4
Branching Storylines
The new simulation that the US Army proposed to Paramount Pictures and the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), as a redirection of ALTSIM (Advanced Leadership Training Simulation) was called Leaders. Leaders is in many ways a dramatic departure from preceding story-driven simulations.
The simulation was set in the field, and so the device of using mock computer networks as media presentation systems became unworkable. What had to happen instead was that the whole field operation had to be turned into a 3D virtual environment with participants given a complete captain’s-eye-view of the world. In other words, Leaders ended up looking very much like a 21st-century video game. To allow participants to “talk to” the nonplayer characters (NPCs) within the simulation, ICT researchers developed a natural language interface that permitted a freewheeling exchange between the commanding officer (CO) and subordinates. It used sophisticated text recognition software to understand words and sentences that participants typed into the system.
Early in the design of the simulation the ICT, Paramount, and their Army advisors decided that the participants should actually be given a broader view than the first-person perspective of the commanders they were portraying. Participants were allowed to see events that were out of the field of view of their characters, if those events helped set up the story or reinforce the teaching points. This practice is a common convention of commercial computer games where characters will often suddenly and dramatically switch from a first-person perspective to a god’s-eye-view of the world.
To be able to deal with each individual decision-making element of the simulation, the team members created a formal structure for each block of the story. They called these “molecules” and all molecules began with a setup scene, which provided background information for the given situation. Each molecule then progressed to a point where the leader had to make a decision. The decision was prompted by a question from one of the commander’s NPC subordinates. At that point the leader would type in a response in his or her “own words.” When the response was recognized by the system, the appropriate NPC subordinate delivered a verbal acknowledgment. The story then branched to an appropriate outcome scene that gave a sense of the consequences of the decision. Within the conversation between the CO and NPC subordinates, there was room for questions and answers, more details, and even some instruction.
Figure 4.1 Basic structure of a molecule of Leaders content showing the key decision and the surrounding media elements.
In 2002 and early 2003, when ALTSIM was working through complex research issues relating to the exercise of free will within the confines of a story-driven simulation, the ICT was experiencing great success in some of its other projects. Full Spectrum Warrior, a first-person game that showed troop deployment in battlefield situations, became an extremely successful learning simulation as well as a commercial game and its success probably influenced the decision to make the Leaders project a battlefield simulation. A second project called CLAS (Think Like a Commander—Excellence in Leadership) presented a dramatic portrayal of a leadership decision gone awry.
The research team at the ICT chose the story from the CLAS exercise as a perfect scenario for the Leaders project. The exercise began with an ICT original film called Power Hungry, produced by Kim LeMasters from a script by Jay Douglas and LeMasters and directed by Hollywood TV heavyweight Chuck Bowman (Dr. Quinn, Nash Bridges, The Profiler). The project was lead by the deputy research director of the ICT, Dr. Randy Hill, working with Dr. Andrew Gordon (who also served as the chief researcher on Leaders).
In the film Power Hungry, a commander receives an emergency assignment to manage a humanitarian food distribution operation in Afghanistan. The previous commander has become ill and has to be airlifted out. The distribution operation is set to begin the morning after the Captain arrives. The Captain’s immediate subordinates begin his first day by confronting him with a series of questions about the logistics of the operation. A humanitarian organization had dispatched a convoy carrying truckloads of food toward the site. The trucks are due within a few hours. The Captain has to determine the best allocation of troops to prepare the site. They need to string barbed wire for crowd control, they have to maintain the security of the route into the site, and they need to manage a large crowd of local villagers who have already begun assembling to receive food. The operation is suddenly complicated by the appearance of a local warlord who wants to participate in the operation. The appearance of this new personality presents a dangerous distraction for the locals and for the Captain and soldiers. In Power Hungry, a series of bad leadership decisions causes the situation to deteriorate rapidly. The warlord is not dealt with adequately and so he remains as a destabilizing influence at the site. The trucks show up early, the crowd rushes the trucks, shots are fired, and what was to be a peaceful and humanitarian food distribution operation begins to turn into an international incident.
