Fictive worlds are, of course, exactly what novels assemble in your imagination whilst you read. In game-play terms, though, it is the idea of bringing a story to life and putting the player within it that appeals. Part sandbox, part virtual world, part interactive fiction, part massively-multiplayer online game. Put simply, a fictive world is simply the simulation of a novel. Construct a world from the relevant pieces (location and character), drop in a player and start the whole thing running.

In this post-Playful world I’ve cast the nets wider and found more material to read. Such as Caitlin Kelleher and her Storytelling Alice project:

Personally I’m more interested in stories for Boys, and ideas like One True Bear, but Kelleher’s work helps enormously, specifically in terms of connecting a valuable output to the idea of Fictive Worlds. That is to say that if they work, they could very well be educational.

However, the one article I wish I had read pre-Playful, would be [Google-cached-pdf] All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling and Procedural Logic:

Interesting how, even now, a television programme with substance defines itself with reference to a more established medium. I bet novels only started to get the respect they felt warranted when film and television appeared. I guess the same holds true for games. They are held by critics to be lower than film, which is in turn lower than theatre and the novel. And here I am, attempting to create a Fictive World, dressing up play in a literary cloak.

Elsewhere there’s a great nod to the language of television drama, of episodes, seasons and season-long story-arcs:

So The Wire is just a simulation of Baltimore, programmed to run from start to finish in around 65 hours (5 seasons of ~13 episodes at 1 hour apiece). Just as Friends is an inward-looking simulation of six distinct personalities in very limited number of locations (coffee shop, apartment, balcony). Speaking of Friends, that reminds me of Supple.

Now that I can see outputs from Fictive Worlds, and I have a sense of the inputs already (allegorical stories for boys) then I can start to put the idea in perspective. From the literary to the ludic indeed!

Reading the recent game reviews for Velvet Assasin it’s hard not to feel roundly depressed. The story of Violette Szabo is compelling, but even in the well known territory of a World War Shooter the designers seem to have failed to make anything from such a good story. Given that the vast majority of games these days are war-based shooters, it’s somewhat surprising to see such a comprehensive failure to go beyond anything amounting to tittilation and violence.

With such a great story turned into so bland a game, it begs the question, are complex stories even suitable for a game? Or, more pertinently, is there a game genre that could have pulled it off, successfully and tastefully?

Well, perhaps. In the next-generation video gaming world, the growth of Adventuring Gaming seems to have been stunted. Interactive fiction appears to be a doomed genre, most probably because it is so hard to write or adapt complex stories in an acceptable, playable format.

Pleasingly, though, comes this quote from Chris Crawford:

I dreamed of the day when computer games would be a viable medium of artistic expression — an art form. I dreamed of computer games expressing the full breadth of human experience and emotion. I dreamed of computer games that were tragedies, games about duty and honor, self-sacrifice and patriotism. I dreamed of satirical games and political games; games about the passionate love between a boy and girl, and the serene and mature love of a husband and wife of decades; games about a boy becoming a man, and a man realizing that he is no longer young.

That’s right, it’s the ‘Are games Art?’ question again. Answer: they’re not. Of more plausible concern is whether games can be considered affecting. Games still pack less emotional resonance than tv soaps, after all. Wouldn’t the story of Violette Szabo have been better served as an adventure game? What you trade in for cutting edge graphics you reap in terms of an engaging story. Whilst you won’t be shooting people point-blank in the face, you might experience a well-paced, unfolding drama.

Looking at the explosion of Virtual Worlds fused with Casual ethics and mainstream, almost bland themes and locations, it’s hard not to feel that an opportunity has been missed. So many Virtual Worlds, so few stories between them? How can you create a massively multiplayer game and watch as little or no stories emerge? Adventure games could be just as ‘massively multiplayer’ but, moreover, they could be filled with stories.

The recent rise of Virtual Worlds was a pollution of the MMO genre with Casual Games. Given that so many exist with so few genuinely different succes stories, it’s time to try something new. Adventure games could be truly episodic, they would have season-long story arcs baked in. Adventure games would be casual without blandness, educational, interactive and fictive. If comics can try something different, if children’s books can tackle difficult themes and use the medium for education, then why can’t games?

Who cares about Duke Nukem, let’s play a game of Kes.

Following on from my earlier extensions for Mozilla Jetpack (Recently Closed Tabs and Keyboard Link Navigation), if you have Jetpack installed, you should be prompted to install my Quick Launch extension. Once you have it installed (no restart required), then you’ll start to notice some favicons appear in the Firefox status bar.

