Open-world games invite us to explore worlds rich in lore and design, but often they give us missions and quests that once we finish, become less interesting, yet we want to keep exploring the open world. Often, one also feels that besides the missions and side missions, the game is not personalized beyond character customization and basic dialogue options. Given that one is roaming in an open world, one could have a personalized narrative based on one’s preferences in terms of narrative, yet determining the narrative of the game in totality would make the game less interesting. One could have a personalized narrative for the player’s character that ties in with the main story of the game, and that’s where side missions come in.
In games, side missions are often optional small-scale missions that players can overlook. Many times, a lot of side missions are wasted as such. However, if a player, besides customizing the appearance of their character, could customize their character’s backstory, personal story experience and side missions that progress the player’s character arc in relation to the main story, and if this personalization could impact the overall main story in the game on the basis of the player’s preferences, a game’s story would become much more personalized and replayable. However, to have a backstory, personal story experience and side missions that are customized by the player, many elements within the game’s open world would have to be synchronized with the player’s custom story and preferences. I call this process Narrative Symbiosis. This process, which I call Narrative Symbiosis, would first of all require character creation in an open-world game. Next, it would require all the elements already present within the open world, in terms of the modelling already present within the open world. It would also require a main story and lore for a particular game, on the basis of which, a personalized backstory and personal narrative of the player’s character could be based. In this, instead of the player massively impacting the open world in the game, the player’s personalized narrative would react to the main story and other elements of the open world and form a symbiosis or coming together of all the narratives and elements. To ensure all this, algorithms are required to moderate the player’s narrative and the interactions of the narrative with the main story and elements within the open world.
The physical aspect of the open world will have modelling that is already present, and only a few new elements like NPCs and objects like letters or other such plot devices will need to be added, and they need to be already present in terms of the physical modelling of the base game. The more difficult part arises in terms of the interactions of the Narrative Symbiosis with the base game.
There is an easy way through this problem and a more imaginative way through this problem. Both are very possible. In the easy method, a question and answer user-interface is employed by the algorithm that uses pre-determined formats to ask the player what the player wants from the narrative and how it ties in with the main story and the settings or locations of the backstory, personal story experience and personalized side missions. The imaginative method is more procedural and generative wherein subjective determinants and variables in the algorithm determine the outcome in terms of pre-determined patterns. Both methods can utilize elements of either approach. The player then is both like and unlike the silent protagonist from Persona 4 Golden in the sense that in Narrative Symbiosis, the player will be reacting and creating the game’s story instead of mostly reacting to it.
For example, in dialogue interactions, the easy method uses the pre-determined question-and-answer format to create interactions between the player and NPCs. However, in the imaginative and generative format, the player and NPCs can be assigned personality types based on a question-and-answer personality test for the player and NPCs and use the subjectivity of the elements of the open world including its proper nouns in the narrative to create dialogue. Again, personality tests for the player and NPCs can be included in the easy method as well. However, while the easy method uses a static question-and-answer format to create a pre-determined scenario, the imaginative method uses a dynamic and more detailed system that uses questions and answers to generate a scenario. The easy method is more suited to a game with a more precise main story in the base game while the imaginative method is suited to a game that has an open world with a more vague and imprecise narrative system. These elements form the story as pyramids of programming stacks with the player’s inputs to the questions and answers coalescing with the inverted pyramid of the video game’s lore and storyline, thus forming links of questions and answers that operate through programming stacks.
In the Narrative Symbiosis approach to story-building in open-world games, the most basic structure for the player to create a customized story is the question-and-answer method that is indulged in. This method is suitable for making the interface more user-friendly. How tedious or quick and easy the process is would depend on what is envisioned for the subjectivity of the Narrative Symbiosis interaction. Like physical interactions follow the laws of physics, interactions in Narrative Symbiosis interactions need to follow a set of rules that moderate interaction so that the player’s personalized character arc meets the main story and elements of the open world in concert based on questions and answers that follow the rules of the society and sociology within the game. With the Narrative Symbiosis method, the player can interact, react to and change the reactive society within a video game. This can create the impression for the player that the player is indeed living in a society within a game. For example, if we had Narrative Symbiosis within The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, instead of only following the instructions within quests and receiving pre-determined dialogue from NPCs, the player could have more options in how to go about with quests and interacting with the society within Skyrim, such that it feels like a more reactive society. The player could have the option of choosing, within the game’s set-up itself, how the player should interact with the game and how the game reacts to the player.
