The Shipping Game · 4:47pm Dec 27th, 2016
Just for the record, I’m not dead. Just both busy with work and drained from life that isn’t related to work. Also a bit of a writing crisis, but that isn’t something to blog about. I’ll be back to writing soonish, if anyone cares, but for now, here’s something worth a blog post, even if it is only tangentially related to ponies: an idea. While I’m not doing anything of the sort soon, it’s one idea I am probably going to use at some point.
1. Check your Steam library.
2. For example, the critically and otherwise acclaimed “80 days” is barely visual at all, while many of the visual novel classics, like “Umineko no Naku Koro ni,” offer no choice to the reader directly.
You know visual novels and choose your own adventure games. Strictly speaking, a “visual novel” is a method of presentation of a story, while a “choose your own adventure” is a structure of a story that presents the reader with multiple defined pathways reflecting in one or another way the reader’s choice. Both are often used together1 but they don’t have to be.2 For the purposes of this idea, the branching reading path is important, while the method of presentation is not.
There are some tenets most of these stories hold strictly to, though:
- There is always a viewpoint character, and the player/reader is presented as controlling their choices. Usually, there’s only one.
- While the reader is occasionally presented with information the viewpoint character could not possibly have access to, these segments never present any choices.
Historically, visual novels were born as subspecies of games – PC games at that, or close enough. While at heart it is nothing but a picture book, and calling it a game is simply incorrect, this is a quality it typically shares with a game, while a book can and often will present a story from multiple viewpoints at once, or otherwise play with the narrative. An unusual recent example is “Until Dawn,” which, like many Telltale Games products which it shares many idea ancestors with, presents a large number of viewpoints – you get to control every character, and your choices profoundly affect the way the story goes – but it is even closer to games in genesis than other examples of interactive drama, and all the choices the reader gets are presented as choices the characters make, as well as tests of button-mashing skill, i.e, “quick time events,” meant to give the reader a feeling of agency.
But they don’t have to be, and you don’t really need to get into anybody’s skin to have agency.
3. Don’t ask. Just watch the thing. Don’t try to treat it too seriously, it’s pointedly full of ridiculous pathos and likes itself that way.
The realization came to me when, for a completely unrelated reason, I remembered the Genesis of Aquarion / Aquarion Evol anime. Both of these series revolve around the idea of a giant robot, of a super variety, combining from three nominally independent vehicles. While there are only three “vectors,” the number of pilots available to fly them is much higher, and the particular combinations of pilots, as well as the order of combination, produce radically different machines. Notably, the gattai, i.e. combination, is portrayed as an experience which carries heavy allusions to sex,3 and if the pilots are not sufficiently compatible, the combination won’t work.
And then it hit me: For some kinds of stories, the very notion of a main character is extraneous. More importantly, it is extraneous to some readers, who will ship everyone with everyone, including everyone at once. We have no end of examples right here on this very site, so it needs no further proof.
So here’s the idea:
4. There’s a vaguely relevant over-18 visual novel called “Critical Point,” which is notable for the fact that depending on which possible solution to the core mysteries of the game the reader decides to look for, the actual cause of the mysterious events that eventually gets revealed will be different. As far as I know, that’s the only story structured this way. Nevertheless, the reader always “controls” the same main character.
Imagine a visual novel-style story, in which you never get to make choices for the characters. Instead, you always get to choose what will happen to the characters currently present in a scene, every time you get a choice. I.e. you get to control the environment, rather than the characters themselves, define the world outside the margins of the visible work by your choices.4 The reader gets to have a man walk in with a gun, but the characters are presented as their own people throughout.
- There’s a host of diverse characters presented, which initially are more or less neutral to each other, but their opinion of each other changes drastically depending on how they behave – and they behave in response to the things the environment throws at them, which is what the reader chose. The characters are by necessity at least to a certain degree stereotypical, so that the reader could anticipate how they could possibly react to stimuli.
