Toward Prose Performances: Reflective Practices in Social Simulation Jasmine T. Otto1,* , Isaac J. Karth1 Abstract Social simulation is a field with many challenges. On the one hand, simulations are deeply technical and challenging to work with, and yet they are also exceedingly varied. This position paper draws on existing literature to identify two ‘simulation rhetorics’ which enable interactive dramas, and other systems involving social models, to make compelling claims about our social lives. These are the appearance of emergent behavior and the experience of world-building, which each depend upon the dual role played by the interactive drama’s author as both its designer and its critic. In the process, we identify both technical threats and evaluation problems facing social simulation researchers, due in part to the high bar set by prior art. This paper seeks to collect craft knowledge on social simulation from throughout its history, in order to address what simulation does for reflective practitioners by enabling deep forms of expression. Keywords Social simulation, Critical technical practice, Open-endedness, 1. Introduction engaged in an reflective design practice with deeply inter- disciplinary roots across both games and human-computer This position paper examines the expressive potentials of interaction. text-based social simulation from various lenses of devel- This position paper is divided into four sections, each opment and design. Although social simulation work con- containing the requisite background to make its claim. Sec- tinues to enter the literature, it is hard to understand why tions 2 and 3 deal with the challenges of authoring for we make these, or how we should evaluate them, without the complex technical systems which are used to produce a clearer account of what authoring does. While the techni- both expressive character animations and speculative mod- cal systems are artistically compelling in their own right, els of social worlds. Sections 4 and 5 contain discussions what questions are we trying to answer, and how will we of worlding through fictional role-playing, and what the know when we have answered them? This paper draws strengths of text and prose might be in relationship to these on prior works from diverse domains ranging from com- forms of authoring. This paper’s conclusion addresses puter graphics systems, to natural language processing, and social simulation authorship as a critical technical practice, transmedial theories of interactive media. These sources drawing on Philip Agre’s definition [2] of a reflective design of context enable us to address how the critical technical process mediated by technical artifacts. By their nature, practice of social simulation may strengthen claims made games and simulations require an experiencer; yet when by technical games research about its unique relevance to author(s) themselves are the intended experiencer of a given questions of deep personal expression. artifact, what standard of evaluation is actually possible? This discussion is made more challenging by typical dis- This paper addresses social simulation authors and other tinctions between designers and critics: the designer who practicing artists, as well as social simulation researchers merely creates the performance, and the critic who merely who seek to ground claims about the expressive potential consumes it. An example of a videogame which queers this of this emerging medium in the extensive literature of both distinction is offered by The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind technical games research and games media theory. This (2002), a commercial immersive simulation which ships with paper aims to support nuanced discussions of the deeply the original content-authoring tools used by its development technical, richly expressive practice of social simulation, team. A metafictional flourish within the lore of the game- and to unpack the differences between research agendas world is the concept of CHIM, a transcendent metaphysical that lead in this direction. state which obliquely describes a character who has realized they are the avatar of a developer or player with access to said authoring tools (e.g. the trickster-god Vivec, an NPC 2. Character Behavior Authoring and the occasional avatar of designer Michael Kirkbride1 ). Drawing on a term from Nordic live-action roleplaying People tell stories from a very young age. Imagine a child (LARP), we see that CHIM may describe bleed between the who has just thrown their dinner to the ground, screaming; author-as-player (who experiences the fictional world as perhaps you would like to know why? It is socially im- their in-game character), and the author-as-designer (who perative to account for our own actions, past a certain age. experiences the game-world as a malleable fiction) [1]. Ac- Yet these explanations will require substantial introspection cording to LARP tenets, the player and the designer are about internal faculties like righteous anger and existential never really separate people, but simply two roles that every dread that do not particularly like to explain themselves. co-author of the