Layered Storytelling

This continues previous posts about the Space Center. Check out the full stack for additional context on this post. I’m writing to a Space Center-informed audience, so apologies if this isn’t a terrific primer on the subject.

The Space Center flights I’m familiar with from the 2000s/2010s is built around a few pieces of interaction. These pieces are generally present in every size of simulator (from 5-15 seats), varying only by degrees or intensity. For example, a larger crew tends to involve more busywork or cross-team collaboration if only to make sure people have enough things to do.

The bottleneck in classic Space Center flights has always been the ability of staff to take in, synthesize, and react to information in ways that feel organic and real. The more you automate routines in the storytelling, the easier it is for a crew to notice the seams of automation in the experience as a whole. As such, some of the layers of storytelling tend to be less developed. Future improvements to Space Center experiences could mine a lot of value out of expanding these layers, such that they are not only viable but a critical part to making the experience feel authentic and alive.

Aside: Mechanics vs. Narrative

In my mind, Space Center flights are built out of components that either fit under Narrative or under Mechanics.

• Mechanics is generally the stuff of “hard simulation” - if you take the power out of System X, it will stop working. If you work out an encryption key, you can decode a message. Physics simulations and just about anything that the software will do in any flight, automatically, fits under mechanics.
  • There are some elements in mechanics that may be performed by a human being, mostly due to the limits of automation. However, if it’s a rote operation that could be automated without compromising the experience, such things could still fit under mechanics.
• Narrative is the stuff that mostly lives in the heads of the participants (including the flight director). It involves the actors, the dialogue trees, and the meaning being made in the experience. If you can ad-lib it, or if something is only used in one part of one story (a special prop, a piece of media, or bit of software), it’s narrative.
  • There is no doubt that mechanics contribute to narrative and vice versa. However, the narrative side of things tends to involve a lot more variability between crews. For mechanics, the ship will respond in a deterministic way. For narrative, the crew and staff running the show could respond in non-deterministic ways. This is part of what makes each flight interesting.

Another way to look at it: If you fly a simulator without a flight director, you can run the engines, fix broken systems, scan for things, and more. You’re playing in a sandbox, and the sandbox responds in predictable ways when it comes to mechanics.

Once you layer in a storyteller, you’ve added the narrative layer on top of the basic mechanics, and it’s this layer that starts to bring meaning making into the picture.

One final way of putting it: Mechanics is about sense-making, while Narrative is about meaning-making.

When mechanics and narrative artfully unite, you start to achieve real-making or a total suspension of disbelief. The crew crosses the threshold into hyper-reality.1

The Layers as I See Them

You can break down the storytelling layers into the following pieces:

1. The mission narrative layer: This is the main event and the most developed layer in flight director practice. Generally this is built out of actors and a set of firm rails that define the overall flight’s progression;.
2. The solo narrative layer: This is where the side stories live. These have been around for a long time, and are also often neglected when it comes to developing the overall narrative experience. Think damage or security teams, long-range messages that go beyond the core plot, or other side quests that give the crew things to do outside of the main narrative.
3. The cross-team layer: This is where a crew has to coordinate different non-narrative simulator mechanics to accomplish a goal (including narrative goals from upper layers). Think of a damage control officer having to coordinate with engineering or power distribution as part of a repair.
4. The mini-game junk drawer: When the crew has nothing to do in the other layers, this is where they spend their time. It’s intentional busywork so that someone doesn’t get bored, but it doesn’t tend to drive the story forward and is almost entirely ignored by the simulation.

Going down the list, you get a natural spectrum from “Narrative” elements into “Mechanics” elements, though the bottom layer is usually a last resort for occupying the attention of a bored crew member.

The Mission Narrative Layer

This is the main event. “Go investigate that wormhole” or “Merchant vessels are going missing near this strange planet”. Encounters with aliens, dialogue trees, combat, and the significant plot points roll under this layer. You could write this out as a screenplay and capture it pretty well.

Mission-level narrative seems pretty well understood at this point. It’s the primary driver of conflict in the flight, and demands the most attention from the crew and staff. Writing a good mission is beyond the scope of this post, but suffice it to say that the primary narrative lives at this level, and the staff & crew spend most of their time reacting to or driving this layer forward.

That said, this layer also tends to be on hard rails, to the point that historically the main viewer would be powered by what amounts to a slide deck. Each plot point was a slide. As you advance the deck, new images come up. The amount of true choice involved in a story like this would be pretty limited to turning pages.

Ad-lib is possible at this layer to a degree, but that’s usually the “glue” that bridges gaps between crew reactions and the next fixed point in the plot. A true story from 26 (?) years ago: our crew needed to negotiate with an alien that was visiting our massive space station. This space station had a million different things happening at any given time, including this alien trader who (for reasons lost to me at this point) needed to negotiate with us.

A massive figure entered the bridge (probably two teenage staff members with one sitting on the other’s shoulders), cloaked in black with a mask. The figure made gestures and spoke gibberish, with the main computer translating for them. I don’t remember much about the encounter, apart from the fact that we made an exchange. We got what we needed to keep the mission moving forward, and the alien would get a shipment of Slurpees (yes, the frozen gas station drink).

I’m pretty sure slurpees weren’t in the original mission script. Maybe they were, I have no clue. The point is that it was funny and a bit weird, and it stuck with me to this day (more than anything else in the story, really!). That “glue” became a memorable moment beyond the “rails” of whatever fixed plot points I missed.

