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How do you handle the exponential growth of things you have to manage with these sort of things? I hear Bandersnatch had a huge issue editing and filming due t

How do you handle the exponential growth of things you have to manage with these sort of things? I hear Bandersnatch had a huge issue editing and filming due to the same issue.

steeleduncan 6y ago
The usual approach for managing complexity is to chop it up into storylets. Emily Short has written a lot about it on her blog [1] [1] https://emshort.blog https://emshort.blog
rl3 6y ago
The simple answer is very carefully. Deus Ex (2000) had similar issues. The game's story was originally intended to branch much harder than what actually shipped. Still, it's widely considered to be one of the best games ever made, owing in no small part to its emergent gameplay. I think we're going to be entering the era of emergent story soon. After all, AI Dungeon exists today.
- Nzen 6y ago
  While emergent story sounds nice, like Nell's primer in Stephenson's novel "The Diamond Age", suspect we won't see it in the same way we won't see a perpetual motion machine. I was inspired to this conclusion by diydsp's chastisement [0] of pursuing algorithmic music. For me, it's the hope of infinite variety. Infinity, though, is only the purview of Horror and the Holy [1]. More likely, though, my computer would only be as creative as a forty person writers room. It's not to say that couldn't be good enough. They can be derivative, so long as it's of something I've not experienced. For example, I've heard the advice to new roleplaying game leaders to crib notes from tv shows and so on, rather than set themselves the task of refereeing and writing a novel story framework. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26874918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26874918 [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1722845.Horror_and_the_Holy https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1722845.Horror_and_the_H...
TeMPOraL 6y ago
I would hope the answer is, through more advanced building blocks - like variables, procedures, functions; through more advanced abstractions - like sequences, associative containers, maybe even state machines; through means of enforcing and verifying correctness - like a type system, or unit tests. Interactive fiction markup language is a programming language - just with a weird syntax that's tuned for content-rich, control-poor programs. Kind of like SGML/XML is a format good for storing text-heavy, markup-lean data. The same is the case with an interactive movie script. In both cases, your story forms a directed graph[0], and the reader/viewer traverses it. But you don't have to, and shouldn't, write out the whole graph![1] Personally, when I see "managing complexity", I read "writing code". Because, once you look past all the minutiae of programming languages, build systems and computers, this is what programming is - managing complexity. I don't think everyone should be a programmer, but I do hope the concepts used in software development will eventually become common knowledge. -- [0] - Possibly infinite. [1] - For the same reason you don't put your whole program into main() and don't write out conditional jumps as your only control structure.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Relatedly a lot of other similar complexity management tools from "writing code" have direct or indirect equivalents in writing complex branching narratives. Things like "integration testing" ("if I run this script of choices, do I get a world state that I expect?") and "fuzz testing" ("can the user find weird input combinations that break the world state?"). You can graph dependency graphs and state machine graphs to try to look for bad patterns or unwinnable cases visually. In one interesting extreme example Andrew Plotkin put a ton of work into building python tools to build the puzzle dependency graph of Hadean Lands to hard prove them (in the style of mathematical proofs) and make sure they didn't contain unaccounted for unwinnable states. Plotkin blogged a lot about that during the development of Hadean Lands.
  - anthk 6y ago
    If I was Plotkin I'd use prolog for that :), that's just a graph node-dependency check.

How do you handle the exponential growth of things you have to manage with these sort of things? I hear Bandersnatch had a huge issue editing and filming due to the same issue.

steeleduncan 6y ago

The usual approach for managing complexity is to chop it up into storylets. Emily Short has written a lot about it on her blog [1] [1] https://emshort.blog https://emshort.blog

rl3 6y ago

The simple answer is very carefully. Deus Ex (2000) had similar issues. The game's story was originally intended to branch much harder than what actually shipped. Still, it's widely considered to be one of the best games ever made, owing in no small part to its emergent gameplay. I think we're going to be entering the era of emergent story soon. After all, AI Dungeon exists today.

Nzen 6y ago
While emergent story sounds nice, like Nell's primer in Stephenson's novel "The Diamond Age", suspect we won't see it in the same way we won't see a perpetual motion machine. I was inspired to this conclusion by diydsp's chastisement [0] of pursuing algorithmic music. For me, it's the hope of infinite variety. Infinity, though, is only the purview of Horror and the Holy [1]. More likely, though, my computer would only be as creative as a forty person writers room. It's not to say that couldn't be good enough. They can be derivative, so long as it's of something I've not experienced. For example, I've heard the advice to new roleplaying game leaders to crib notes from tv shows and so on, rather than set themselves the task of refereeing and writing a novel story framework. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26874918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26874918 [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1722845.Horror_and_the_Holy https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1722845.Horror_and_the_H...

TeMPOraL 6y ago

I would hope the answer is, through more advanced building blocks - like variables, procedures, functions; through more advanced abstractions - like sequences, associative containers, maybe even state machines; through means of enforcing and verifying correctness - like a type system, or unit tests. Interactive fiction markup language is a programming language - just with a weird syntax that's tuned for content-rich, control-poor programs. Kind of like SGML/XML is a format good for storing text-heavy, markup-lean data. The same is the case with an interactive movie script. In both cases, your story forms a directed graph[0], and the reader/viewer traverses it. But you don't have to, and shouldn't, write out the whole graph![1] Personally, when I see "managing complexity", I read "writing code". Because, once you look past all the minutiae of programming languages, build systems and computers, this is what programming is - managing complexity. I don't think everyone should be a programmer, but I do hope the concepts used in software development will eventually become common knowledge. -- [0] - Possibly infinite. [1] - For the same reason you don't put your whole program into main() and don't write out conditional jumps as your only control structure.

WorldMaker 6y ago
Relatedly a lot of other similar complexity management tools from "writing code" have direct or indirect equivalents in writing complex branching narratives. Things like "integration testing" ("if I run this script of choices, do I get a world state that I expect?") and "fuzz testing" ("can the user find weird input combinations that break the world state?"). You can graph dependency graphs and state machine graphs to try to look for bad patterns or unwinnable cases visually. In one interesting extreme example Andrew Plotkin put a ton of work into building python tools to build the puzzle dependency graph of Hadean Lands to hard prove them (in the style of mathematical proofs) and make sure they didn't contain unaccounted for unwinnable states. Plotkin blogged a lot about that during the development of Hadean Lands.
- anthk 6y ago
  If I was Plotkin I'd use prolog for that :), that's just a graph node-dependency check.