simulation game must shift fluidly between. Perhaps this explains a tendency among AI researchers to Thus, we posit that practitioners of social simulation, as the underestimate how incapable virtual agents are at account- authors of technical systems and role-playing games, are ing for their own behavior. Based on her work with the Oz Project and notably pre- 11th Experimental Artificial Intelligence in Games Workshop, November figuring explainable AI, Sengers describes agents with in- 19, 2024, Lexington, Kentucky, USA. creasingly large repertoires of behaviors as getting more * Corresponding author. $ jtotto@ucsc.edu (J. T. Otto); isaackarth@gmail.com (I. J. Karth) and more obtuse: “Programmers can create robust, subtle, © 2024 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License effective and expressive behaviors, but the agent’s overall Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). 1 https://www.imperial-library.info/content/trial-vivec behavior tends to fall apart gradually as more behaviors are CEUR ceur-ws.org Workshop ISSN 1613-0073 Proceedings combined” [3]. She explains that divide-and-conquer meth- not merely replicate capitalism as a social order, but also ods of software engineering inherently tend to strip away serves as a vessel through which retellings authors articulate the relationship of one action to the next, which is essential critique and imagine how things might be otherwise. to integrating sequences of behaviors. Therefore, Sengers Simulations and retellings are not entirely extricable from employs the lens of narrative psychology, which seeks to one another. World-building itself is an act of transfictional avoid reducing patients to a mechanistic set of rules. The storytelling [12], such as the multiple competing lines of in- agents should not forget what they were doing, nor fail to universe propaganda which supported the launch of Deus make up their minds. This lens in turn supports the design Ex: Human Revolution. Maj goes on to argue that emergent of dramatic agents, which must (seem to) possess their own narrative belongs not only to Umburto Eco and other au- narratives. thors, but also to readers who regularly produce crossovers In the course of behavior authoring, it is critical to un- between worlds, select personal vantage points, and other- derstand the legibility of individual character actions, re- wise immerse themselves in fictional worlds. Kreminski and gardless of graphical or textual representation. Even though Mateas likewise claim that interactive storytelling deliber- domain-specific languages have been created which take up ately conflates player experiences with authorship, by clev- these concerns, such as ABL for joint character actions [4] erly inviting retellings of emergent narrative experiences and Gertie for character animation [5], they have not (to within the bounds of a shared model of the world [13]. our knowledge) seen independent reproduction, at least If social simulation models are really worth evaluating, not in the research literature, despite the technical problem then the element of reflection is impossible to elide. Mur- evidently being tractable. ray’s aesthetic categories of immersion, agency, and transfor- The high cost of graphical fidelity to action is another mation are not structural properties of the narrative artifact, culprit in non-reproduction. It is more common to see fully- but rather aesthetic effects experienced by the critic [14]. animated 3D characters in the behavior-authoring literature Transformation, as Mateas interprets it, is a difficult cate- than say, 2D paper dolls2 or screenshots of visual novels3 . gory because it deals with the critic taking on other perspec- We argue that it is entirely reasonable and prudent to cut tives in a variety of ways. Bad News [15] models a large down the asset requirements of character drama - in the number of agents, but only embodies one at a time in live sense of making behaviors self-evident through precise move- performance, placing them directly in conversation with the ment, - because while animations do act as vital signifiers critic. By contrast, Why Are We Like This [16] encourages of activity and intent [6], not all signifiers need to be anima- the critic to describe relationships between agents that may tions. Too many research projects fail (either completely or follow interesting trajectories, taking on an authoring role. in gaining traction) because they try to emulate big-budget In a world with the technology of the novel—that is, the videogame development too closely. It is more prudent to set of literary conventions that let us interpret text on a adopt the strategy of the visual novel or interactive fiction, page as the interiority of a fictional character—it is not dif- in which the same function is served by fixed poses and ficult to believe that the social lives of individual agents little dioramas of action, or by script and prose. might be an interesting thing to simulate. It is substantially harder to pin down specific categories of action through which these agents may (autonomously) share space or in- 3. World-building as Reflection formation, and