Dynamic Syuzhets: Writing and Design Methods for Playable Stories

Abstract

The holodeck vision of the future of Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) assumes a world that reacts around players as story protagonists; but, we have seen how this approach faces challenges in negotiating the delivery of narrative affect and player agency within current technological and Artificial Intelligence (AI) realities. By approaching the field through creative writing practice, this paper argues that casting players as experience—rather than story—protagonists, has proved an effective alternate means of writing and designing for Playable Stories. Through close analysis of the growing Story Exploration Game genre and comparison with interactive theatre, four new terms—the dynamic syuzhet, authored fabula, fixed syuzhet and improvised fabula—are introduced to show how writing and designing for players as experience protagonists can negotiate the needs of narrative and player agency, provide means to combine mimetic and diegetic player experiences, pair self-directed and empathic engagement, and offer opportunities to use dramatic irony—a cornerstone of narrative drive in other storytelling forms that is unexploited in interactive storytelling. The study that formed the basis of this paper was driven by the question of how writers can develop practice within the current constraints of the form and informed the development of my own indie video game Underland.