Stories
Stories are objects in the FærieMUD library which are used for the storage and later communication of an object's history, as well as for describing any series of events as a means of instruction or qualification.
This document is an outline of the theory behind story objects, ideas on how they will be implemented, how they relate to quests and other parts of the object library, and their possible uses.
Theory
The role of storytelling has been central to a culture's existence since the dawn of recorded time. Storytelling is a culture's means of community learning, a way of storing those bits of knowledge that free one's progeny from repeating the mistakes of the past. It is also how a culture exemplifies those aspects of character it deems noble and right, in the form of legends and heroic epics. Story is also, as every Færie will tell you, the very lifeblood of a Færie world.
We intend FærieMUD to be a living story, a game in which the development of one's character, and the belief in the magical is as or more important than the acquisition of power. To accomplish this, we need to create an underlying framework which allows a character to remember the events which are significant to her, and later to be able to describe these events to others.
We plan to accomplish this by representing stories as game objects which can interact with other objects, be stored, and later be examined or passed on by their owners.
The objects will not truly be stories fit for telling unto themselves, of course; they will be little more than collections of facts, characters, and events assembled into a chronological order. The telling of a story, is, after all, much more than this. So, because of the importance of storytelling to our game, the stories a person owns will also be modifiable, and a storytelling character will be able to suitably recast his tale in a more artistic light, embellishing or accentuating the details in his own style.
The stories a character accumulates during her life will also directly affect her standing in the game after her character dies a permanent death, as well (see Death). Characters with more experience will have access to more exotic character races, and be able to more directly influence their character's creation. Stories, among other things, are one means of acquiring this experience. They are a kind of "currency of the spirit," a reward that survives beyond death.
The Importance of Story to FaerieMUD
The world we hope to create is one that provides an environment of collaborative story-telling, or more accurately, story-living.
In order to achieve this, we must model the concept of Story in the world. We must make stories accessible not only to the players of the game, but also to their characters, and to the mechanics behind the game world itself.
Kinds of Stories
A story, as it is defined within the world of FaerieMUD, is a construct which contains knowledge about a sequence of game events, either as a means of representing historical memory, or as a means of providing an abstraction for some proffered, imposed, or proscribed series of actions.
Here is a tentative list of the types of stories:
- Empirical Stories
- Stories that a character has lived, representing the character's historical memory, built from the events she has experienced.
- Imperative Stories
- Abstract stories which can be employed to script or automate some task. Eg, Recipes, the action half of a Role, etc.
- Didactic/Prescriptive Stories
- Abstract stories which represent instructions or rules for accomplishing something. Eg., Quests, the fulfillment part of Oaths, Orders, the trigger part of a Role, etc.
- Rhetorical Stories
- Stories which have been crafted or altered for telling, either from scratch or derived from an empirical story. This is the sort of story that characters with the Storytelling skill will be able to create.
The Role of Stories in the Game
"Experience points"
Stories, combined with character attribute and trait development, relationships, skills, etc. take the place of experience points as they are usually though of. Though FaerieMUD does have experience, it is a much finer-grained and lesser contributor to a character's accomplishment than in some systems.
When a character dies, one who has accumulated more (or better) stories, has advanced in his skills more, or has developed his traits to a higher level will be rewarded by additional options (more control, exotic species, etc.) for character creation.
Character History
Stories give characters a sense of context and history, a place in the world. By formalizing the concept of a story, we hope to make accountability, planning, and organization more important than it is in other games.
Character Memory
In order to make characters intelligent in their own right, without the aid of the player, it will be necessary to model some sort of event memory. Characters, because they "remember" their past deeds, can react accordingly to situations in which their past experience might dictate some course of action different than if they did not remember. For instance, if a character has committed a crime in a particular city, it would be interesting to model the character's tendency to be nervous when coming back to the scene of the crime. A character who has been nearly killed by a hippogriff will be understandably reluctant to face one again.
Cultural Stories and The Monomyth
The various socio-political constructs in FaerieMUD are also capable of possessing a history, and a kind of collective memory. As characters live and die in the world, particularly important stories might become part of the collection of stories possessed by the socio-political organizations of which the character is a member. This could be dependent on the stories actually being told in the context of the group, or perhaps the nature of the story and its specifics would be dependent on how it becomes part of the social organization's collection.
The stories of a character's race, culture, locale, family, and social organizations would naturally be accessible to her to some degree, depending on age, relationship with the organization, and possibly other factors. These stories would provide part of an implicit social context for the player, and contribute to the character's depth and worth in the world by adding a value to social interaction and group membership beyond simple combination of material resources.
Another interesting thing to explore might be the use of a concept similar to Joseph Campbell's "Monomyth" -- a over-arching meta-story that is common to heroic epics of all cultures -- one which can be used to perhaps guide the character via dreams or interactions with other characters that fit into the archetypal roles on the Hero's Journey. I'm not sure how this would manifest itself, but it would be interesting to try to find correlations between the prototypical Hero's Journey story and the stories of characters' lives.