In the CLAS exercise, an interesting set of interactive interviews with virtual characters from the film allows participants to investigate the disaster and figure out what the Captain did wrong.
The CLAS exercise was judged to be highly successful by the Army and the participants.
“But wouldn’t it be great,” suggested Dr. Bill Swartout, ICT Director of Technology, “if we could simulate the entire food distribution operation, create virtual characters that carry out the bidding of the new commander, and even allow a participant to become the commander and make the critical decisions? Wouldn’t it be even better if we could do this in such a way that bad decisions would lead to the same negative outcomes as those seen in the film, but good decisions would lead to a successful operation?”
Content for the CLAS project was assembled by a research team that visited the United States Military Academy at West Point. The team included Dr. Randy Hill and Dr. Andrew Gordon from the ICT. The men conducted interviews with commanders returning from the field. The interviews were condensed and distilled into 63 teaching points. The most relevant of the teaching points were applied to the Power Hungry video scenario created for CLAS. But the new Leaders project could allow exploration of all 63 points.
The creative team from Paramount (consisting of Nick Iuppa, Gershon Weltman, writer and co-author Terry Borst and Janet Herrington), joined by Dr. Gordon and research associate Brian Magerko, sorted the 63 teaching points into five chapters based on the commonality of their content. From these organized sets of teaching points the team then built a branching storyline in which each teaching point had only two possible outcomes. The first pair of outcomes led to another level of outcomes and then to another until there were four levels of outcomes per chapter. This meant that the participant would make four decisions before reaching the end of each chapter.
At the end of the chapter, the points all led to a common global event that brought all the possible branches back together and enabled the next chapter to start at a single point. This collapsing down of the branching storyline at the end of every chapter made it possible for the elaborate simulation to progress without growing into an unmanageable structure.
To fit the wide variety of leadership decisions into the Leaders simulation it was necessary to expand the basic Power Hungry scenario. To this end the Paramount team extended the story back into the previous evening. This allowed the inclusion of several personnel issues that were among the teaching points. Some individual soldiers would have important roles to play in the next day’s operation and so the management of these soldiers and their problems could be seen to have a direct bearing on the outcome of the simulation.
Another challenge faced by the Paramount team was the need to determine exactly how the warlord could affect the mission and how the Captain could take advantage of his presence to make the operation a success. Since the story within the Power Hungry film was in fact a disaster scenario, the possible positive effects of the warlord’s presence were never fully explored. Working out the events that could lead to a positive outcome required additional research with military experts as well as good, hard story development.
Figure 4.2 Organization of a single chapter of the Leaders story flow showing the branching of the decisions leading back to a single event that allows the next chapter to begin at a single point.
The Paramount team also had to identify those especially dramatic teaching points that could serve to control the dramatic arc of the story. In addition, they had to place those teaching points at strategic moments within the simulation story so that they would provide the growing sense of drama and urgency needed to create dramatic tension.
The Paramount team also saw opportunities to create special challenges for the Captain in his relationships with his direct subordinates. They found related teaching points and included those elements as well.
Much was made in discussions with the military about the Hollywood formula for building exciting stories and the way it would be employed in the Leaders project. The screenwriter on this project (experienced in television and interactive videogames) applied a classic Hollywood story development approach to the Leaders simulation. This approach required that there be rising tension through out each chapter, building to a point of climax at which point the global event would occur.
Figure 4.3 3D virtual world representation of the food distribution site in Afghanistan, which is the training ground for participants in the Leaders simulation.
Since the events were organized into a branching storyline it was necessary that each event flowed logically into the next and that each event built dramatically on the previous event. Although the screenwriter was scripting the simulation, the entire Paramount team designed the story. This is actually a very common practice in Hollywood screenwriting, especially in television where writing teams develop the story before a single writer creates the final script.
