Suspension of disbelief
My experience in week three
The source material this week was a continuation on narrative design and introduced us to the term Suspension of disbelief.
The Introduction Video by Alcwyn Parker sets the premise for a week of content designed to make us draw a link between theory and practice. There is mention of a term Pure solutionism (new to me), that was coined by Evgeny Morozov in his book ‘To Save Everything, Click Here’. The term describes the belief that all difficulties have benign solutions, often of a technocratic nature and can refer to the providing of a solution or solutions to a customer or client (sometimes before a problem has been identified). The term raised my interest as I’ve been guilty of making this mistake in the past within my own work and I’ve reflected on this as being an attributor to failure for one or more of my applications. Parker summarises by highlighting the importance of audience research and how using research to inform your practice will inevitably lead to a higher quality of output. I completely agree and acknowledged the importance of research myself in this post within the previous study block as well as citing my own applications that have suffered from not completely understanding my customers and what they want.
The Ergodic Literature Video by Dr Michael Scott explores the world of ergodic literature, a term coined by Espen Aarseth. Despite only short, the video is highly theoretic. There is introduction to cyber texts and cybernetic narratives as one form of Ergodic Literature that is described as narratives that change when we interact with them or texts that change their form in response to some kind of logic. We are introduced to scriptons being a part of a narrative that can be meaningfully conveyed and presented to the reader as a unit, and textons being a component part of this, usually a word or symbol that can be understood in isolation, but when strung together with other textons, will form a scripton. There is then some exploration into four layers of user functions - interpretive functions being interpretation based on the user’s prior knowledge of context, explorative functions being the pathway the user takes and the order in which they experience scriptons, configurative functions being the decisions that are made by the user to dynamically manipulate the scriptons in the text and textonic functions being the calculations that directly manipulate textons themselves. This forms the theoretical premise for the next part of the video which describes how this applies in practice when related to the architecture of a game, particularly state variables that are manipulated by the user’s decision making which then alter the cyber text. There is a juxtapositional demonstration of this using a scene taken from the game ‘Mass Effect’ which brings welcome context to the theory by showing two different eventualities and explaining the prior good and bad user decisions that led to the shape of state in each. Having built numerous games the concept of state and how state properties affect outcomes was not new to me but bringing some theory to this was hugely interesting.
The Introduction to Ren’Py Video by Dr Michael Scott gives a concise introduction to Ren’Py, a visual novel engine written in the Python programming language that can be used to tell interactive stories. Though only my first preview of the tool, the setup instructions in the video were clear and concise and my varied programming experience helped me to get to grips with the program very quickly and from only a brief prelude into the workings of Ren’Py, I was able to see the power and versatility of this engine, and with it’s basic and procedural syntax (much akin to writing a console app) it was easy to see why this tool is so widely adopted by aspiring Role Player Game (RPG) creators who are starting out and want to get into development quickly with little setup and configuration overhead. We were given a task to create an RPG using the engine which is covered in more detail in this post. Though enjoyable learning something new, I’m not sure I would use the engine again for my own projects being it lacks the ability to deliver the type of application that interests me. However, saying that I can see the value in Ren’Py and being the previous Long Live the Queen Case Study Video by Dr Michael Scott gives a summary of the ‘Long Live the Queen’ game created using Ren’Py and the commercial success this had selling more than 350,000 units on Steam alone, one cannot ignore this framework and it’s ability to deliver highly playable gaming experiences for which there is clearly a market.
The Pursuing Interactive Suspension of Disbelief Video by Sean Vanaman referenced his work on Telltale Game’s The Walking Dead and their new game Firewatch at his company Campo Santo and explored the challenges encountered and techniques used in creating tonal, emotional, systemic and narrative consistency in the pursuit of suspending a player’s disbelief. The video gives priceless insight into the speakers experience from working on the aforementioned games. There were some nice takeaways in the form of the speakers summarised component parts required to achieve suspension of disbelief, these being believable characters, discoverable story and responsive systems and statements about narrative design such as stories about people help us to see past our disbelief in the text, all of which were inspirational and made me deeper assess the construction and execution of narrative within my own project. Sean Vanaman goes on to reference Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet said to have coined the term suspension of disbelief and his belief that readers, or in this case players shouldn’t have to ignore certain aspects of the experience just to find narrative or connect to the story. The speaker opinions that to do this we must communicate with the player, focus on the human experience and create a narrative that is worthy of emotional engagement, he likens the process to being on a date with the player, getting to know them, listening to what they have to say and then responding to them with comfortably predictable and excitingly surprising responses. He liken’s it further to dancing with the player and explains that it should be effortless and that we should take the first step in the dance by giving the player the narrative that they can then find meaning in and respond by taking the next step which thus prompts us to respond again in a predictable manner that is appropriate for the user. When you hear this, it rings true at a deeper level that what the speaker insinuates, when you consider the embedded narrative being the first step in the dance and the emergent parts of the narrative being the response. The next part of the video takes a look at The Walking Dead, what went right and more importantly what went wrong, he singles out parts of the game where he feels the dialog could have been more responsive and notes that at these points he can feel the players eyes glass over, suggesting that they are experiencing a story but that it’s not their story. He blames the majority of these moments on Quick Time Events (QTEs).
A Quick Time Event (QTE) is a method of context-sensitive gameplay in which the player performs actions on the control device shortly after the appearance of an on-screen instruction or prompt.