Dreams and Remembering
An interface which provides the player with a means of looking into her character's stories would also enrich gameplay. Character dreams and subconscious thought processes could be modeled by using pieces of stories from the character's past, as well as those obtained by virtue of membership in a culture, socio-political group, or Covenant. Similarities between empirical stories and rhetorical ones could cause dreams to suggest parallels with commingled imagery from both. Such a function would be useful in creating spells for prognosticative magic or premonition.
Object History
Stories could also be attached to inanimate objects, if events occur to them which cause them to change. This will generally be true only of items of a particular Quality, particularly those which are imbueable or sentient.
Implementation
The implementation of human stories as structured objects in a computer simulation is not a trivial problem. Any implementation will, of necessity, be incomplete, and only an approximation of what a story or a myth is to a human being. It is doubly difficult to make such an implementation result in instances of objects which are readily understood by the computer.
Because this is a difficult design problem, it is especially important to set some goals for the outcome that can act as heuristics for decision-making along the way. Limiting the scope of the implementation to the areas that are important to the FaerieMUD world increases the likelihood of its resulting in something that will live up to expectations.
Design Goals
Story objects have three distinct roles. They should be able to encapsulate knowledge of a specific series of events which has already occurred, support the generation and modification of readable story text, and abstractly represent some process or pattern of events which has not yet taken place.
Encapsulation of a Series of Events
Stories must encapsulate knowledge about past series of important events. In order for the machine to be able to use Stories to encapsulate this historical knowledge, it must be able to "understand" the story at some fundamental level, or at least be able to understand it in some very specific ways.
The understanding of stories can be accomplished to the level required by implementing several mechanisms of machine treatment: a programmatic way of deriving a relationship of stories to other objects through interactions, one or more ways of traversing the story in a logical order, and a generalized means of testing stories for "completeness".
Interactions
- Story vs. Story
- Stories must be represented in such a way that the similarity of two stories can be easily calculated. This is necessary for matching abstract stories (PoltiStories, roles, etc.) to concrete ones, modeling associative memory, and other tasks.
- Story vs. Event
- It must also be possible to derive some sort of "relatedness" value when comparing an event to a story, both for the purpose of determining whether or not an event will be added to a story, but also to simulate the "jogging" of ones memory, the integration of surrounding events into a character's dreams, and because it will likely prove a useful mechanism by which other comparative relationships can be derived.
- Story vs. Relationship
- Stories will need to interact with Relationships on several different levels. Connections need to be drawn between the two for many different functions, and they will alter or influence one another at various points in the character's everyday activities. The tone and development of a Relationship with a character or object is affected not only by the events which occur between them, but also by the context in which those events are set and the eventual outcome of them. These are things which only a story can provide.
Iterators
Stories should support iteration over at least the event stream in both chronological and narrative order, and the "cast" of relevant characters. Other such traversals will undoubtedly present themselves as the implementation is fleshed out.
Testing for "Completeness"
Since stories at some point must become complete so they can be consigned to the character's historical memory instead of the fore of her thoughts, the Story itself must provide some indicator that it is "done". This may be a function of the relatedness between the causal first event and one that has just been added, or it may be necessary to implement some more complex heuristic.
Generation/Modification of Readable Prose
Story objects must also be useful to the human player, as the game without this functionality would be little more than a chat server with a power structure. In order for stories to be useful to players, they must be readable and mutable.
Readable
In order to function as readable stories, Story objects must support the generation of text from the details contained in their data structures. This text must be grammatically correct, interesting prose that sets the scene, stimulates the imagination, and maintains the suspension of disbelief. The closer to this goal we can come, the better the entire game will become.
Mutable
In a world where stories are of such import, it must be possible to retain stories and legends that are popular or contain important knowledge. Just as societies throughout the history of this world have had a place for bards, poets, and historians, so must our world enable characters to remember, alter, and retell their own and other peoples' stories. The interface for doing so, especially while maintaining the same degree of machine usefulness presents quite a challenge.
Generalizable
There are some uses of Stories (eg., Quests, Roles, Teaching) that depend on its being a malleable and generalizable structure.
Stripping of Detail
Stories are most easily generalized by stripping the details which make them specific, so Stories must support some means of doing so.
Base Story Class
Stories int FærieMUD are, in essence, the meaningful history of an object as described by a series of two or more related events. Story objects consist of a chain of interrelated events called a Skein, and perhaps some other kinds of data structures which are maintained for efficiency or to facilitate the story being used outside of the context of its creation. These events represent the events which occurred to the character, from the protagonist's perspective as she experienced them. This means they will almost certainly be personalized or modified shallow copies of the events which actually came the character's way.
The story system has five parts:
The Event Model
All of the details of the event are contained in Event objects: what sort of thing happened, where it happened, to whom it happened, etc.
The Character's Perception
When the event is propagated outward (described in Event Propagation), it can encounter one or more characters' perception objects), which decide whether the character it belongs to is capable of perceiving the event, based on factors which affect sensory perception.