The Quick Launch extension tracks your most favourite websites and adds a link to them, so you don’t even need to type or hunt through bookmarks. What’s more, if you stop visiting one site and start visiting another, then the Quick Launch bar will automatically update itself with your new preferences (all in 44 lines of javascript). If you haven’t got it installed, here’s what it looks like:

If I’ve interested you in Mozilla JetPack, then you should take a look at the code on Github or view the source here.

If you have Jetpack installed, you should be prompted to install my Keyboard Link Navigation extension for adding hotkeys to every link on a page (all in 46 lines of javascript). If you haven’t got it installed, here’s what it looks like:

With this plugin enabled (check the box in the status bar to do so) you can open any link by typing a colon followed by the number of the link you want. For example, :7 will open the 7th link on the current page.

It’s very rough and ready, but if you just want to see the code, visit Github or view the source.

If you have Jetpack installed, you should be prompted to install my Recently Closed Tabs extension for adding favicons to the status bar to give you a sense of where you recently were on the Internet (all in 27 lines of javascript). If you haven’t got it installed, here’s what it looks like:

And if you just want to see the code, visit GitHub or the code itself.

As a result of a number of different threads, I ended up playing ForumWarz again. The in-game sTalk is a scripted, conversation interface dressed up to look like an IM client, in this case Google’s gTalk, and the interactions it affords are varied enough to avoid seeming overly forced.

Of more interest, though, is the fact that the creator is quite happy to discuss the DSL he created in order to help the writers create dialogue trees for use in the game:

Behind the adult-rated nature of the game, there’s some clever things being done with Ruby:

In fact, there’s a whole post on the ForumWarz blog about The ForumWarz Admin Tab which is a place to create cinematics, events, shots and, of course, conversations – see it here.

Late last year I presented to the Guardian newspaper on the subject of Casual Games and Passive Gaming. Casual Games are addictive and surface based – easy to learn, hard to master or indeed not worth mastering.

Passive games can be used to add depth to casual game mechanics. Indeed, that was when I realised:

passive + casual = massive

Social networks have provided depth. Web 2.0 is about generating content through relationships, rather than community (for the sake of community).

Social networking in games and websites provides a hook for users to come back to the site again, it creates sticky content. Games alone are good sticky content but they don’t get users interacting outside of the game itself, the website is ignored, pretty much. Social networking in a game or network can encourage users out into the rest of the site, to find friends and groups in corners otherwise left unexplored.

Casual MMOs are on the rise now but they’ll need more than just networking to provide depth. Casual MMO’s need networking and gameplay to provide the depth, and that’s going to be a difficult trick to pull off. Adding depth to a game is where the real game design happens, the most successful Casual MMO is going to be the one with the most depth, hidden and obvious, and it’s only going to be the most talented game designers who can achieve that kind of feat.

It’s hard enough in hardcore gaming, where content soon become repetive or level based (think end of level monsters or blue keys for blue doors, etc). Those are shortcuts. MMO need to start growing beyond using social networking to provide depth and start looking back at good old game design if they’re going to be truly successful. There need sto be discoverability, and obvious challenges, hidden depths and active tasks. This is a big problem for Casual Games, and moving to MMOs hasn’t solved it. Casual Games are renowed for copying and in their move to the MMO world is, in a way, another example of this.. Casual MMOs may prove to be the most successful by their self-evident casuality, but they will need to grow beyond their roots if they’re to show people how MMO’s can have mainstream appeal. That means no cloning, no copying, no grinding and no virtual or multiplayer faking.

This is the effectively the next level of online Casual Game design. The first step was to prove the business model, the second was to co-opt MMOs and the third is to introduce story-telling to create simple and compelling games with enough depth to reward long lasting play. Kongregate’s card-game style challenges and Xbox Live’s brute force achievements are the first such steps along this path. Kongregate rewards skills and patience whilst xbox rewards persistance, mainly, but both approaches promote a real reward for repetitive play.

Now it’s time to make that more than just a virtual badge, it’s to open up a story and directly involve the player. I can’t wait :D

In one to two years? It could be anything – social, mobile, games, business, news, comics, films, etc

In five to ten years? It’ll easily be the reversal of online media onto print. Disposable, printable newspapers, forums, reviews, local gossip, etc.

