Abduction and Game Stories

I was recently reading this article on the escapist. It talks about abduction as a form of reasoning. The verb form is abduce, so it isn’t related to the abduction that’s frequently performed by aliens. Basically, abductive reasoning is when you take two unconnected facts, especially facts that don’t seem to belong together, and infer a state of the world that would connect the two facts. It gets used a lot in tabletop roleplaying. Like when the gamemaster says “Everyone shows up in this town that has a fair going on.” And you say to yourself “Why would my character show up in a town that has a fair?” And you come up with a good in-character reason for your character to be in the town.

Right, so it’s the process of connecting two previously unrelated facts. This is the very process that forms the basis for the procedural stories in Tales of Sigma Draconis. And now I have a name for it. My thought is that if the system can generate loosely related events, like events concerning the same item, or same group, etc. Then the player will use abductive reasoning to provide the causal linkage between the events.

I imagine it working similar to how cuts work in film. Lev Kuleshov was a Russian filmmaker who performed an experiment wherein he took a shot of an actor with a blank expression. He then intercut that footage with shots of other things, like food, a child, a coffin, a woman, etc. It was the exact same shot of the blank faced actor each time, but the audience perceived the actor as showing different emotions based on what the actor appeared to be looking at. The same sort of thing happens with montages, we see a series of shots that are loosely related, by featuring the same characters, or same location, or similar theme, etc. and we view them as depicting change over time.

So my thought is that if you take two story events, that are loosely related, then the mind will abductively fill in the causality between them, leaving the player with the impression of a continuous story. I’m planning on having the world not take itself too seriously, because if the world itself is somewhat strange, then tenuously related events or non sequiturs will hopefully be more easily accepted. In any case, I think that the system can’t do too much worse than many of the video game plots written by actual humans.

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