- While lots of possible pairings (or N-ings, if you insist) will emerge, only certain relationships, developed to a certain point, are capable of overcoming the crises that will indirectly follow from reader choices, and multiple relationships are required to exist to get everyone to the end. Any relationship can solve at least one crisis, but no relationship can solve all of them.
It’s a story where you have to ship characters together to get it to come out right, and whom and how you ship changes what happens.
Please discuss.
This sounds amazing.
Of course I do!
Also one, I need to watch Aquarion now thank you. Two, that sounds like the kind of visual novel we should call in Ryogo Narita to help with the scenario for. Three, I'd read it and actually think it's a neat writer exercise concept.
So like:
It does sound interesting, though. And it would be nice to make a game of this.
But then again, I've also heard rumors of there being a Human in Equestria Simulator being planned, where the purpose is to help solve a mystery in Ponyville, while avoid being murdered yourself. So maybe there will be something similar to what you said in there?
Sounds like a fascinating concept, though I do have to wonder how one would frame the environmental control.
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Amen! My network of contacts doesn’t reach this far though, what’s left of it.
I’d write it. Eventually I even might. One can only
hopetrope. :)4357548
Not particularly likely, considering that you said “yourself.” The core idea here is that there’s no “yourself” here, none of the characters you see are “you.” But you get to pick what happens to them from a list of options.
The challenge in designing such a story is in limiting the number of possible branches to something manageable while keeping the cast diverse. After some more thinking, the basic idea would have to be that you select the primary N pairings through your earliest choices which define the broad strokes, and from there on, it goes on like this, where further refinements you introduce affect how pairing develop. For a radically simplistic example:
So you have a class of people, which contains an ojousama, a jock, a nerd and a genki girl. Suddenly…
Ninjas burst through the wall, or
A man walks in with a gun.
If ninjas burst through the wall: the ojousama faints and this attracts the attention of the jock – who beats up the ninjas and starts a relationship with the ojousama as he rouses her from the faint. The nerd and the genki girl hide together and hit it off as the result.
If a man walks in with a gun: The jock is afraid of guns, but the nerd talks him down until the police arrive. This attracts the attention of the ojousama, who thinks he’s a big hero now. Meanwhile the jock and the genki girl hit it off by hiding together.
Further reader’s choice proceeds from there in defining more and more backstory: So where did the ninjas come from, why the man suddenly came in with a gun? Each choice produces different effects on all extant relationships, because each refinement of the backstory affects all the relationships at once, as more information becomes available to the members of the cast. The reader gets to decide which of the possible options is “true.”
I also suspect that some form of numeric feedback would be needed for the reader to make more informed decisions, which is one more reason to mention the idea started by remembering a super robot show: In-story, there’s such a thing as a “synchronization rating” and it sits there nicely. But it doesn’t really have to be in-story to work.
To put this more into the pony perspective, here we have the Mane 6 drinking tea with crumpets and suddenly, one out of three things happens…
A letter from Celestia arrives, telling them they all need to go to the Crystal Empire.
A giant monster attacks the town.
A townspony stumbles in asking for help with a problem.
…insert more options.
You can probably imagine which actions by which ponies in reaction to these three situations could cause which particular pairings to start, right? At least, given more detail on the situation than a one-liner. And once the situation develops, we have three pairings in seed stage. The next time a choice comes up, it will affect all three extant pairings – but some will be affected in the direction of further closeness, while others will be driven a bit more apart. Etc…
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See comment above. The basic prompt is “Suddenly…” – one thing out of N happens.
It does sound like an interesting concept... Something like a story driven version of The Sims, though even lighter on character control.
I do kind of wonder if it would be frustrating, though. In dating sims, you have a constant (the character you control) and a number of characters you're trying to understand well enough to make them react to your choices the way you want and build the relationships you want. But you always know what you are thinking.
In shipping fandom, pairings are based on how you interpret the characters and a relationship between them-- you can make all of them react to your choices as you think they should.