The story development team had to arrange the events (molecules) in each path of the story into a classic narrative arc, rising to a climatic moment. The task then was to (1) look at the content of events that were grouped together because they all dealt with the same kinds of skills and problems, (2) establish links between them so that they shared common characters, (3) order them so that the complexity and drama of the problem escalated, and (4) find a way to tell a dramatic story about each set of events. This daunting organizational and creative task was carried out by the story design team over a period of months, until there were complete flowcharts of each chapter with teaching points tied to characters and related types of problems and story issues that built dramatically from one to the next and the next and so on. The details of this activity are spelled out in Chapter Seven of this book.
As a validity check, the teaching points were cross-referenced against a classification of leadership skills that had been prepared by the Army and published in Practical Intelligence in Everyday Life (Sternberg et al., 2000), a text on tacit knowledge. This was done to make sure that each participant would be exposed to teaching points from each skill classification no matter which path their decisions took them on. The matrix of the task classifications, teaching points, and leadership skills was refined repeatedly through the course of the content development.
While the Paramount team was creating the final story for the simulation, a group of very creative graphic artists within the ICT, under the direction of Kurosh ValaNejad, began constructing the environment in which the simulation was to play out. They built a 3D model of the encampment for the company that was conducting the operation. They built the food distribution site in such a way that the semi-autonomous characters from within the story could complete the construction of the site. And then they built those characters as well. (Building a virtual 3D world will be discussed further in Chapter Twenty-Four.)
More sophisticated lead characters were fully scripted and their performances were acted out within the framework of the story as though they were animated characters operating within a conventional feature film. As in previous story-driven simulations done by Paramount for the military, character development included the creation of a complete character bible that explained the background and motivation of each major character.
The audio for the characters was recorded by professional actors who read through the hundreds of pages of alternate responses that the screenwriter wrote for every imagined eventuality, along with other responses needed to accommodate unanticipated input from the participants.
The complete set of questions and responses were turned into a text role-playing game and posted on several military training websites. Officers were asked to play the game and this gameplay helped “train” the engine that was driving the natural language interface. Additionally, the gameplay identified hundreds of other responses that needed to be authored to round out the complete database of Leaders verbal content.
As a further challenge to the Leaders development effort, the ICT decided to assemble the simulation using Narratoria, a new authoring tool created by Martin van Velsen, and a team of computer engineers at the ICT. (Narratoria is discussed further in Chapter Twenty-Six.) Narratoria took the script elements, the 3D world that was created, the characters, and the audio elements that made up the speeches of the characters and brought them all together into a working simulation. The assembled simulation was then repeatedly tested to debug its performance and to help identify scenes that could use a more dramatic rendering.
Roland Lesterlin, a Hollywood director, directed the performance of the actors for the audio elements of the simulation and staged the scenes. That is, he set dramatic camera angles and lighting and positioned the characters in order to give the simulation a Hollywood appearance. Lesterlin accomplished these tasks through the simulation integration system in Narratoria.
Figure 4.4 A diagram of the control architecture used to assemble and run the Leaders simulation.
The Leaders simulation and its underlying technology were successfully completed in September 2004 and today form the basis of serious game projects.
SUMMARY
The redirection of the ALTSIM simulation turned it from a computer-based command center simulation into a computer game set in the field of a 3D virtual world. The new simulation was called Leaders and adapted its story from an already successful training film called Power Hungry. In creating the interactive Leaders simulation, the Paramount team adopted all 63 teaching points that the ICT researchers had gathered for the development of the dramatic film that was used in its successful CLAS exercise. By classifying and organizing these points and dramatizing them through the use of realistic characters and events, the team then provided a story outline, which the screenwriter turned into a compelling set of scripts. The scripts were assembled into an interactive game through the use of a new authoring tool called Narratoria, created by the ICT. The same tool also integrated the graphics and audio tracks and text recognition engine into a final working simulation prototype by the end of 2004.