Improving Computer Game Narrative Using Polti Ratios - Review

Link:

http://gamestudies.org/0801/articles/hall_baird

This article is making reference to Georges Polti's 36 Dramatic Situations, which are 36 different situations that can be typically found in any story:

http://www.changingminds.org/disciplines/storytelling/plots/polti_situations/polti_situations.htm

and initially propose the theory that if people can explain what is going on in terms of at least one of Polti’s units then the object that they are engaged with can be labelled a story.

- How this article is deciphering between a story and a game (initially)


There may not have been a lot of quotes that I thought were useful to me from this article however, I did find it interesting. This is due to the method of creating their very own ratio to decide how good/exciting a game's narrative is. It might be worth me looking into this ratio and applying it to my game and see what I come up with.

Polti Ratios (Taken from article): 

Level of Drama(LoD)= P/E
Variety of Drama(VoD)= U/36
Involvement in Drama(IiD)= U/(M+5*C)

1 Identify as many Polti units as possible P.
2 Identify (roughly) the number of events E.
3 From P, identify the unique units U.
4 Count and categorise the characters as major M or minor C.
5 Plug all these numbers into the Polti ratios.

Second, how do we think about improving these ratios? To improve the ”dramaticality” towards the Polti-ideal story we want P and U to increase as much as possible while E,M and C are minimal. We propose the following five steps:

1 Eliminate irrelevant Polti’s units with respect to the story.
2 Propose additional units with justification to increase M.
3 Consider the implications of proposing these units on the number of characters (M and C).
1 Reach some sort of satisfactory trade-off between additional units and characters.
2 Plug the new numbers into the Polti ratios and compare the abstract reconceived story with the original story.

We now give a worked example of exactly this sort of story reconceptualisation, taking an input story for a computer game, manually extracting our metrics, considering how to increase our LoD, VoD and IiD, and factoring in other constraints. We then present a later version of the story which has been created for this computer game.