storytelling

That Time A Space Simulation Turned Into a Spy Hunt

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

Readers of my blog know I used to simulate star-trek style spaceships. It was my entry-point to the world of writing, storytelling, theater, and tech all at once. A part of the reason I studied computer science was to make sense of the one part of the simulator I didn’t understand. My first written stories were simulations written to fill a story vacuum. As a flight director, I was lucky enough to not only write the stories, but perform them.

I told hundreds of stories in my five years simulating starships. Mostly I stuck to my biggest hits. Occasionally we’d test a new story and fiddle with it to make things more exciting. But this flight wasn’t like that. It was supposed to be a nice, normal mission. Instead it ended up being my most memorable flight in a half-decade of incredible stories.

Setting the Scene

The nine crew members each donned their uniform, a felt poncho modified with starship colors and branding. It was a birthday party, every kid was in second or third grade. A bit young, but me and my team had dealt with worse.

One side a school, one side a spaceship.

To reach the ship, they needed to pass through the ‘teleporter’, an old photography dark room door, the revolving kind. They’d step in two at a time. I’d remind them not to touch the side lest they be lost to space, then spin the door 180 degrees.

Pitch black for half a second, then the bridge of a starship. Even when you knew the trick, it still felt like magic. The UCS Everest was a large vessel, suited to handle parties of 10-15. There was a main viewscreen at the front and tiered seating at the back. A staff member would ask the arriving crew their job position, then direct them to their seat.

Once everyone was seated, I would teleport in behind them and the epic boarding music would fade away. Safety instructions were always boring, but from the very first second I could tell this crew was different. Eyes wandered, kids whispered. I talk quick, but this crew had no interest in any of it.

When the safety briefing was done, I had a single instruction for my staff. “Get through the training as fast as you can.”

We had a set of junior controls for young crews. Instead of everyone having a distinct job, they were all prompted to do the same activities together and drive the ship as a single unit. For groups younger than 4th grade, it was really the only way to keep them from being overwhelmed. Unfortunately, the most recent windows update had broken the juniors controls, so all we had were the advanced systems.

The Flight

The crew was both overwhelmed and not particularly invested in the story of the mission. They were supposed to fly to an endangered planet and help evacuate the citizens. For crews like this, we like to put a ‘doctor’ on the bridge to help them out. Whenever I came on over the speakers as the main engineer and told them they needed to ‘undock’ or ‘set course’, the doctor secretly made sure the task got done.

In this case, the doctor was basically flying the ship on their own.

Fifteen minutes into the flight, I could tell things weren’t working. I was quietly telling my staff to get ready to ‘board the ship’ as various alien intruders and wacky characters, but while that was being prepared, I needed the story to continue.

The Breakthrough

There was a political situation surrounding the endangered planet. I was on the speakers as a Texan ship captain warning them of the dangers. None of it was clicking, the whole mission was feeling like a bust. Then I said the words that changed the course of the mission. “The mayor of that planet is a crafty fella– he’s got people everywhere. Keep an eye out, you may have a spy on board.”

On the cameras, I could see kids’ heads popping up and glancing around. Their security officer, just eight years old, jumped out of his seat with a toy phaser in hand. There was still conversation being picked up by the microphones, but they weren’t talking about a party. They were talking about the spy.

Not yet realizing what had happened, I had the ‘ship doctor’ get back to the bridge to help them navigate the upcoming asteroids.

The second he teleported in, every kid in the room was out of their seat and yelling at the top of their lungs. They all made different accusations, but there was only one message: The Doctor was a spy.

My first reaction was frustration. Everyone had left their computers, which meant no one was driving the ship, which meant the mission was frozen in place. But these kids had never cared about the mission in the first place. As I watched the doctor get forced into the brig at phaser-point, I saw what I had been looking for since the start. A crew that cared about the mission. Not the space theater or the advance controls or the working together. They only cared about hunting for spies.

If the flight had been a field trip arranged by a school, I would have paused here. The crew would have gone back to their seats and we would have discussed what their priorities needed to be. But this was a birthday party, and when you’re flying a birthday party, it’s best to reserve the lectures for the really bad behavior.

A small brig for 6 suspects

So the mission changed. I ordered a volunteer dressed as a security guard to go up and help the kids interrogate the doctor. But their blind hunger for spies was worse than I thought. The security guard ended up in the brig right next to the doctor.