This game depends on understanding how the programmer thinks all of the characters should react, which can be tricky. A lot of shippers have very different views of what, in general, makes a good pairing (opposites attract vs. strong similarities) and what the "real" core of each character is (AppleDash shippers and RariJack shippers have strong disagreements about who Applejack really is, for example.)
Writing a game like this in a way that's broadly satisfying might be tricky.
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Which is why it probably can’t be a story relying on a pre-existing fandom, or at least on pre-established characters. The characters need to be presented to the reader from scratch, for long enough for at least some idea of what they are to develop in the reader. There can’t be too many of them either, or nobody will be interested enough in them to ship them.
Well, I didn’t say it would be an easy story to write. :)
But there’s always the option of asking the reader outright about some things. If we’re basically inviting the reader to sit next to the writer and offer ideas – which is what this is – this could even be a meta-framing device. Character X is writing a story. You are their editor. They ask what do you think should happen and the story proceeds from there. Then they ask whether do you think opposites or similarities attract…
And why the hell not?
What's interesting is that in some ways, interactive web cartoon/games (I'm not quite sure what to call the genre of Ruby Quest, Problem Sleuth, Homestuck, Prequel Adventure, etc) are already flirting with the edges of this idea. While mostly the reader input is given as commands to the protagonist, many play with the nature of player vs. character agency: modern IWGs often treat the commands as suggestions which the characters can refuse due to independent volition, and sometimes straight-up let you issue commands to the surrounding world that have nothing to do with the protagonist(s).
Building an interactive novel/game/story specifically around environmental control would be cool, though. As would the shipping aspect.
Just to be nitpicky, Pathologic, a Russian first person adventure game, had different endings, which correspond to completely different solutions to the mystery, depending on the point of view with which you decided to look at the game. It was a quite interesting approach to storytelling. It also change it' story depending on how you interacted with the environment.
Generally this kind of storytelling is tricky to achieve, but could b very interesting.
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Well, I didn't know that existed. :) Might be something to look at.
That said, Critical Point predates it by seven years.
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Fair enough. I didn't check the release dates as I was on the phone.
If you are interested in the game, you can read this dissection of it, as I'm not sure you will have the time to play it through.
This would probably end up being mind-blowingly difficult to make, but if it was executed well it would probably also be mind-blowingly awesome to play.
You reference 80 Days in your footnotes; this idea seems like it definitely has parallels with some of the player options in that game. (Which I protest calling a visual novel; it's way too gameplay driven to be a visual novel.)
4357825
Excellent point, comparing this to stuff like Homestuck. A similar narrative approach could be taken, though the work of doing EVERY possibility, instead of just the one the author selects, would be back-breaking...
Anyone have any thoughts as to how this idea could be adapted in a way that the story could weave back into common points no matter the choices the player makes? In my experience that's one of the tenets of CYOA stories, and, I'd imagine, part of what makes them writeable at all. No matter the decisions of the player/reader, some things never change, so scenes (and assets) can be reused.
4357825 It's now your fault I read Prequel.
I have to sit and wait for the adventures of Katia to continue now.
You bastard.
Well, it's not exactly what you're going with with the relationships thing, nor was it branching, but Ghost Trick was kind of all about manipulating the environment to make stimuli to get characters to do what was needed to solve a problem.
4358567
I know… it's taking a lot of willpower not to just dive right back into that heart-aching story with its benighted, failure-fated protagonist.
4357825
I know! I know! They're called 'Quests'.
No, really. Over here is a wiki/archive of Quests, and a helpful page called "What's a quest?" There are a few good ones in there, though it's hard to look through the big archives. There are hundreds of them! (And almost all of them are illustrated in some way.) Anyways, on topic: Yes, I've seen some Quests occasionally let the audience/player manipulate the environment or cause events. Unfortunately, I don't recall any particularly notable examples, and I doubt that there's been a Quest without some kind of protagonist(s) to focus around. There are some that have the audience be literally voices coming from some object (ex: a psychic necklace, a radio channel) that the protagonist listens to and interacts with, but while that's interesting it's not really what's being talked about here.