The Character's Apperception
If the perception object decides that the event is perceivable, it is tailored to the character's particular nature and biases. Non-pertinent, or unnoticed details (as determined by attention, perception, fatigue, etc.) are stripped away. Adjectives, adverbs, and whole phrases may be added to suit the character's bias based on her relationships, short-term memories (related stories), and other factors.
Story-assembly
Events must assembled into skeins of related events, quantified, and later culled or pruned from the object which has stories. This system is the one we've named The Fates, after the Greek sisters who weave, measure, and cut the Thread of Life.
Prose Generation
This is a sort of inverse parser, which takes either events or stories and generates readable prose from them.
Related Ideas
Events
(This section is still incomplete, and will continue to be added to and revised as the library is developed.)
- An event is generated
- The event acts on its target object
- If the event doesn't result in a change in a developmental object, no further action is necessary
- Each object which owns a developmental object which was changed is queried for its list of active stories.
- This list is iterated over, each story in turn is given the event, and is responsible for determining the event's significance. If the event is significant to the story, the story inserts it into the proper place, and indicates significance to the caller. Events which correspond to the significance of the triggering event can be generated if necessary, and passed the containing object.
- If no stories indicate that the event was significant to them, a new story is generated and added to the object.
Fates
The three fates -- Clothos, the spinner; Lachesis, the measurer; and Atropos, the cutter -- have an important relationship to the creation of story objects in characters and physical objects.
- Clothos analyzes the skeins of events which are experienced by a character or object and spins them into stories which she passes to Lachesis.
- Lachesis measures each story for the importance it has for the character and passes all relevant stories back to Clothos and on to the object or character experiencing the story.
- Atropos uses the karma or quality of the object or character and determines the number of stories it can store. She excises the rest.
— Ged The Greys Hain - 13 June 1998
— Ged The Greys Hain - 23 May 2000
— Ged The Greys Hain - 15 May 2001 [Cleaned up line breaks]
Scotus' Addenda:
It is important to understand the importance of stories to the FærieMUD system because we feel the storytelling element is one of the most difficult aspects of role-playing to translate into computer code.
One of the most important things it will try to do is show how stories can be forged which have greater meaning than the man-kills-orc stories which predominate other MURPEs. We have decided the key factor is growth of the protagonist. This decision is fairly arbitrary, but it rings true. Growth is something which MURPEs are generally pretty good at modeling, and FærieMUD's Developmental Object objects are particularly good at modeling growth.
Every Artificial Intelligence in the system will be a combination of an artificial soul and an artificial memory. The artificial soul will consist of a series of stories (stored as story objects) which chronicle the important events in the life of the AI? (usually an NPC). The artificial memory will consist of a series of stories which that character has heard.
Some of these stories will be stored as part of the !AI's race and culture. Some will be stored as part of her guild. Some will be stored as part of the city where she was raised. And some will be unique to each unique character which exists in the FærieMUD world.
Both the soul and the mind have ways to interact with stories they encounter (by living them or by hearing them). The combination of the actions produced by the two of them offers something very much like a realistic set of reactions to an unpredictable set of stimuli.
If you say something to someone you meet in that world, they will try to interpret that as a story. And their souls will be attuned to such stories so as to allow them to react to any story you tell them. If nobody is running them, their !AI will compare your story to theirs and react accordingly. They might take offense. They might take up arms in your cause. They may incorporate your story into their artificial memory, if it strikes them just right. Or they may tell you a story in return.
Thus, bard?-type characters will play a pivotal role in the game and storytelling? will be a skill common to many cultures.
Each story will be composed of a series of phases (or episodes?) strung together to form a story.
The exact structure of individual episodes has not yet been determined, but here are some suggestions we have been considering (feel free to add more):
- protagonist-conflict-action-resolution
- subject-verb-object-modifier
YASA, yet another Scotus addenda:
The relation between language and story is obvious, but the way this is represented in FaerieMUD is less so. Language is the matter out of which stories are made, just as oak might be the matter out of which a door is made.
A story can thus be seen as a tool (or even as a weapon) which the storyteller uses, according to his storytelling skill? to orient the behavior of someone else towards something (which she hopes will be) more favorable to her own interests. Such a tool can be made from a material (or language) which may or may not make it a better orientation tool.
Looking to a biologist's view of language (from the early '70s):
NATURAL LANGUAGE(1) Linguistic behavior is orienting behavior; it orients the orientee within his cognitive domain to interactions that are independent of the nature of the orienting interactions themselves. To the extent that the part of its cognitive domain toward which the orientee is thus oriented is not genetically determined and becomes specified through interactions, one organism can in principle orient another to any part of its cognitive domain by means of arbitrary modes of conduct also specified through interactions. However, only if the domains of interactions of the two organisms are to some extent comparable, are such consensual orienting interactions possible and are the two organisms able to develop some conventional, but specific, system of communicative descriptions to orient each other to cooperative classes of interactions that are relevant for both.
— Humberto Maturana, Biology of Cognition
— Scotus - 28 May 2000
— Scotus - 24 Jul 2001
— GedTheGreysHain - 20 Apr 2003 [Integrated the 'story' page from the main site]