The speaker recounts certain events that are well placed and that engage the player with an exciting response and offer them a means to improve core skills required later in the game, however he then goes on to recount events which are seemingly meaningless and conveys that these actually trip the player and cause them to stumble during the dance. The later half of the video focuses on Firewatch (currently under development) and the speaker looks at what they learned from The Walking Dead and how they have moved development forward as a consequence. He speaks of the importance of tonal consistency, conversation that feels real and relationship building and covers in detail an event and speech manager they are working on that aspires to assist in delivering the correct dialog based on game state.
The final focus for the week was to review a chapter from Doug Brown’s Thesis on Suspension of Disbelief. I made the decision to review Chapter 2 – Defining suspension of disbelief. This decision was motivated by the notion that to achieve suspension of disbelief in my work, one must better understand what this really means. This seemed like a valid approach at the time, however, over halfway through reviewing the chapter, having invested quite some time into the dissection of the first twenty pages, I realised it was perhaps a bad decision to review this chapter being it was hard to find the authors point of view in the work being that the majority of the chapter is more of an exploration of the meaning based on the opinions of various credible sources and not the authors opinion himself. For this reason some of the review topics were harder to answer and my review was perhaps not as valuable or as good as it could have been. My learning here of course is that I should have skimmed over the entire chapter first before beginning to dissect it, I won’t make this mistake again. My finished review can be seen in this post.
Tying this to my project
The content this week encouraged me to think far more deeply about the role of my application/s in delivering a carefully considered embedded narrative and the importance of giving the right responses to the user at the right time in order to build a personal emergent narrative that the user can connect with and lose themselves within what Sean Vanaman terms the dance with my work. Where this video highlights the importance of the narrative and offers holistic solutions to ensuring the user is always experiencing their story and not losing interest, the Ergodic Literature video then brings some theory to this. Combining the two has given me the insight to continually consider narrative while I move through the development process and this is certainly something I’ve not done before at anywhere near the level I realise is required. When I look back at previous works I’ve done such as Scenefly, an app that aimed to help it’s users discover relevant events and services near them and find others around them who share their passion, though the design and technical execution was on point and to a high standard, the consideration of the embedded or emergent narrative was non-existent. I realise that this is true of a lot of my previous works and that the user would struggle to connect with these applications.
This brings me on to how (specifically) I am going to employ the techniques I’ve learned over this week to ensure that I’m not making the same mistakes in Escape The App and with my future applications. With regard to Escape The App I will be looking more at the gamification element as being (perhaps) more important than the playable experience in that this is the part of the application that satisfies what my research shows the escape game enthusiasts want in playing against one another to beat each others escape times. I will be looking more at how I can build cybernetic narratives into the gamification element, exploring who the user types are, escape game player and escape game business owners and what roles they play in the narrative as well as how I can communicate with them to create tonal consistency and narrative cohesion. I’ve not discounted the app as a companion to playing an escape game though as this is still the core of the app, inspired by Firewatch having a person at the end of a hand held two-way radio and considering the role of the already existing Games Master in escape games (someone who watches the game and helps the players along), I want to explore the notion of a virtual games master within the app that communicates to the user based on their choices, I feel that this would be a nice vessel to drive a conversation throughout the game and keep the user engaged with the app which is something I was worried would be quite a challenge given the pre-existing intensity of playing an escape game. I’ve updated this task to include some more items in the checklist, one of which being to create a flow diagram to explore the various journey’s a player might have based on the decisions they make within the game and how the virtual games master would respond to such decisions. So far I’ve spoken only of the escape game players themselves without much emphasis on what the businesses want. Aside from Escape The App driving more players to the businesses some further reading I did this week of Scott Nicholson’s white paper on The State of Escape Games raised that businesses apply a lot of focus toward games design and how this can drive repeat customers. The notion that a game can have various puzzle configurations to escape is something businesses are experimenting with as a solution to this and knowing this provokes consideration on my part to how I should introduce this into the narrative to create hooks that bring players back to the same games. I’ve created this less immediate backlog task to explore this.
Finally, despite the set tasks this week being quite laborious I did manage to complete an animated introduction video for Escape The App that will play after the app has loaded and before the registration step that I intend will introduce just enough of the narrative to the user to gauge interest to drive them to register. On top of this, in following the drive to get a horizontal slide of the application built for MVP within this study block (now probably unlikely but one can still try), I have finished enough of the shape of location, game and user data in the database to code up the core functional elements of the Account Screen (the landing screen for logged-in users) that suggests relevant games and the bare bones of the Games Screen where users can find other games to play. I’ve talked a lot in this post and I don’t want to harbour on, so I am not going to post any code snippets today and instead I will reserve these for another post in future.
Summary
In this post I’ve given a brief account of the source material introduced to us over the week. I’ve gone on to summarise how this has influenced me and the development of Escape The App. I’ve highlighted some tasks I’ve created as a consequence of this weeks learning and I’ve noted some of the production I was able to complete alongside this. I will add that although hugely inspirational, I’ve found this week quite testing - The tasks to create the RPG with Ren’Py and the chapter review did seriously hinder my project sprint plan for the week and I did find it very hard to juggle the tasks and the production work in tandem. I’ve left myself a note to raise this in the next webinar and parlay how much of the task work is actually required to be undertaken if it hinders my sprint. Despite being a firm believer in the adage that Knowledge is Power and knowing that the subscribed tasks are set as a means to inspire and improve my practice for which I can see great value, the weight of the tasks was a bit overpowering this week and it was disappointing to trade the time I wanted to spend working on Escape The App. I do see the positive in this though, in that without being forced to undertake these tasks I would easily excuse them for not having the time, but I realise that sometimes it’s good to down tools and find inspiration as when I finally did get round to creating my introduction video at the end of the week, the narrative had changed slightly and the video was better as a consequence.