Anyways, it's been literal years since I actually spent much time looking through that site, (or similar stuff elsewhere,) so there could be a Quest that is somewhat close to Oliver's idea and I just never saw it. *shrug* Oh, and quick tip: Most of the time the images on that site are shrunk. You can click the file name to expand them, or the button labeled "Expand all images" that's at the top of every thread.
4358411
That’s why the concept of “flags” exists: Most of your choices in a typical visual novel only produce a change in the immediate continuation of the scene. The wider plot-reaching effects don’t kick in until enough choices that alter invisible state accumulate, and further choices veer off into immediate bad endings. See, for example, the flowchart for “Tsukihime,” a classic visual novel. Each box is an atomic scene. This is how it’s usually done. In a traditional visual novel, “routes” typically correspond to the hero(in)es that the viewpoint character pursues, and occasionally, the routes don’t have anything connecting them except the starting selection choice sequence. In the setup described above, a “route” would correspond to one out of possible N sets of relationships.
That said, Tsukihime’s sequel “Kagetsu Tohya” is much more complex because of the looping structure. It’s a story that gradually reveals bits and pieces on looping readings. That can be written and has been more than once. And “Ever17” pulls a really cool switch, where two nearly identical sets of events which you think are alternative paths through the same story are actually not…
As long as the story can be separated into seemingly independent chapters which can be reused, it’s manageable.
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Not even slightly sorry. Prequel Adventure is hands down the best Quest (h/t 4358843) out there. I swear to the Nine that it, alone, is what prompted me to start playing the Elder Scrolls games [1], and having done so, I love it all the more because now I get the in-jokes.
Plus the Prequel side story "Quill-Weave: Research" contains one of the single most fucking hilarious comic panels of this decade. (Even better in context. Read the whole side story.)
--
[1] Story time! [2] [3]
[2] My Oblivion character was an Argonian acrobat I named Quill-Weave; in honor of Katia, I started a blind iron-man playthrough of the game (no saving/reloading unless I died, at which point I'd reset to the latest autosave), without even reading the game manual or controls documentation, just to see how much trouble I could get myself into. I went acrobat, tried to teach myself to pickpocket, failed hilariously due to having no idea how the stealth mechanics worked, ended up running almost literally across the map with an Imperial City guard on my heels, stumbled into a dungeon with a nest of vampires near Chorrol, and killed them without realizing one of their hits had gotten through her natural Argonian disease resistance. So basically I accidentally contracted vampirism by, like, level 3.
That was around the time that my own competence and Quill-Weave's both skyrocketed (she got the vampire stat boost; I complained to a friend about the game and got a brief stealth tutorial, plus using night-vision to sneak around in the dark just magnifies everything about stealth). So my playthrough stopped being a sad comedy of errors more or less the instant she became a vile creature of darkness, and I spent many gameplay hours slowly and satisfyingly becoming more and more of an unstoppable badass. I find this entirely narratively fitting.
[3] My Skyrim character was an Argonian named Horizon-Toucher, who I headcanoned as Quill-Weave's granddaughter. And even though the game wouldn't let me make an acrobat, and in fact didn't even have an acrobatics skill, I said "screw you" to its pathetic assertion that I had to treat sheer vertical cliffs as barriers, and spent all my time mountain-climbing. I came very close to setting up some sort of "Postcards from Whiterun" tumblr with screenshots of H-T's adventure and brief captions which were letters to her grandmother. You can browse my Skyrim steam screenshots for 90% of the effect — just skip the first row of pictures, which I took before settling into the narrative.
Oh, gods, I really need to do something with that. The misadventures of Team Lizardtits, their intrepid team photographer
CosnachErik, and HT's horse Gluehoof still crack me up.4359503
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Goddamnit. I randomly ended up on this blog again, read the comments, decided to click the thing and now it's 4 in the morning.
4362471 YUP.