I was down to two volunteers. The next one I sent up with no costume at all and specifically told the kids that this person was not a part of the story. Just a staff member there to guide their experience. They reluctantly agreed not to stuff her into the brig, but there were plenty of murmurs that she was ‘secretly a spy’ anyways.

Now that I knew what kind of story we were telling, I knew what kind of tools we should use. We planted a device in a tunnel under their seats and set off the alarms until they found it. We played crazy ‘hacking’ noises over the speakers and flicked the lights from red-alert to green-alert to a bunch of other colors while they flipped switches on a panel. Whenever there was downtime, I didn’t even have to fill in the blanks, the crew would sprint right back to the brig and resume their interrogations of the prisoners.

Then came the masterstroke. An away mission to the lower decks. It’s a funny thing, kids love getting onto the starship, but once they’re on the ship, all they want to do is leave. There was a second starship right across the hall. We redirected that ship’s camera feed to the main view-screen. I told my last volunteer to go in there and stand around.

When the kids saw the footage of a person in a uniform doing nothing, they went wild. Never had they seen a more guilty figure in their lives. The staff member led them on the away mission and they caught the ‘spy’ with ease. They were thrilled for an excuse to use the phasers.

On their way back to the ship, the crew bumped into two unfortunate staff members who were returning from a lunch break. They were dragged to the brig like everyone else.

The Finish

With the end of the mission closing in, I decided it was time for a trial. We gave each student a seat and made them all a part of the jury. One by one we brought out the suspects. I wish I could tell you they were thorough in their questioning. I wish I could say they even listened to what each prospective spy had to say. But they didn’t. It was closer to a witch hunt than any form of judicial process.

At the end, they decided it was the doctor who was the spy. Of course it was, he was the first suspicious figure on the bridge and the only one they all remembered capturing. I told them they were right and that they had successfully completed the mission.

They cheered and ran off with their parents to eat cake. Great reviews all around, although I’m guessing that dying planet from the start of the mission would have a few complaints.

When we finished restoring the bridge from the child hurricane that had ripped through, I sat back and took a breath. One of the other staff members walked over to me with wide eyes. “That was amazing! I’ve never seen a mission like that before. You should write it down and fly it more often!”

I smiled and shook my head. We had improvised 2 and a half hours of nonsense. A playful nothing to distract a bunch of ten-year-olds. It was none of the magic that had drawn me to the program in the first place, and used none of the tools that made the simulator cool. Just one long string of chaos, and we were lucky the kids had liked it.

Something Changes When Story Moves From A Book To A Game

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

I didn’t start my writing journey with books. It wasn’t short stories or fan-fiction either. My original medium of storytelling was a bit more improvised. 

Star Trek Simulations.

It sounds a little silly, but for the first five years of my storytelling journey, I was a game master. Crews of birthday parties and corporate events would show up, I would give them a mission, put them on their ship, and send them on their flight. Whenever they spoke to the computer or the main engineer or an alien, it was usually me. When the ship took damage and smoke rolled in near the security terminal, I was flipping the switches.

It’s where I cut my teeth. It’s where I learned how to make the big moments of a story pop. And when my time flying starships came to an end and I made the move to telling stories in books, I discovered how unprepared I was.

Telling a story in a book is one thing. Telling a story in a game is something entirely different.

First and Third Person POV

Realistically, it isn’t just a split between games and books. It’s a split between interactive media and non-interactive media. When a reader reads a book, they expect to be told a story. When a player starts a game, they expect to be the story.

In a book, the main character is the main character. In a game, even if there is a main character, the real protagonist isn’t inside the game, it’s the person holding the controls. For a game to feel engaging, it needs to engage not just with the moving avatar on the screen, but with the human being that’s driving the decisions.

Much like in books, games have two main pov styles. First-person and third-person. Note these are different from where the camera is. Those familiar with books and movies will probably understand gaming’s third-person approach to storytelling. There’s a character on screen with a history, traits, and a connection to the world. 

A game like God of War tells the story of Kratos trying to raise his son in a cruel world controlled by the gods. When things happen, they happen to Kratos and Kratos reacts to them. He changes as the story goes on. This makes sense. This is close to traditional storytelling.

For games, first-person perspective storytelling is a complete 180.