For example, the player could have the option of gifting food and wine or anything to the miners at Markarth and the game would ask the question, based on the player’s decision, symbolically, if the player had made friends, and based on their cultural and political affiliations, being poor Nords, Orcs or Forsworn, if the player would like to align with their cultural or political affiliations, this would create a third programming stack after the previous two ones, in which the player’s friendship or not with these miners would affect how the player creates a story arc for later quests related to this decision, which are also programming stacks. For example, if the player tried to be Thane of Markarth after being friends with the miners, the Jarl of Markarth would ask questions, literally or symbolically, about the player’s loyalty to peace and stability in Markarth and give the player dominion over the interests of the people that the player has helped in Markarth rather than being Thane of Markarth being a largely empty title. The player’s friendships and enmities here will create a personal story arc for the player in Markarth. This story arc depends on the elements already present in the game and the lore and rules of society within Skyrim and Markarth. The society within Skyrim and Markarth is reacting to the player’s story choices. As a reference, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is one of my favourite video games of all time and was made a long time ago. This was an example of the easy method. The imaginative method is more procedurally generated.
In short, Narrative Symbiosis creates societies in video games by giving the player and NPCs a habitus. Habitus (Pierre Bourdieu’s concept) is social orientation through learned preferences or dispositions, schemata or structures of perception, conception and action. Rebecca Rose Varghese in The Hindu (2022) writes that according to Pierre Bourdieu, when people exhibit agency they unconsciously refer to social structures, thus reflecting on and reproducing them. Individual actions are thus reflected by the socialization and habitus of the individual. The term habitus refers to a collective entity by and into which dominant social and cultural conditions of a society are established and reproduced. It is a subjective and yet not an individual system of structures, concepts, schemes of perception, actions and norms that are internalized by individuals in the same group. Habitus helps instil a sense of the world in individuals by attributing cultural value to material or immaterial objects. Even at a very intimate level, habitus postulates specific properties. What one considers, ‘natural’, ‘taboo’, ‘neutral’ and ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is constructed by one’s habitus. In Narrative Symbiosis, linear flowcharts are replaced by the process of symbolic narratives coming together moderated by the habitus. The idea is to connect the player’s narrative with the game’s narrative using the method linked to programming. The question and answer format will be used here, not linear instructions appearing in a flowchart. The player’s agency in the game will reflect on and reproduce the social structures within the game, thus having the player socialise to collect cultural capital within the game. This cultural capital will create a feedback loop with the main story and lore of the game. Having a habitus requires us to not look at video game societies objectively as the implementation of plans, but understand that the player too constructs a narrative, not passively records it.
A particular class of conditions of existence produce the habitus in a video game that is durable, transposable dispositions within the society of a video game which generate and organize practices and representations. This society is collectively orchestrated within the framework of rules of the society without necessitating the player to obey rules, but rather orient themselves towards achieving goals and results within the society. The habitus is a world of already realized ends. According to Bourdieu, the structures characterizing a determinate class of conditions of existence produce the structures of the habitus, which in turn are the basis of the perception and appreciation of all subsequent experiences. Produced by the experience of the game, feel for the game gives the game a subjective sense, and therefore acknowledgement of what is at stake, and this gives the game an objective sense, the sense of the probable outcome that is given by practical mastery of the specific regularities that constitute the economy of a field in terms of practices linked to the conditions of their enactment, a consensual validation that is the basis of collective belief in the game and its fetishes. Attention to the action itself remains subordinate to the pursuit of the result. Practice is a social exchange, reciprocity oriented towards results that use combinatory formulae that reproduce the habitus.
Algorithms and a framework of rules that moderate interaction in games might be enough to make Narrative Symbiosis work. This way, games with Narrative Symbiosis can be handcrafted by writers, developers, designers and players. The user interface in the question-and-answer model can become simple enough for the player such that the player could be creating scenarios while talking to an NPC for example. How user-friendly the interface is will be a great advantage for a game with Narrative Symbiosis. However, if games of a smaller scale employed the technique first, that would be a safe option for developers. If the technique can be made to work on smaller games, it could then be carried over to much bigger games. Narrative Symbiosis, in which the player creates a customized backstory, a personal story experience and side missions to create a character arc for the player’s character, is very much possible. This can be a step forward in achieving user autonomy in computer-simulated environments.
The article is authored by Kavish Rai, and was originally published in SKOAR!’s December 2022 issue.
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