A Toolkit for Encouraging Player Stories

[droqen]

Regarding Kate Compton, Jason Grinblat, Nina Kim, Emily Short, and Tanya X. Short's
"A Toolkit for Encouraging Player Stories"

note: don't download the PDF, it's not the same as the page contents

[AB]

[droqen]

Inevitably, players tell each other stories about their gameplay experiences. But some games inspire more, like . .

[example 1 - stories told by Dwarf Fortress players, "fan art and narrativized play"]
[example 2 - Blaseball stuff, "collaborative worldbuilding", "shared canon"]
[example 3 - WoW pandemic, a "community legend"]
[q - do these examples present bias towards one sort of story? is it close to or far from what i'm seeing and what i'm interested in? investigate.]

What can we do as designers to encourage and support community storytelling?

We can start with the hands-off approach . . .
make a good game with compelling dynamics . . .
Perhaps we can do one better:
make a good game and [emphasis mine]
provide some social scaffolding -- say, a community space like a Discord server -- for players to share their experiences and tell their stories.
[q - will there be anything about the design of such community spaces or players' engagement with them? a Discord server has a considerable amount of 'design' that goes into it, as does the Discord platform itself]

But we wish to go deeper [q - deeper how?]: through the lens of tellability [q - what is tellability, how important is it? investigate this link then come back], we can . . . take a close look at each moment of phase change in the process of player story formation. From when a player first encounters a game (and even before then, in design and development) to when they relay a noteworthy experience to other members of their community, we can identify points of intervention for us as designers to catalyze the process.

I'd like to make sure I don't forget to chase down these questions I noted.

Also, my lens right now is thinking about my droqevers, the games I keep releasing for a week at a time... They contain secrets (sometimes) and meanings (questionable), and I wonder if the way I'm releasing them could be 'better' for the things I'm after. What am I after? There's a kind of social fabric which definitely bubbles up around individual games, but mostly in private places. I really enjoyed the discourse and community events that Cruel World inspired, for instance.

I want to use the contents of this report to analyze the small play-worlds that I've been designing and the kind of player engagement that I'm enjoying. People posting pics of places they made it to, talking about secrets they've found. Sharing, showing off, whatever.

[droqen]

qs from the above sections

q1 - "fan art and narrativized play" in Dwarf Fortress, "collaborative worldbuilding" and "shared canon" of Blaseball, the "community legend" of the pandemic in WoW - none of these revolve around individual players' accomplishments or even discoveries, which is a surprising contrast against what i've noticed in the response to my work... i definitely like to design systems and worlds with secrets and individual expressiveness... well, I guess all these are top-down larger-scale perspective on what must at the bottom be a collection of individual accomplishments/discoveries/expressions.

Boatmurdered is a story, but it too contains descriptions of individual discoveries: about funny jokes to tell and situations to run into, in among the entire system. Certainly the community canon of Blaseball, which I have not been much exposed to, contains many imaginative 'discoveries'. A character's name reminds you of something funny that resonates with others, or rhymes with something, or an event has a certain resonant interpretation. These too are discoveries. Finally, in the case of the WoW pandemic, players crafted a tale, and every tale is comprised of many smaller events. The ones who told the story that rose to the status of "community legend" were not coming up with facts, but rather curating facts. They may have been 'coming up' with the most salient interpretations of those facts. The best ways to present the story.

I haven't resolved my answer to this question.

[droqen]

q2 - Design of community spaces
We'll see if this is touched on at all. I'm sure it will be.

[droqen]

q3 - In the introduction it is written that "we with to go deeper," deeper how?
Well, I suppose the answer is given in the following sentences, the rest of the paragraphs.
Aside from 'tellability' and related language (i am assuming 'phase change' is something tellability-related, which i would have appreciated been given a heads-up on by the text), i would describe the authors' 'deeper' as:

Identifying points where designers can intervene in the process of player story formation.

There is some further example given but in my opinion the description of the range beginning 'when a player first encounters a game' is not particularly necessary. I am deeply interested in a breakdown of 'the process of player story formation' as well as these 'points of intervention'.

[droqen]

q4 - "The rest of this introduction will give some outside perspective to tellability." OK, good. I'll wait on this. Ah, actually, there's a whole outline, how nice!

[droqen]

Outline

This single paragraph lies at the end of the introduction, it serves as a sort of outline or roadmap for the entire report. Or, aspires to, anyway.

Here's what it's going to do.

1. give some outside perspective to tellability.

2. lay out a model pipeline for how design and development flow into play and then into community. This will give context to the meat of the report, . . .

3. the seven tools we describe for seeding player stories (with some empirical examples). We'll situate each of them along a lifecycle of play in order to hone in on exactly when and how they motivate sharing*. By understanding how moments of play become memorable and tellable (individually and collectively), we hope to contribute to a new and fruitful exploration of meaningful*, personal*, and enduring* player stories.

I've starred several key words which help me t o understand the authors' position and goals.
Players must share stories (perhaps the authors regard 'sharing' as an implicit part of 'stories' which is not unreasonable), and these stories should be meaningful, personal, and enduring.
What do these words mean? Perhaps it is not necessary to get into the semantics. As I read I am responsible for getting ahold of a vibe, which is a slippery thing.

[droqen]

We limit our discussion here to games  . . which mechanics support a persistent fiction . . . Abstract games, like Tetris, may produce tellable moments . . . but our tools and examples aren't geared for them. Additionally, our tools work best in games that embrace some amount of emergent play 3 [q - INVESTIGATE], as emergence is good at producing the conditions of tellability.

