The Dinner Party
2005
Interactive Narrative Concept built in Flash
Final Project for Janet Murray's Experimental Narrative class

The Dinner Party is an interactive narrative I created in Flash to try out a concept of involving the game player in the creation of multiple narrative paths. Like other games such as Facade, the game player is put in a pre-determined first person scenario where through their interpretation and involvement in the development of the scenario, multiple narrative paths are created. Once the story has come to a dramatic conclusion, the game player has the choice to replay the game, starting from the beginning, and try out new approaches of involvement to create different narrative paths which in turn create different story developments and conclusions. Unlike Facade, the story uses little computation, but rather relies on various psychologies to create believable narrative threads and a sense of authorship in the interactor.

Through The Dinner Party, I try to accomplish several things at once. The first thing I asked myself was... "How can I create a game that can provide many narrative paths out of the simplest structure?" I decided to proceed under the notion that first impressions influence future behavior and that narrative is created from a series of individual impressions or vignettes. To create a structure for this concept I came up with a three-act, three-tiered structure on which to model the story.

Three courses at a dinner party are mapped onto the three-act structure, a course for each act. The dramatic peak in the story occurs at the end of the second act and the drama is played out in the third. Depending on where you are in the three-tier structure at the end of the second act will confine you to groups of outcomes in the third act. The end of the second act is like a "point of no return" where the player is punished or rewarded for their past actions. Whether the player feels like they are being punished or rewarded in the end is completely subjective and dependent on style of play.

The three-tiered structure serves to create believable narratives in response to the player's style of play. The player begins the game in the middle or neutral tier. If they play a polite role in the first situation, they move up to the top or "polite" tier. Likewise, if they play an impolite role, they move down a level from the neutral to the impolite lower tier. From the lower or upper tier, the only next available move is to either stay at the same tier or to move back to the middle, neutral tier. One cannot jump two tiers at once. Correspondingly, the player who is currently positioned on the lower or upper tier will only receive two ways to respond to the next situation, a response that will keep them where they are and a response that will move them to neutral. From the neutral position the player has three ways to move: to stay where they are in neutral, or to move down or up. The player has three corresponding ways to respond/react to the current situation.

My reasoning for this structure of only being able to move one tier at a time or to stay in the same place is Gestalt in nature. Players tend to create a character and model of response for themselves in the story that solidifies over time. Other characters in the story help this solidification to take place and a cycle starts to develop. This model is taken from real-life social situations where people's responses or reactions to character behavior, positive or negative, encourages similar behavior. The characters in the Dinner Party do the same. The situations and dialogue are suited to the development of various behavior models and many sections of dialogue are written to have multiple interpretations depending on the player's overall impression created from past interaction experiences.

Sketches and notes for narrative structure: