SWAT 4: The Movie, by Pentadact, who is secretly Tom Francis

Graham: This made no sense to me until I read the title -- and then it was very, very funny. Just reminds me of how much potential there is in game-to-movie adaptations. I've often wondered why no one has ever written a film like this. Some sorry writer is commissioned to port some ridiculous game license to the silver screen, and rather than use it as an excuse to do something original, they always seem to try too hard to turn it into some wholly uninteresting action movie slog. I suppose it's clueless producers that are to blame, but given that they so often pick the most unlikely candidates to turn into films, one wonders why no one has gone at least a little Kaufman-esque.

Aubrey: Interesting, interesting.

To me, this makes a very good point about generative narrative. This piece reads more like an "account of events" than a story.

So, if you want to generate a good story, you leave out the insignificant actions. Like, can anyone tell me at what point Jack Bauer takes a shit in 24? You can never tell! Maybe he holds it in all day? Maybe we don't have to care about Jack's shit at all.

So they skip the shit because it's insignificant. That's not to say it can't *be* significant - if Jack's been holding it in for a month, his demeanor will probably change, post shit, so his shit is significant, and story-worthy. (If I had a shit after that length of time, I would probably WANT a film crew to film it, too.)

So, what I'm saying is, generative storytelling through gameplay should see the game trying to anticipate what actions are significant, and highlight and support them for the player. At the same time it should be taking the insignificant and make it significant so that there's no boring train of similar actions. If people are picking up and dropping items in the game world, creating boring pieces of story ("Player1 picked up the pen. Player1 then placed the pen down again. Player1 picked up the pen again. Thoughtfully, Player1 put it down once more"), couldn't an NPC become significantly annoyed at this that they provoke the player into doing something more interesting? (Enpeecee said to Player1 "Stop Messing around, f4g0t. Some nazi war criminals are walking past the window!".)

James

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