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Fictive Worlds

November 3rd, 2009, By Duncan Gough

I talked at Playful ‘09 about wanting to play a game of Kes. In turn, that led to an investigation of storytelling in film and television. Which, in turn, led to a desire to construct a playable world from the narrative of a series drama like Friends, or a serial drama such as The Wire.

Let's play a game of Kes – Playful '09
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Fictive worlds are, of course, exactly what novels assemble in your imagination whilst you read. In game-play terms, though, it is the idea of bringing a story to life and putting the player within it that appeals. Part sandbox, part virtual world, part interactive fiction, part massively-multiplayer online game. Put simply, a fictive world is simply the simulation of a novel. Construct a world from the relevant pieces (location and character), drop in a player and start the whole thing running.

In this post-Playful world I’ve cast the nets wider and found more material to read. Such as Caitlin Kelleher and her Storytelling Alice project:

As my thesis work, I created and evaluated a programming system for middle school girls called Storytelling Alice that presents programming as a means to the end of storytelling. Storytelling Alice includes high-level animations that enable users to program social interactions, a gallery of characters and scenery designed to spark story ideas, and a story-based tutorial. To evaluate the impact of storytelling support on girls’ motivation and learning, I compared girls’ experiences using Storytelling Alice and a version of Alice without storytelling support (Generic Alice). Results of the study suggest that girls are more motivated to learn programming using Storytelling Alice; study participants who used Storytelling Alice spent 42% more time programming and were more than three times as likely to sneak extra time to work on their programs as users of Generic Alice (16% of Generic Alice users and 51% of Storytelling Alice users snuck extra time).

Personally I’m more interested in stories for Boys, and ideas like One True Bear, but Kelleher’s work helps enormously, specifically in terms of connecting a valuable output to the idea of Fictive Worlds. That is to say that if they work, they could very well be educational.

However, the one article I wish I had read pre-Playful, would be [Google-cached-pdf] All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling and Procedural Logic:

What is most interesting to me about the critical praise deservedly lavished upon The Wire is not how it may or may not yield an increase in viewership, but how the critical consensus seems to situate the show distinctly within the frame of another medium. For many critics, bloggers, fans, and even creator David Simon himself, The Wire is best understood not as a television series, but as a “visual novel.”

Interesting how, even now, a television programme with substance defines itself with reference to a more established medium. I bet novels only started to get the respect they felt warranted when film and television appeared. I guess the same holds true for games. They are held by critics to be lower than film, which is in turn lower than theatre and the novel. And here I am, attempting to create a Fictive World, dressing up play in a literary cloak.

Elsewhere there’s a great nod to the language of television drama, of episodes, seasons and season-long story-arcs:

The Wire’s novelistic qualities are most directly linked to its storytelling structure and ambitions. As Simon attests in frequent interviews and commentary tracks, he is looking to tell a large sweeping story that has traditionally been the purview of the novel, at least within the realm of culturally legitimate formats. He highlights how each season offers its own structural integrity, much like a specific book within a larger epic novel, and each episode stands as a distinct chapter in that book.
[...]
In The Wire, each season focuses on a particular facet of Baltimore and slowly builds into a cohesive whole. An episode typically does not follow the self-contained logic of most television programming, as storylines are introduced gradually and major characters might take weeks to appear.

So The Wire is just a simulation of Baltimore, programmed to run from start to finish in around 65 hours (5 seasons of ~13 episodes at 1 hour apiece). Just as Friends is an inward-looking simulation of six distinct personalities in very limited number of locations (coffee shop, apartment, balcony). Speaking of Friends, that reminds me of Supple.

Now that I can see outputs from Fictive Worlds, and I have a sense of the inputs already (allegorical stories for boys) then I can start to put the idea in perspective. From the literary to the ludic indeed!

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