A book uses first person to connect more deeply with the protagonist. We’re closer to the main character than ever. We can see their thoughts and how they decide how to act in the world. Games do the opposite. In the first-person perspective, the main character is washed away, made into nothing but a vessel for the player to control. It’s an effort to place the player directly into the story. Now when bad things happen, they don’t just happen to the character, they happen to the person playing. 

In DOOM, the players inhabit a character only known as Doomslayer as they defeat demon hordes. In Legend of Zelda, the players play Link, a character who never speaks and simply reacts to the world. Even though Link is shown as a real person in the game, he has no distinct attributes, only the ones a player projects onto him.

The Gameplay is the Story

When I first began simulating starships, I found the moments that were most story intense were the least engaging for participants. They didn’t care about two other characters arguing between one another to decide the fate of a planet. They didn’t care about the lore that set up the story. 

In a game, cutscenes are skipped. There’s a reason for this: The main character doesn’t need development, after all, the player is the true main character. And if the main character doesn’t need development, then the only kind of story events that matter are the ones that change the gameplay.

In games, a story is what happens to the main character and what they do in response. If something changes in the world, it has to be at least in part triggered by the player’s actions. And when something happens in the story, it can’t just have emotional weight, it has to mean something for the gameplay.

I used to play a typing game. You were in a cage descending into the depths and sharks would emerge from the darkness with words written on their belly. I’d type the words and the sharks would go away. It was fun, but the story wasn’t exactly engaging. In fact, the setting could have been replaced by a hundred other settings and I wouldn’t have even noticed.

This is the trouble with splitting story from gameplay. If halfway down, the operator radios in to tell me they’ve been in love with me for years, it doesn’t mean anything. The operator isn’t real, the love isn’t real. But if they radio in to tell me all our shark research has allowed us to slow the shark’s attacks, that does mean something. It changes how the game plays, so I become invested in that element of the story.

It’s hard to accept. The story of a game is only as good as how it affects the gameplay. This is where the phrase ‘ludonarrative dissonance’ comes from. If the gameplay and the story aren’t telling the same experience, the player disconnects from the half they don’t care about.

In the world of starship simulation, cutscenes between characters became a no-go. If I had something important to share, it needed to be delivered directly to the crew, and it had to change how they approached the mission.

Interactive Storytelling Workarounds

There’s a certain selfishness to a player’s approach to the story. They only care about what affects them. So how do you tell a story about complicated characters and nuanced situations in a way that makes the player pay attention?

I’ve found three ways:

Optional stories, passive stories, and mysteries.

Optional stories are exactly what they sound like. If 50% of players don’t want the lore, don’t force it down their throats. Sidequests are great, but some people are in a hurry. You leave the B-tier material in the game, but as optional content. Games are a bit like a walk down a buffet line. Everyone gets an entree, most people get the sides, and some people pick up a dessert at the end. In books, everybody gets the same experience. In interactive media, we don’t have the same luxury. It’s up to us to meet each player where they are instead of demanding they enjoy things they don’t like.

The idea behind passive storytelling is finding a way to sneak details into the experience without bogging down the gameplay. Gameplay is king. But if we can find a way to deliver a few lines of dialog without interrupting anything, then there’s no harm in it. This is how God of War told a character driven story, they’d give the player a level to traverse and the characters would talk amongst one another on the way. It’s like playing a podcast while working out. The player’s unrelenting drive to do things is fed, but the context of the story sneaks in with it.

Mystery is exactly what it sounds like. Players enter an area, make observations, and form their own conclusions about the situation. If anything, I think mysteries actually are better suited to interactive media than books. My most successful Star Trek story was one where the crew was coming to save a trapped squadron. When they arrived, they’d discover the squadron was gone. After a brief investigation, they’d discover a wormhole leading to who-knows-where. Without telling the crew a single aspect of the story, they figured it all out, and within a minute or two, they’d inevitably enter the wormhole with no plan on how to get home.

Conclusion

Games come with entirely different expectations. A reader expects a story. A player expects an experience. This post didn’t even discuss handling player freedom, needless to say that’s a rabbit hole for another day.

I had to make some adjustments when I switched from interactive media to direct storytelling. I imagine a lot of D&D Dungeon Masters go through a similar experience. They realize the main character can’t just be a vessel anymore, they need personality, background, and a particular view on the world. Every character can’t just talk to the protagonist anymore, they need to be living, breathing parts of the world with their own motivations.

