 And back here we come to the part of the exhibition that is focused on storytelling and game. And here we can see some wonderful historical examples. For example, this book on the left, this is Sugar Cane Island. This is the first Choose Your Own Adventure book. And this is basically, you know, before interactive stories came about. This is the prototype, you know, in the analog age. Here, you know, you would read the story, and you reach a point in the story and it says, what do you want to do? Go through the right door, go through the left door. If you want to go through the right door, you turn to page 72. If you want to go through the left door, you go to page 56. And then you skip to that page, and then there's story branches. And that's basically what's happening in an adventure game. When you're making decision notes, whether to go to the right or to the left, it's the exact same thing, only in digital form. So, you know, this is a very important historical artifact. In order to gain a better understanding of computer games narrative dimension, it is helpful to have a closer look at adventure game architecture, because this is fundamental for storytelling in games, and is at work in many other game categories, such as action adventure games, role-playing games, strategy games being played in campaign mode, or the quest structure of massively multiplayer online games. Adventure games began with the aforementioned text adventure advent in 1976. This interactive narrative, which was based upon the cave explorations of William Crowther, unfolded through the textual exchange between computer and player. Over here on this screen, we see an emulation of the classical text adventure Zork, because before games were graphical like Monkey Island, they were not all games, but adventure games were simply text-based. We would have a description by the computer of where I am. It says I'm north of house, and then we have a prompt here, where I as a player can tell them what to do. I can tell them go west and hit enter, and then he says to the west of the house, there's a small mailbox here. I'll say open mailbox, bell mailbox, mailbox, hit enter. It is already open. Okay, well, thank you. And these games are full of redundancy, where you end up feeling really stupid as a player. Okay, so they say look in mailbox, and it tells me that a small mailbox is empty. Well, that's great. You know, I've just wasted five minutes of my life. Okay, so I'll say go west again. I'm in the forest. I'll keep going west. You would need a machete to go further west. You hear in the distance the chirping of a songbird, and so on and so forth. This is a back and forth on the textual level between myself and computer program that unfolds a story. It's a rudimentary story. I don't know the protagonist's name, and, you know, but hey, it's a story. The early text adventures such as Zork from 1980 eventually became replaced by visual adventure games such as Monkey Island from 1990, where the player clicked on the screen to move her character or interact with an object as opposed to typing a command such as go west or use key on door. You can pick it up. You just have to point your cursor at it so the hand icon appears. If you left click now, you'll pick it up. There has to be an easier way. If you say so. Okay, I've picked up the duplexer, but what am I supposed to do with it now? You put it into your inventory. That's where all the items go. You've picked up that object. Now you can open your inventory by using your mouse wheel. Hey, there it is. Correct. This is your inventory. I knew that. All adventure games, whether textual or visual, share three fundamental characteristics as the media theorist Klaus Piaz has shown. First of all, they are stories in the sense that they have a beginning, middle, and end. Secondly, they are based upon maps, in other words, places, and the paths between them. Third of all, they are a series of decisions that are distributed throughout the map. And one can add all adventure games have the same underlying structure. The program architecture of these games consists of a beginning database configuration that is transformed in the course of a successfully played game according to clearly defined rules into a predetermined end configuration. Everything in the game world is managed by this database structure. Not just the objects, places, and non-player characters, but also the player's figure. The database structure needs to be successfully reconfigured in order to open up new locations on the map and new interaction possibilities for the player and to move the story forward. In accordance with the binary principle of digital computers, transistors can be on or off, zero or one. There are only discrete transitions in an adventure game. Either the conditions that the programmers defined are fulfilled or they aren't. These thresholds are decision nodes that structure the unfolding of the story. If the predetermined reconfiguration of the database structure hasn't been enacted, then the next move and the next sequence in the narrative remains unavailable. The space of an adventure game is, in essence, a labyrinth. It is a hodological space ruled by decision logic. The player traverses the story of a game by making decisions between fork and pass, such as whether to go right or left to shoot a double-crosser or let them run to trust another character or not, etc., etc. The bifurcations of the labyrinthian network structure of the game's narrative have to remain limited. They can't branch out too far, each differentiation increasing the narrative complexity exponentially, and they also must meet up at certain points until in dead ends for economical reasons. At the moment, narrative game scenes have to be pre-produced, thus limiting the number of alternatives that can be offered. This limited network structure is fundamental for storytelling in games. The nodes can have a limited number of alternatives, and the paths between the nodes can have a different length, but every alternative course of events needs to be foreseen in this network, and it does not exist. The game world in which the player performs her actions is