The Solo Narrative Layer

This layer has existed for a long time, however in my experience it’s a struggle to develop this well. It requires a lot of expertise and coordination from the staff behind the scenes to execute well, and their attention tends to be fixed to the mission narrative layer.

Even so, this is where things start to get interesting in Space Center flights. Most flights tend to run such a strong main mission, but individual players often miss a lot of that main story because they are so engrossed in their own work. There’s not enough time to get the whole crew on the same page about what’s going on, all the time, so it gets missed.

This is where the solo narrative layer can be an interesting tool for developing the individual experiences of participants. This narrative layer is told through the individual workstations, often through interacting with non-player characters (NPCs) communicating over text-based chat.

The classic example is the “Damage teams” station. If something breaks on the ship, the bridge damage control officer isn’t responsible for getting it fixed. Instead, the bridge officer dispatches a fictional team of characters to fix the damage. Individuals with specific skills may be called upon to fix the damage.

This creates a sort of mini-game experience, matching skills to things needing repair. There’s a whole world of mechanics that unfold in this layer as a result. However, at the narrative level, there’s also rich opportunity to create drama.

For example, a water pipe breaks in a crew cabin on a lower deck. The bridge officer dispatches a plumber to the cabin to fix it, but the crew member occupying the cabin has some bias against that plumber for some reason. Now, the bridge officer is stuck in the middle of some interpersonal conflict, and the path forward could be anything from “We will send someone else” to trying to navigate that conflict with the parties involved.

These interleaving pieces can start to layer into other parallel storylines for other bridge officers as part of the next layer of storytelling.

A mission-aware solo narrative layer can help participants keep track of what’s going on in the main narrative if they’re getting lost (Our plumber might throw in an aside, “Did you hear we decided to not go back to earth? What’s up with that?”).

The key goal of this layer is actually aimed at what happens after the crew leaves their uniforms and returns to reality. All too often, crew members start exchanging notes about “what just happened?!?” after they finish their flight. This chatter to make sense of the whole experience, and all the layers of what just happened, helps sell the whole experience and has surprising retention value for returning on another flight. You realize just how much you missed and you want to come back and fly a different flight.

Flights built in a way that they are also inherently replayable could make this even more interesting, as the crew could try different paths through the same story if they wanted to.

This post-flight chatter is hard to undersell if you don’t know what I’m talking about. In my experience, every crew goes through a decompression phase after their flight. Field trips can’t stop talking about the experience, and replaying the encounters and experiences they just had. It’s rather remarkable, and it lasted enough after the field trip that students would convince their parents to sign up for summer or overnight camps, or a birthday party.

As such, don’t underestimate the side stories - they layer in the complexity in a way that primes the post-flight conversations, getting people talking and comparing notes to make sense and meaning out of the whole thing.

The Cross-Team Layer

As a crew engages in a flight, they often need to collaborate to meet mission objectives. This can happen verbally or just in person, but it often happens in the form of paperwork or handoffs between stations. For example, a damage control officer may hand off a note to the communications officer to call a lower deck and notify that deck that water will be turned off as part of a repair. Once the repair is complete, an “all clear” message can be broadcast as well.

Those rote steps are less interesting than finding ways to generate emergent collaboration between stations. This is another area that is underdeveloped but extremely important in how the software itself is designed.

Recent developments on power distribution in Thorium Nova exemplify how tweaking a longstanding station design can drive more cross-crew collaboration. Whereas previously the bridge power distribution officer would react to requests or needs from across the bridge to adjust power levels, the proposed model inverts this to a degree. The net effect is that the crew has to collaborate more effectively with each other in order to ensure power is not overdrawn.

This stands at one end of a spectrum in this layer, with “more paperwork” being another. Turning these handoffs into more of a negotiation in the right places (Two systems have conflicting power needs, so the crew has to make a trade-off) has a lot of power to enhancing narrative complexity.

This is especially true if the trade-offs being made have consequences on the solo storylines being maintained by each crew member.

The Mini-Game Junk Drawer

This is where we send crew members to do very little that’s actually useful. I remember a grid of sparks that I had to flip switches against, or asking crew members to perform other sorts of busy work. This is a last-resort layer, and in my opinion it should be used quite sparingly if ever. If we can’t keep a crew engaged with the other layers, then perhaps the crew is too big and we have a broader design problem on the flight.

Some of these mini-games can be useful in the sense that a player may feel like they are doing something useful to help advance the story. I think that the key factor with such activities boils down to this:

1. Is there a real narrative reason to engage in the activity?
2. Does it introduce intentional friction to control the pacing of the story?

• Example: We really need to decode a message to advance the story, and tension is building while we work to break the code.

3. Can the flight director control how much friction is involved and, thus, control the resulting pacing?

By narratively justifying these mini-games, we can elevate them from busywork to meaningful activities. That said, we must be extremely intentional here so that we aren’t just loading a room full of crew and computers, and then not having anyone talk to anyone else as part of the experience. Mini games tend to be solo affairs, so unless the crew is paying attention to that solo affair (“Decode the message! Quick!”) or the activity is part of a collaboration of some other kind, such activities would need some other strong justification to not be considered total junk and useless to the overall experience.

Conclusion

These are the layers as I see them. I think that future advancements in space center narrative design and storytelling could live in finding ways to increase cross-crew collaboration (without bogging down individual crew members with busywork), and especially finding ways to build the solo storytelling that happens within each crew member’s head. Such solo storytelling develops the post-flight conversation, which gets crews talking about just how much layering happened along the way.