I can barely contain my need to understand tellability. It has been brought up many times and we haven't yet arrived at the promised "outside perspective to tellability." So I don't lose hold of this, what is tellability, so far? What burdens have been placed on this concept, which must be resolved in order for this report to hold together for me? I will also look for tellability throughout the report, even into the future of the report, to attain a better whole understanding of the report's relationship to this concept.

Tellability
- through its lens, we can take a close look at each moment in the process of player story formation (note the term 'phase change' may be involved)
- looking at these moments may be a prerequisite for 'identify[ing] points of intervention', i.e. the very designers' tools being presented in this report. absolutely crucial.
- emergence is good at producing the conditions of tellability.
- "how likely a game experience is deemed worthy of sharing with others."
- tellability is "influenced by factors such as unexpectedness, particularity, genre convention."
- data is part of tellability only when it contributes to a greater story, "our relationship to [events, data] and the way we frame them"
- unexpected (++++tellability; mentioned twice), <expected> (--tellability)
- particularity (++tellability)
- moments that are singular (++tellability)
- moments that are non-repeatable (++tellability)
- genre convention (++tellability), perhaps "familiarity"
- personal, the result of reperative play 5, "where players are actively invited to bring their own meaning-making processes to bear on their experiences" [!!!!!!!] (++tellability)
- <impersonal> (--tellability)

[droqen]

There seem to be a lot of factors to this tellability thing! I think it's worth a peek at the outside reference now but I mostly don't think I'll need that, I understand the parameters of this thing we're calling tellability. I will note that my present understanding of tellability is, while in my opinion sufficient, delivered piecemeal throughout the entire report which imo is not a very good way to present it, for something so central.

FROM THE LINKED TELLABILITY ARTICLE:

the features that make a story worth telling, its "noteworthiness"

So, tellability (or "narratibility" or "reportability") is this 'worth telling' quality itself, or its noteworthiness, and this article is exploring the features which factor in to such a quality.

It's not entirely clear whether tellability is a quality to be applied to stories or to the specific incidents about which a story is told.

Tellability is based on the "judg[ment] of storytellers"

Such appraisal of tellability tends to prize these features, which again, I can't say whether these features are meant to apply to the story (a produced, authored artifact) or the specific incident (the naturally produced artifact, about which a story shall be told):

- significant
- surprising
- worthy of being reported in specific contexts
- a "point" is or may be conferred on it

The breaching of a canonical development tends to transform a mere incident into a tellable event

What does "breaching of a canonical development" mean? Here, though, 'tellable event' does seem to imply that 'tellability' is to be used with regard to an incident and not a story -- let's move forward with that assumption, and that a story takes as a sort of precondition that the events about which the story is written are 'tellable' -- you cannot write a story that is not regarding something tellable, in the way that you cannot really drive along a road that is not drivable, or that if you do, the driving will be bad.

What I mean is that the act of telling does not prove that something is tellable, but a good telling reflects the inherent tellability of the event or incident being told.

Tellability may also be dependent on discourse features, i.e. on the way in which a sequence of incidents is rendered in a narrative.

This is confusing to me because it's moving in the opposite direction. I think the authors of tellability themselves did not properly make the distinction between qualities of an event, versus qualities of a story about an event. I will make the distinction here now.

An event has 'tellability'.

A story has 'storytelling-quality', which has a sort of collaborative relationship with 'tellability'. I will be translating all 'incorrect' usages of tellability (i.e. through my lens, the application of 'tellability' to 'stories') to 'storytelling-quality'. (I will try to make a note of this each time I do it.)

[droqen]

SUB-CLOSE-READING OF TELLABILITY, POST 2

tellability and 'narrativity' seem differentl. maybe narrativity is more like the storytelling-quality? in any case i don't care. i am reading about tellability.

Bruner has insisted on the fact that "to be worth telling, a tale must be about how an implicit canonical script has been breached, violated, or deviated from"

Oh! Breached! This is where 'breaching' (earlier in the tellability article) comes from, as well as 'genre convention' (as a ++ for tellability, from the player stories report).

dynamic conceptions of plot, and in particular to its complication phase

its what now

At this level, it is assumed that there is a general human interest for stories reporting events that have a certain degree of unpredictability or mystery. In Ryan's . . . possible worlds semantics approach, the more complex virtual outcomes are, the more tellable the story is.

So many questions.
1. What is a "complication phase"
2. What is a "virtual outcome" and what does it mean for one to be more or less complex

Only once this basic understanding has been established can I return to these claims regarding the concepts' claimed relationships to tellability. Am I going to go down this road? My god.

Nah, I'm good for now.

[droqen]

SUB-CLOSE-READING OF TELLABILITY, POST 3

next section (2.3) talks about stuff i've already talked about above, no need to re-hash (or gloat that i 'got it' before it was presented to me, ha ha)

the tellability of the same event might change according to the knowledge of the audience

considering key factors involve unexpectedness and mystery (reliant on the receipient's knowledge/understanding), as well as changing relationships to 'implicit canonical scripts' (although canonical scripts are partially public so too is this reliant on what's in the recipient's thought cabinet)

[droqen]

ok too many words going back to our main article, the report

[droqen]

THE PLAYER STORY PIPELINE

we do love our models and graphs here in game design.