects going to imbalance the game?

Q&A... How do you model character knowledge? For any given story, there are usually only a few pieces of information that are key to the narrative. Model them as binaries or flags. For a few perhaps they need to be an integer. Predicate logic might lead you away from narrative.

A storylet might set up a character, and a future one might depend on that character. It's effective to build an understanding of what's in the world model - so tracking who the player has met turns out to be important.

Do all "eligible" storylets have the same likelihood of being chosen? Some systems have probabilistic weighting. Others might be scoring storylets based on how many prerequisites they meet.

Some mechanics are explicit. It depends on how much you want the mechanic to be a part of the story. Equally you don't want people to meta-game. How does knowing it affect how players interact with the game?

An interesting question: Can you work out things about the player through their choices? Are they choosing one style of option over and over? Perhaps you need a big sample size to be able to do that. Players do self-identify a lot.