Modeling the Story Facilitation of Game Masters in Multi-Player Role-Playing Games

Inherent in all forms of interactive storytelling is the problem of reconciling freedom of the user with requirements for pre-authored plot. In non-digital RolePlaying Games (RPGs), Game Masters (GMs) constantly encounter and solve this problem, facilitating collaborative, interactive storytelling in real-time. In this study, the various theories of GM operations are combined with experiences from a three-year project on storytelling and player interactions in multi-player RPGs; to present a model of the cognitive process of GM operations in RPGs. 1. Game Masters in Role-Playing Games Inherent in all forms of interactive storytelling (Crawford 1983) is the problem of reconciling the freedom of the user to impact the unfolding story and the requirement for a preauthored plot that has enough detail and coherence to be programmable (Louchart and Aylett 2003). A potential solution to this problem is to control the interactive narrative via synthetic characters or autonomous agents (Bradshaw 1997; Hayes-Roth 1998) that interact with the human users who also enact specific characters within the framework of the story or experience. Both the pre-authored, plot-directed approach and the approach focusing on autonomous agents present challenges in ensuring that the behavioral consistency and believability of the fictional characters is not violated, and in presenting a coherent, interesting narrative structure (Mateas and Stern 2000). There are various solutions to these inherent problems of producing interactive storytelling software, e.g. letting autonomous agents be influenced by an overall dramatic structure (Louchart and Aylett 2007). The potential solution presented here is offered by perhaps the purest example of emergent, character-based collaborative storytelling systems currently in existence, that of multi-player, non-digital, Role-Playing Games (RPGs) (Edwards 2001; Fine 2002; Peinado and Gervas 2004; Young 2005; Tychsen 2006). While incredibly varied in form and format, RPGs should not be viewed as a sandbox situation, where characters are placed within the confines of a fictional world and story then happens. RPGs generally feature a function here termed Game Masters (GMs) (Combs 2004; Young 2005), which play a central role as story facilitators (Aylett et al. 2008). GMs manage the overall plot of the game story, autonomous agents in the form of non-player characters (NPCs) and the input and actions of the players and the fictional characters they control (agents from the system perspective). For clarity, all of these features of RPG play are referred to as “story”. While it remains debated whether games can feature stories in the classical narrative sense, this discussion is not of interest to the current study. The GM, in other words, acts as an interactive storytelling engine. Understanding how the GM operates at high levels and in detail, is therefore an obvious source of knowledge for how to design digital storytelling systems. RPGs are however complex games, and the operations of the GM varies from RPG to RPG, and is far from wellunderstood at either the higher level of operations or in the detail. The general principles of GM functionality have been discussed within the hobbyist community for decades and within the research world to an increasing degree over the past ten years, however with a focus on play functions such as the description of the fictional environment, maintenance of dramatic tension through play, and levels of authorial control, not the actual conceptual process of story evolution through the game process (Edwards 2001; Fine 2002; Peinado and Gervas 2004; Bøckman and Hutchison 2005; Tychsen 2006). For example, that there are different approaches to how GMs manage storytelling is a welldebated subject, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of these approaches known (Young 2005). However, the cognitive processes and detailed mechanics of how GMs operate have not been mapped in any detail, and this is what is needed in order to identify GM operations and transfer principles into the context of digital interactive drama. The model of GM operations presented here is based on experiments and existing literature on RPGs (e.g. Young 2005), which was utilized to provide parts of the model (notably regarding the process of authorial control), and verify some of the conclusions derived from the analysis. Due to space constrains a formal state-of-the-art is not included, but is integrated in the main text a , as well as the experimental material. Substantial parts of the data material have been analyzed for other purposes and published (e.g.