gradually come to hold intimacy with each other. Following Azad and Martens, we observe that the We firmly believe that social simulation itself empowers nature of spatial embodiment (and time), knowledge rep- authors to reflect on what is essential to different possible resentation (and character personality), and relationship identities, in different possible worlds with their own social depth (and power dynamics) varies wildly across the lit- norms, according to their own interests. Azad and Martens erature. It is useful to invoke Lahey here, who positions are correct to note that any single social model necessarily social narratives themselves as sites of discourse (and not privileges certain ways of being over others [7]. The anti- as impartial arbiters of truth), and illustrates how authors psychiatric line of critique, which concerns a carceral state may engage deeply with text-worlds linked to their own operating on grounds of mental health, is deeply pertinent real-world troubles [17]. to AI as a locus of political power [3, 8]. In the context of reflective design, Sengers argues that metaphorical represen- tations serve as a valuable tool for interrogating assumptions 4. Open-ended Possibility Spaces and articulating specific critiques of the built world [9]. Much like fictional writing, social simulation is usually Emergent narrative in social simulations arises from inter- purposeful and sometimes transformative. For example, a locking suites of autonomous behaviors belonging to var- model of a small activist community produced by Dickinson ious agents in the world [18]. In game design, emergent et al. [10] describes positionality, relationships, and various gameplay refers to goals that players are able to discover internal factors as the multitude of forces which govern and strive toward, as a function of game mechanics and level who may speak in a given meeting. We compare the act design [19]. By analogy, emergent narrative is characterized of authoring this model to Becca Schuch’s retelling of her by the existence of player retellings that are enabled by the own ambivalence toward creating a ‘painting goblin’ in the game’s worldbuilding and behavior models [13]. At this Sims 2 [11]. A painting goblin is a Sim whose tireless labor point, we can integrate Aylett’s original definition of emer- enabled the author’s other Sims to lead happy lives free of gent narrative, which argues that agency is experienced financial stress. Shuch’s ambivalence toward the goblin - more strongly by a player who defies prior narrative goals; who seems content, albeit not included in the escapist revels yet too much player defiance makes the authored story fall of Schuch’s other Sims, - demonstrates that Sims 2 does apart, presenting a paradox [20]. 2 If level design is progression design in a navigable space, https://wildermyth.itch.io/wildermyth then narrative design is progression design in the state space 3 https://quakefultales.itch.io/tracks-in-snow-showcase underlying a quest system or other social model. Works tations of this strategy can be observed in both The Sims 3 of interactive fiction are known for concealing their door- and Elsinore, as Elsinore NPCs can occasionally be forced to opening states behind puzzles, whilst the Metroidvania and teleport by their own schedule; whereas Sims simply don’t survival-crafting game genres make ‘player upgrades’ more get to places on time, which ruins their dramatic timing. obvious. Even games without direct embodiment, like The (The Sims 2, which has a scene where Mary-Sue Pleasant Sims and most idle games, contain progression mechan- walks in on her husband’s affair, employs a rigged event to ics like ‘skill levels’ that conceal most of the affordances transport her home from work early.) available to individual agents from the outset of the game. In SimSim, Charity et al. explore the design space of Recently, Soros and Guttenberg analyzed the state space of functional single rooms which may sustain a single occu- a homebrew NES game using the concept of door-opening pant whose needs slowly deplete, encouraging them to use states, which correspond to both topological bottlenecks various furnishings at various times [27]. The duration of (‘get out of the starting area’) and conceptual bottlenecks need-satisfying actions is directly proportionate to their ef- (‘execute a wall-jump’) in game progression [21], i.e. there fectiveness, and movement also takes time, so it is entirely is more to be discovered, but only if you manage to go possible for agents to perish of hunger if the fridge is on somewhere new or find a new way to do things. Simi- the far side of the room. Walking time has become the dom- larly, Dendryscope introduced a skein representation of inant factor in a lot of agent-based simulations, because state space in a choice-based interactive fiction which sup- the transport time is often wildly out of proportion with ports graphical query authoring [22]. the time spent on the task. Viewed from the long aesthetic Harris identifies Lucretius’ clinamen as a key figure in distance, this kind of domain-mismatch is very funny, but it Italo Calvino’s writing, a