Narrative Design 202: More About Storylets
In the last piece I posted, I talked about three different styles of interactive writing. I want to focus on the one of these that is the most complex, and the most interesting to me: Storylets.
A storylet, to retread old ground here, is some atomic piece of story that is associated with some metadata, and chosen based on some algorithm. For example, a game might use a full quest as a storylet (essentially a small, self-contained story). These quests might be tagged with certain values (the metadata) that control when they can trigger: #full_moon, <has_magic_sword:true>, {aliens_killed_count > 5}. And then finally, there would be a system that when queried for a valid quest, would check against these requirements and present a list of quests that fit the criteria.
The reason this concept is so interesting to me, though, is its flexibility. A storylet could be a scene, instead of a quest, and the next scene might be chosen from a pool of them based on which characters are available, or based on the emotional arc of the overall story. It could be a line of dialogue, and be selected by a complex pathfinding algorithm designed to move the conversation towards a particular topic.
The algorithmic implications are so cool — if you tag your storylet content with the right information, you can do all sorts of interesting systemic magic to pull special combinations from your pool of stories. Here’s an example of how this works for one game, Weird West. Or here’s an example from the brilliant Heaven’s Vault of using this for conversational topics, based on how salient the topic is to what the player or character is probably thinking about right now.
This kind of storytelling flexibility is key to making engaging and surprising storytelling systems — it has a lot more power than a simple branching choice system, because any systemic rules you can think to apply you can use to select which storylet is most relevant. And it’s far more flexible, too: it’s not possible to write a branching dialogue system where at any point any relevant topic can be discussed, but with a storylet system, it’s easy!
I truly think any game that is considering an interactive story should look at storylets instead of simple branching logic for deciding what story paths the player can take.
