Bug-Induced Environmental Storytelling

When driving home from GDC on Friday night, the iPod shuffle started playing the Dungeon Theme from Ultima VI. Of course I started to reminiscence, and with our environmental storytelling lecture fresh on my mind, I remembered something that strongly relates to the topic of our talk. You see, I played Ultima VI on the Amiga – and that is very important in all of this.

Dismissed as technically infeasible and not financially viable early on, Origin eventually released the Amiga version of Ultima VI two years after the original PC version. I loved it, but the conversion did come at a price: some music had to be cut to fit into memory, dungeons with many enemies often slowed to a crawl (forcing the player to wait as long as 10 seconds between moves), and the game had a few bugs. One of those bugs is of particular interest here: Ultima VI, on the Amiga, liked to duplicate inventories. Every couple of hours, upon either loading or saving the game, the party would end up with two versions of every inventory item they had possessed. But rather than celebrating this unexpected gift from the heavens, I cried foul! As the Avatar, I wasn’t in the business of saving Britannia through cheap tricks. So I diligently went through my belongings, character after character, weeded out the duplicate items, and dropped them on the ground. Of course the game saved all those item locations, and after a while I had “taboo” item caches all over the world, reminding me of my journey thus far I returned to the various towns and dungeons.

Is that environmental storytelling? Many of the criteria are met: disparate environmental elements are associated into a larger whole (the item caches and knowledge of my earlier cleanups combine into a story with additional meaning); the moment echoes the world at large (as the embodiment of virtues and fair play, the Avatar decided to forfeit unfair advantages); and the act of reflection gains meaning through player reference (only I know the true meaning of these item caches, but other observers might infer a different chain of events).

But this isn’t pre-authored environmental storytelling, as we discuss in section 3 of our talk. And is isn’t fully systemic, either, as discuss in section 4 (although the player does contribute to the history making of the world through a game system). The environmental storytelling situation emerges from a bug and through player choice.

What I find especially cool about this example is how the game and real world converge. Player and player character act as one: as the Avatar, I’m supposed to play a virtuous person. Embodying those values leads to my real-world actions as the player. And when looking back at my earlier actions through the filter of the resulting environmental storytelling, the reflection gains additional meaning: I don’t just recall the state of my party, which quest I was on etc. when I left these items. I am also reflecting on my virtuous, noble acts as a player/Avatar. Surely other players would simply have kept all the extra items and sold them for profit?

It’s a great example of how a fully fleshed out world, with an evocative premise, helps the player contextualize events, even when those events are outside the game’s intended possibility space. And the player-authored environmental storytelling – rather than breaking the suspension of disbelief – actually helps to sell the event. Not all games with unintended/unconventional environmental storytelling work out like this (in fact, this example might be the exception of the rule). But in this case, the results were both unexpected and cool – and I attribute that largely to the immersiveness of Britannia, and the sense of character that Ultima creates.