generative trope that “marks both impedes getting up close to the character drama [28]. the unraveling of a dominant code and the passage from one We propose that simulation authors may find a craft- code to another”, containing multiplicities that exceed (and based alternative resolution to the hard technical problem fall short of) what the text appears to represent [23]. This of timing and duration through the unique capacities of is a claim about the space of possible readings, in the con- prose. Calvino identifies narrative time in prose as deeply text of one or more readings, which characterizes exquisite malleable [29]: “I do not wish to say that quickness is a experiences of emergent narrative. However, we believe value in itself. Narrative time can also be delaying, cyclic, that existing tools do not suffice to make the vast possibility or motionless. In any case, a story is an operation carried space of computational dramas accessible to most authors. out on the length of time involved [...] either contracting or Say Anything, an exceptionally open-ended mixed-initiative dilating it.” Calvino’s relationship with prose is especially prose authoring tool [24], demonstrated that behavior au- interesting here because the Oulipan practice of constrained thoring no longer requires large amounts of extremely spe- writing entwines it with simulation. Thus, prose equips us cialized writing, as long as it is possible to ethically gather with two drama-sustaining moves as authors: characters high-quality collections of prose fragments. As we antici- may walk out of the scene and become unaccounted for; pate that more social simulation authors will explore how to and a clever choice of actions may change the span of time give voice to different types of characters, we argue that pro- that is implied to pass. gression design will be ultimately responsible for making these experiences memorable. 6. Conclusion 5. Quickness as an Open Question The critical technical practitioner plays a key role in games research, as well as it sibling domains in HCI such as computer- Mateas characterizes Laurel’s dramatic patterns as a set supported collaborative work [30] and critical code stud- of organizing criteria above and beyond narrative, lending ies [31]. We have observed that social simulation is rooted stakes to a series of related incidents through higher-level in co-authorship with sign-making systems. As a story- structures such as scenes and episodes [14]. In film, breaks telling medium which draws on historic traditions of com- between scenes are commonly known as ‘cuts’, and play a putational drama, social simulation is exceptionally well- vital role in the narrativizing process of ‘the edit’ (i.e. de- positioned to support arguments for the meaning-making ciding which takes to keep, and in which order!). Yet the capacity of reflective design; but only if our community iden- problem of where to place the cuts has not been adequately tifies clear strategies to evaluate social simulation artifacts, addressed by prior social simulation literature. Rather, du- which are constructed in many different ways, reflecting ration has mainly been explored in the context of schedules idiosyncratic design processes. and pathfinding. In Clockwork, Azad et al. suggest the In Section 2, we examined the legibility of individual char- example of a student who goes to sleep too late, and so acter actions. Because dramatic agents need to appear to cannot rest the full 8 hours before their scheduled waking possess their own narratives, merely combining individual time, which may negatively impact their capabilities the behaviors can fail to create believable or interesting charac- next day [25]. ters. There are past projects that address the challenge of The agent given ‘cooking tasks’ in the scenario designed integration directly, but as they have not seen widespread by Agre and Horswill [26] has the improvisational capac- replication, this remains a weakness in social simulation ity to recover from intermittent interruptions to their plan; research. Further, the focus on fully-animated characters but they aren’t equipped to deal with long-duration inter- has overlooked many avenues for lower-cost research. In to- ruptions by say, turning the burners off to prevent a fire. day’s video game landscape, many notable narrative games (Sims also lack this capacity.) If simulation-time is the dura- avoid AAA animation in favor of lower-fidelity approaches, tion it takes for agents to do things, i.e. they are animated with great audience response and narrative success. Re- one-to-one with these timings, then there appears to be no searchers should similarly be open to more textually-focused representational skew and therefore no problem. The limi- simulation. In Section 3, we looked deeper at attempts at holistic Computer animation - SCA ’04, ACM Press, Grenoble, agent simulations. Emergent behavior won’t save us on France, 2004, p. 59. URL: http://portal.acm.org/citation. its own: the agency is found in the middle zone between cfm?doid=1028523.1028532. doi:10.1145/1028523. defiance and conformance. 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