However, the real excitement of the next few years is going to be the continuing conflict between the Casual and the Long Tail. Not so long ago, the Long Tail was the main meme on the internet. Companies showed off their Long Tail visions and how they catered to the niche. Now, it’s all about Casual. And Casual is mass market – make money in volume and swamp the market with clones and blandness. The Long Tail was all about making money from the vast numbers of internet users who are passionate about something. Betas for websites are all about creating passionate users, having their viral energy do the work for you. But the revenue comes from mass appeal.

Whilst this continues to be the case, then something is wrong on the internet.

“Supple, a soap-opera type social interaction game, which is planned to be the released as a series of episodes with advanced features and additional characters and narratives included with each episode.”

“Supple, is one of the most popular downloadable games of 2008. The testimonials and game reviews say it all. With over 3 million downloads already, this totally original Sims-style game is sweeping the internet. Supple is funny, challenging, sexy and the characters actually speak real English.”

I played it a year or so ago and it was fun. When the hype about Episodic Games was exciting, a sit-com style game sounded perfect. It’s a shame that no-one has built a successful episodic game, unless you count the yearly sports iterations of games like Fifa Soccer, but sit-coms and comics would be a great fit for regular, immersive casual gaming as entertainment services.

Quake III was my game. I am all about the elegant, simple, minimalist design

This most interesting part of the interview, for me, was a brief discussion about making money from a free web game. Clearly id software will generate revenue from a popular website that offers a free game just from advertising alone, but there’s also an additional business model that has a lot of potential.

At launch, we’ll be ad-supported completely, and probably for a couple months after that. One of the big features that our player base is asking for is the ability to run private servers. Right now, we control all of the game servers, so all of the game instances that are happening are public games.

So, in the couple months after launch, we will be putting together, more or less, a subscription option that allows players, for a very nominal fee — something around like the $4.99 price point — to also probably do other things, but the core functionality will be to allow players to, through the very elegant interface they have on the website, run their own game servers.

This is yet another Counter Strike inspired idea! When I played Travian I soon felt that I would have more fun playing against a much smaller group of friends. Much like social networks like Facebook allow you to create your own group and interact with friends in there (publically or privately), a free game like Quake Live is going to collect enough passionate users that a sufficient number of them will want to play privately, and paying for that privilege is a valid revenue stream. What’s more, look at what you’d be able to do with your own private server:

There’s really no ability to say, “I want to run my own game and only have the people playing that I want to be playing,” primarily because it’s free and we’re paying for all that infrastructure anyway. There are huge benefits for us controlling the physical hardware that the game is running on.

You say, “I want to play this game at this location. I want it to be configured this way,” and then tie that into our friends list and the social aspect of it. “I want to invite this player, this player, this player, this player, this player. Start the match.” Or even have that match recurring, on a calendar basis — “Every day at six o’clock, I want to play a match against John, and I want the system to invite us both to the match, start the game for us automatically.” We’ll be introducing that.

Private servers are an excellent way to tap into a couple of different sections of your playing community. There are those users who are passionate enough about your game to want to play it in a smaller, more controller environment. Furthermore, there are always individuals in a community who love to ‘host’, those players who enjoy helping out others, on the one hand helping out and on the other having a say in the cultural development of the game. Both of these player types will consider paying for a private server, provided it’s affordable and worthwhile.

Elsewhere, something that’s been noticeable about this revision of the web is its ability to take old ideas and try them again. Flash games had been around a long time before they were branded Casual Games and turned into a multi-billion dollar business. Console games recently went through a phase of focussing on co-op and went one better than the old days by facilitating online co-op.

Thankfully console and PC games have begun to catch up with the innovations of the internet, picking up on the idea of games as something more than unconnected islands. A lot of games now use the internet for more than just convenient patching and updating. There’s an attitude amongst console and PC game developers that web development is easy by comparison:

What really hurt us was the initial thought of putting a web interface on it. Some things surrounding the game were certainly overly trivialized by us. That’s easy to do when you say, “Oh, we’re hotshot game developers. This web stuff can’t be too hard because so many people do it.”

Things like that that really had taken a couple times longer than we expected them to.

Whilst I’d doubt that any web developer is going to consider rendering complex 3D objects to be trivial compared to database optimisation, it’s possible that in their rush to adopt the web developers’ mindset when it comes to APIs, free content and the social fabric of their websites some innovate ideas get left behind.

So not only is it great to see the hardcore game developers and web developers might be moving closer together, it’s also very exciting to think about a real business model for free games on the internet.