ICIDS, Days 2 and 3
I think I need to do something less linear than I’ve been doing for these - instead of talking about the various talks (all of which were super interesting, don’t get me wrong!) I want to focus on on the themes and the ideas that ran through the talks and my head as I listened to them. All of these are pulled from tweets I made during various thoughts; I want to try to
Another trend I'm noticing: the pleasure of works with seams; seeing the underlying machinery and the patchwork nature of the experience
A theme that came through both yesterday and today was the notion of seams, and being able to see the seams. I forget which speaker used this metaphor, but it’s the equivalent of buying a super expensive watch with a glass facing, such that you can see the underlying gears, and appreciate not only the watch as an artifact, but also the process underneath that allows it to run.
This is a super interesting theme, especially as related to Kate Compton’s notion of Opulant AI - AI systems that fully display that they are AI, and that openly celebrate the fact that there’s an AI system running underneath them. In this way, the seams/gears are not only fully on display, but get to be as pretty and polished as the rest of the experience. Especially in the realm of Interactive Narrative, this notion of seamful experience crafting is super important, since even with all of the amazing advances that people shared, computers still aren’t super good at creating or displaying narratives on their own.
Game narrative as an ellipsis, a space where the audience can fill in the gaps to build meaning and feel a richer experience
This kind of ties into the previous idea, but it also serves as a bit of counterpoint. Humans are, by nature, storyful creatures. It’s really easy to set up situations that we recognize as a story, even if all of the details aren’t there. We see this all the time in story prompts, or in games like Fiasco where the game gives the briefest scaffolding for the players to build up their characters from just a few simple relations and the barest number of additional details.
This is the piece that really allows the simulationist approaches to thrive - by giving the players just enough of an interesting world, and a few ways to hook their own experiences into the space,
The notion of the use of a character as an interface to a space; characters offer their own views, but maybe can be influenced
This is a technique that came up in few papers not only yesterday, where at least one talk was centered around doing just this, but also today, in how Bad News embodies every single character as the primary interface of how the paper learns about the generated town and its inhabitants.
It allows the author several important tools - the ability to control the set of information that the player as access to at any given point, the ability to provide an additional layer of commentary on the virtual world through the eyes of the particular characters and it provides a playful way of learning about the world.
Interesting notion throughout this talk about "Narrative Corridors" - the path that a player can wander down as they explore
This point ties into the talk from Kevin Bruner, and it takes kind of the opposite approach from the simulationist approaches of designing the space of the story such that a player is constrained by the space and affordances in such a way that no matter what they do, they can never actually leave the garden path, even if it feels like they’re going off an exploring things. Being able to offer these constraints allows you to build the Telltale-like experience, where players feel that they have way more choices and agency than they actually do.
Obviously, these are just some of the many ideas and threads that came up during the conference, but these are the ones that stuck with me. I probably won’t have the brains to put one of these together tomorrow (yay driving) but I do want to write more on this conference as a whole - this has been an amazing experience, and it’s been wonderful to be surrounded by so many brilliant minds.