created by the portrayal of relevant program variables and routines as virtual places, things, and processes. The symbolic chains of the program code are overlaid with a semantic layer in order to present the player with an understandable, meaningful world context with which she can interact. Thus, through a series of predetermined transformations of the game world, a story is unfolded in adventure games. The story of the game is the semantic thread that guides the player through the labyrinthine game world. It gives the player hints as to where to go, and, this is especially important, a motivation to do so. Klaus Piaz applies Roland Barthes' structural analysis to adventure games. Which divides narrative into functional segments. With this approach, we can distinguish the integrative elements from the distributional elements of adventure games, and sum up some of what we have said before. Integrative elements are only indirectly functional. They are subdivided into indications, which convey character, feeling, and atmosphere, and information, which enables the player to comprehend spatial relations and orient herself therein. The other main category, distributional elements on the other hand, are distributed functionalities that can be collected in one place and used in another. These are, for example, the objects one has to find in an adventure game, which then have to be brought to a certain place on the map and used in a certain way to make progress in the game. Whether they be keys. Something is down there in the well. I can see something sparkling. Oh man, I hope it's the key to the seller. Suitcases full of money, or rubber chickens, to use an example from Monkey Island. Don't ask me what you did with the rubber chicken, but I remember there being one. Distributional elements are subdivided into kernels, distributional segments with a chronological and logical function, such as the aforementioned game objects that have to be found in one place and used in another. All we still need is a shovel. The shovel, Lily. We'll never dig up the treasure without a shovel. I don't know where we can find a shovel, either. I'd imagine they're kept in the cellar. Now we just need to find a way to get down into the cellar. And catalysis that only have a chronological function, such as cutscenes or scripted interactive sequences. All interactive elements of an adventure game are distributional. Because of the primacy of these elements, the adventure game is closer to the functional folktale and the Homeric epos than to the psychological novel, in that it essentially consists of a series of action sequences which is why its stories were initially highly formulaic. The primacy of distributional elements influences the narrative repertoire of computer game stories. Doors, thresholds, battles with adversaries, the restoring of order in a world that has fallen into chaos, empowerment fantasies, explorative journeys to distant locations, and quests to obtain specific items are recurring themes. You should just come with me instead. I'm on a treasure hunt right now, you know? Uh-uh. Well, it's your decision. You can always come to the swing tree later when you're done here. I think I found something in the flower beds over there. Until then, see ya! The predetermined database architecture of adventure games also suggests a certain kind of story. The adventure journey as a sequential glit du passage. Specific games differ in the way in which they enact this fundamental structure. An adventure game can take place in a fairy tale setting, a paranoid cityscape, as a detective story, or as a science fiction thriller, for example. This list is by far not complete, and new games are constantly experimenting with the narrative possibilities. For example, Remember Me, which has overlaid the adventure game architecture with a psychonotic journey into the collective unconsciousness of an entire city, where the player not so much has to find objects and move them around, but rather has to find memories and rewrite them in order to progress in the game. Since, in essence, the player is retracing a preordained path, many stories revolve around an amnesiac protagonist who is trying to find out who they are, just as the player is trying to discover the narration hidden in the game world. This virtual amnesia of the player's figure corresponds to the player's ignorance of the game story, which they must uncover in the course of gameplay. Players have to reconstruct the past, find the narrative traces hidden in the game world, and piece them together. Thus, the main activity of the adventure game player is searching for the distributed narrative elements and finding them. After the spotlight on the fundamental adventure game architecture dominating storytelling in games, it must be stressed that contemporary games are pushing the boundaries on how complex gaming storytelling can be. Games such as the aforementioned Heavy Rain offer rich atmospheres and psychologically complex characters. The cornucopia of indications in the form of the four protagonists, inner monologues, and their dialogues with non-player characters move the story of this game in the direction of the psychological novel and other complex forms of narration. In addition, the game offers multiple solutions to challenges, a multitude of optional side paths, and different game endings. The player's decisions influence the unfolding of the plot, bending and stretching the story while they do so. This game is also a prime example for the steadily increasing sophistication of gaming technology and game design. David Cage developed a new method for the motion capture of facial expressions for this game, which gives the characters a new breadth and depth of emotional expression. It can be generalized. Advances in gaming technology bring new storytelling possibilities. For example, in the game LA Noir, which also devised a new way of capturing the subtleness of facial expression so that the act of deciding whether someone is lying or not could be made a central mechanic of gameplay. And this holds true for all technological innovation. Every step forward brings new narrative possibilities.