Both mediums are difficult. Both mediums highlight different strengths. For games, accomplishment is the greatest payoff. For books, it’s usually something a little more philosophical.

If you get a chance, consider writing a story for a game someday. Nothing captures the difference in formats quite as much as watching your audience glaze over the moment you force them into a cutscene.

Logan Sidwell is a sci-fi and fantasy writer from Utah. He started as a writer and director in Ed-Tech, he now strives to marry his background in Computer Science and his years of storytelling to create fun, compelling ideas that explore new ground in technological and fantastical settings.


Check out my debut novel: The Human Countermove

We Need More Aspirational Art

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

Art holds a mirror to society.

Through stories we see aspects of ourselves and the world we live in. The Circle shows us a world where social media becomes ubiquitous and inescapable. The Fifth Season quietly highlights the bubbling fury of institutional oppression and racism. Neuromancer blurs the relationship between people and technology. Every time, these dark stories end in tragedy. A mirror that reflects a dark and cruel world where people in power serve themselves and sacrifice others without a second thought. 

These stories keep us grounded. They keep us connected to how the world really works. 

They’re also a self-fulfilling prophecy. Too many sad stories about an irredeemable world and people start to believe it. In a world with no principles, staying committed to a moral fiber becomes the losing move. We become cynical and jaded. Once a community stops protecting one another and each individual focuses on fending for themselves, it stops being a community.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. A mirror doesn’t have to highlight our worst instincts, it doesn’t have to reflect our darkest selves. It can do the opposite. It can show us our best selves, an aspirational vision of who we wish we were. Stories of idealists like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, or of a new society like the utopian days of early Star Trek.

We need more aspirational stories.

In 1986, Star Trek: The Voyage Home, transparent aluminum was introduced as a curious futuristic invention. A novelty. But not to the chemists and engineers that watched that movie. Transparent aluminum now exists, a case of life imitating fiction. It’s not the only time this has happened. Mobile phones, tables, and voice controlled computers were all first Star Trek tools before they became our reality.

The opposite is just as true. War of the Worlds told the story of a highly advanced alien invasion involving chemical warfare, lasers, tanks, and aircraft. Fifteen years later, we saw almost all these inventions in WW1. Squid Game told the story of increasingly desperate contestants in a lethal competition, now the competition is a real game show (except for the lethal part).

We underestimate the power of collective thought. A politician achieves their ambitions by convincing enough people something is possible. A stock rises or falls not based on the company’s performance, but its perception. If an expert tells a country they are in decline, it becomes true.

So what happens when the only stories we tell of the future are dark and cynical? Black Mirror stops being a warning and instead becomes a checklist. Every person sees every other person’s action in the worst possible light. Billionaires take notes on dystopian stories and program them into their product. The scientists that grow up on these stories fear the consequences of their inventions.

In 2023, Alexander MacDonald, NASA’s chief economist said about the impact of sci-fi writers. “We don’t go to space because we have the machines. We go to space because we have a culture of people who are inspired to build the machines.”

We need science fiction stories that imagine and inspire, that tell the stories of heroes saving the day and technologies that transform life in the most wonderful of ways. Most importantly, we need sci-fi stories that dream of a bright future.

But this isn’t just a problem with science fiction, it extends into fantasy and thrillers and mystery and every other genre. We keep telling stories about vigilante superheroes in corrupt societies. What about the leaders that shine a light on corruption and fight to make things better? Instead of cynical wheeling and dealing in the west wing, what about an idealist that manages to get a piece of impossible legislation passed because they inspire their peers?

It’s something I’ve been wanting to adjust in my writing. I want to dream of a better world and a better universe. I want to know that the stories I write inspire a materials scientist thirty years from now to invent bendy glass, or bouncy steel, or non-toxic mercury.

We’ve spent a long time critiquing the present. For incremental change, critique is incredibly important. It keeps us moving forward. But it won’t be revolutionary. It won’t reinvent how we live.

The only way for that to happen is for us to change the types of stories we tell ourselves. Fill the world with moral, upstanding heroes by telling stories of moral, upstanding heroes. Advance technology to improve the human experience by telling stories of technology that improves the human experience.

It’s naive. It’s idealistic. But that’s what storytelling is for. For us to one day live in a utopia, we first have to imagine it.