Interactive storytelling problems and the "credibility budget"

[Marek]

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060601/adams_01.shtml

This column covers roughly what Adams talked about in his GDC session. It's worth a read as it deals with the age-old problem of player freedom in a story-driven game.

What is the unit of cost of an improbable event in a story? Its credibility. That’s what gets spent when something improbable happens. And in fact, every story, interactive or non-interactive, book, movie, television, or computer game, has a credibility budget.

I’m not just talking about this stuff in a purely abstract, theoretical sense. I’m talking about design and coding. I think it’s possible to build a quantity, a resource called credibility, into a game, and to track expenditures against it.

[Twilo]

Well, with the chicken example, if that happened a enough times (chickens materialising) in the game, it'd be established as just a part of the game world/story and would acquire a certain credibility. This is sort of thing you get in other media a fair bit, like the superhero ring in Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, or vampires in Buffy etc.

Within the credibility budget framework considered, an isolated "incredible" incident would have a high cost, but a number of similar incidents would have a much lower cost together than any individual incident would alone; maybe even a net negative cost (as other "sorta" incredible events elsewhere would become more credible).

[elmuerte]

Hmm... very interesting and also very difficult to implement there are so many questions you will have to answer. And there are a lot of trade offs.

[Marek]

I think Adams means credibility within the role you are given. So if you play the game as the Grand Chicken Materializer then materializing chickens will obviously have a very low credibility cost.

[SpiderMonkey]

Ernest Adams writing about credibility. Oh the irony.

Edit: This comment is probably a bit trollish. To be more specific, I find the "singing comedians do both because they aren't good enough singers or good enough comedians to do one exclusively" statement to apply to Ernest Adams. His attempts to bring together academia and practical game development seem to end up stripping out/grossly diluting the interesting academic content, while struggling to provide anything of any practical use.

[Twilo]

What I meant was that the relationship between events and their credibility isn't one-way; even if it isn't established in an explicit way ("Grand Chicken Materializer" etc) the occurance of (by everyday standards) incredible events in a work of fiction has an effect on our perception of what is credible within that work.

We need some good post-modern games.