A storyworld is the set of all Objects and Processes (data and algorithms) that are used by an interactive storytelling engine to deliver an interactive storytelling experience. This lesson covers the various Object elements that can be used in storyworlds; the next lesson covers Process elements
Actors
The first major element of every storyworld is the cast of actors. Each actor will have a number of traits. First, obviously, are the personality traits. There are plenty of other traits that you can assign to actors; here’s the
Gender: it’s nice to know the difference between boy actors and girl actors.
Active: Only active actors get to play. A player can be kept inactive until you decide to let them appear. Dead actors are inactive.
Unconscious: an unconscious actor is still officially active but can’t do anything. Unconscious actors wake up, inactive ones don’t.
Location: the stage the actor currently resides in.
Name: what else are you going to call them? “Hey, you!” ?
Picture: Smile!
Try to keep the main cast small. It’s OK to have minor actors who make brief appearances, but these actors are “dirt” that complicate the storyworld with little benefit for the drama. Where’s the drama in interacting with an actor whom you’ve just met?
Props
These are the things that actors can use for various dramatic purposes. Game designers love to sprinkle props all through the spaces of their games, usually weapons of ever-increasing power. After a while players get tired of hunting for the Super-Turbo-Hyper-Flaming-Vorpal Blade to defeat the opponent who has only a Turbo-Hyper-Flaming-Vorpal Blade. You have to think in operational terms: what dramatic purpose do you intend for a particular prop? If it has no significant dramatic purpose, then it doesn’t belong in your storyworld.
It’s difficult to come up with a good set of traits for props. About the only trait that seems universally necessary is the owner of the prop, as two people cannot own the same prop. Game designers are wont to attribute weight to props, so as to prevent actors from carrying too large a load of props. If actors need to carry a ton of props, then the storyworld isn’t about people, it’s about props.
If a prop has no owner, then it must reside on a stage. Once an actor takes possession of a prop, it simply travels around with the actor.
Stories don’t often put much weight on props. Odysseus didn’t have much on him. King Arthur had his sword Excalibur, and not much more. In most stories, actors come pre-equipped with whatever props they need. Emphasis on props is more of a game-thing than a story-thing. There are plenty of stories in which actors seek some important item, such as the Holy Grail or the Maltese Falcon or the Ark of the Covenant. But such MacGuffins are singular items that motivate characters, not your everyday prop.
In general, it’s best to minimize use of props.
Stages
Most game designers think in terms of spatial coordinates (x, y, z) and have actors move about with delta-x’s and delta-y’s. This is entirely wrong for storytelling! The Odyssey doesn’t have a map. King Arthur’s legends don’t have a map. None of Shakespeare’s plays have a map. Nor is there any map in Gulliver’s travels, or any of Mark Twain’s stories, or any of Hemingway’s. The Star Trek universe has no map; neither does the Star Wars universe. All of these stories have collections of stage instead of maps. Actors depart one stage and ‘travel for many days’ or ‘just a few minutes’ to get to the next stage. You have to think about space in operational terms: not what ARE stages, but what do we USE them for? The primary purpose of a stage is to segregate the actors into dramatically useful groupings. Romeo and Juliet have the balcony and the tomb; it just wouldn’t do for other actors to bumble onto those stages mid-reverie.
Thus, a stage should NOT have some sort of positional coordinates. Stages simply exist; actors move between them like the Starship Enterprise moves between planets: they jump through hyperspace. Stages can have special attributes that make them dramatically interesting. Often the special aspect of a stage is its unique dramatic context; for example, in Huckleberry Finn, each stage is equipped with a dramatic situation that serves to exemplify one of the dark sides of human nature.
Don’t set up stages with props that must be obtained in sequence to progress through the story. That’s an old-time stunt from text adventure games that made sense 40 years ago; it’s long past time to leave that dumb trick behind. It can be useful to establish proclivity relationships between actors and stages. For example, if you want to find Bad Bill the gunslinger, the saloon might be a good place to go. Miss Peach the teacher is best sought at the schoolhouse and Old Gus is probably at the stable.
It’s handy to have a trait that I call “open door”. You use this to prevent actors from entering or leaving stages at inopportune moments. Really, it would be such a drag for Juliet to go to the bathroom whilst Romeo is comparing her to the dawn, or for the maid to enter that stage at the same time. I have also occasionally assigned an “owner” to a stage to insure that, should a conflict arise, I know who should leave. Territoriality is one of those things that we all know but never notice.
Lastly, it’s good to have a Nobody, a Nothing, and a Nowhere in your lists. You never know when you need to send an actor to Nowhere to get them out of the way, or to be able to say that an actor has Nothing, or that Nobody put his eye out.