Blog - Improv and Games: Scaling Issues

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

As I mentioned before, I like to think about how improvisational acting and games are related, as, well, I do both at school. I've been running SCAD's Improv Club for a couple years now and was involved with a touring improv troupe long before that.

In any case, I think improvisational performance is a good resource for people interested in game design. After all, it does deal with how participants, both actors and to a lesser degree the audience, can interact with a dynamic story.

Not to mention that improvisational performances are games in their own right, which is a topic I plan on discussing eventually.

In any case, given as I have a lot to say on improv and games, it will become another sort of series for this blog: 'Improv and Games' (just follow the label "improv").


This one is on what improvisational theater can teach about scaling.

You'll note I did talk about scaling issues involved with using improv in digital games in the blog post of mine I linked to above, and also in its follow-up post.

However, this post is more about the scaling issues in improv games themselves.

It was brought to light in my mind as today in my Digital Art and Culture class we had a discussion on an excerpt we had read from Brenda Laurel's Computers as Theatre. The discussion at one point lead to how, if audience is to interact with a story, to keep everything from falling apart (a question tackled by game writer/designers all the time). You know, with those damn players and their agency screwing up our beautiful works of art. ;)

I mentioned in the discussion my experience with improv and how improv handles such problems.
My professor made a very good point though in response where he said that he found when he has worked with actors or those in theater on a performance that involved improvisation, that the more people added into the mix, the more difficult it got to coordinate.

This should not be a foreign concept to anyone in game development, as it is not only true for the development team itself, but in game design there is the concept of scaling: How well the game can support different numbers of players.

It is a phenomenon I experience in many of my games, during testing, but has been most powerfully true with Project Loyola, being as that one is massively multiplayer. That's a whole different and rather scary animal.



Now, most game designers know that games can teach.
Improv games are indeed used as teaching tools (if not directly constructed for that purpose, although I'd assume they are), so the participants can learn the craft of acting (often just to learn to become better at improv itself, ironically.)

One game that it interesting to look at in regards to scaling is the improv game "Superheroes", which is a great tool for teaching improv performers how to deal with keeping control, especially in the face of scaling issues.
I've picked that game to discuss here, as many of you might already be familiar with that one as it is often used in the popular show Whose Line is it Anyway?.

For those unfamiliar: One actor starts, and the audience provides the fictional superhero identity for that actor (let's say Cheese Man for our example) as well as the crisis that Cheese Man and the other heroes will have to solve. The scene begins and the actor will first improvise a bit to introduce the audience to his own personal clever interpretation of what a superhero called Cheese Man might be, and then quickly discovers the crisis (the inciting incident, so to speak.)

At that point, another actor will jump into the scene. Actor 1 (Cheese Man, in our example) will announce some variation of "Thank God you're here ___!" with the blank being filled by a spontaneous superhero identity for actor 2 (like "Sir Cries-a-lot", or something). This pattern is followed for a while, where the previous actor gives a spontaneous new identity to each new actor as they join the scene, until the last actor's spontaneously generated superhero character (traditionally) devises a solution to the problem (that often involves all the bizarre characters in the scene.)
With crisis solved, one by one all the actors make their exit, in the reverse-order by which they appeared, until the original actor (Cheese Man, in our example) wraps up the scene.

Now, having run this game enough times as the host of a club of amateur improv enthusiasts, it is interesting to see what happens with the final actor who enters the scene.
This is, although few people realize it until they have plenty of experience with the game, because that actor is the central peg upon which the game succeeds or fails -not the first actor.
(Ironically, it is usually the least experienced player who gets the part of this critical final actor, because they're less confident about their abilities so they wait to jump into the scene until they're the only one left...)

The reason the last player in this game is critical is, as you may have guessed, a matter of scaling. They not only have to fight more for their audience attention amidst the chaos of all the other actors in the scene, but also have to coordinate all those other actors towards a solution, advancing the story, allowing the scene to end.
Time and time again, I've seen this actor fail at herding the other actors to a solution, making for a game which drags on at this point, and falls apart.

It is also telling just see the dynamics of how improv games succeed and fail (and where they succeeded or failed) compared to how many players play in that particular game. Games with two actors "play" differently than those with three, four, etc. More than four and less than two (solo/monologue scenes) actors are the most difficult scenes to maintain.

That, however, is why "Superheroes" is interesting as it is one of the few games (although not the only one) that runs the entire range of scaling. It starts as the ever difficult one-actor scene, adds another actor for a "two player" scene, then three, then four, then up to the again difficult five, etc. Then, it works its way one by one back down into a one-actor scene. All the while, the dynamics of scaling are shifting, throbbing and changing.
As an outside observer or participant you can witness how these dynamics effect the game for better (for example at two/three actors how they play off one another to build the scene or comedy) or for the worse (the struggle for the final actor to tug the scene towards its conclusion).

"Superheroes" and the nature of the final actor in the scene may even present a kind of law: the more players in the game, the more powerful a facilitator is needed to manage those players.
The final actor in a game of "Superheroes" is intended to be the facilitator, although if ineffective, another actor must step up and take on the role.

Most improv games, however, don't have any one facilitator, and ask all players to collaboratively manage the game. (Coincidentally, that is what a game like "Superheroes" is used to teach: how to bring or maintain order in a scene)
For one other great example, look at the improv game "Entrances and Exits", which I choose as a specific example here because the entire core of that game is about how players enter and leave the game, shifting the dynamics as they shift the number of players in the game.
The players themselves are in charge of how many players are in the game at any one point, particularly when an actor chooses to leave the game on their own. (Interestingly, the mechanics of the game dictate that an actor can't return to the game on their own: another actor has to bring them in. This causes some of the weirder dynamics of that particular game.)

So yeah, there's some food for thought for you, fellow game designers.
Just one of many examples to come where I'll talk about what improvisational theater can teach about designing games.

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 5:24 PM  0 Comments Links to this post