[OT] Interactive Fiction is an Oxymoron

G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl G.J.Tielemans at dinkel.utwente.nl
Mon Jul 30 19:04:19 UTC 2001


>Ger: Who is here talking about interactive story-telling? 
..The first meaning of fiction in my old Oxford (1980 $5.95)is: fiction= a
product of imagination. (I place a good simulation or a good TextAdventure
under this definition and even prefer a combination of these; like
independent Characters moving in a story-maze.)
..The second meaning: fiction= an invented story.
Even inside this second meaning you could wonder when a story is created:
- When someone invents the scheme of the story? 
- When a good storyteller tunes this story to his estimation of his public?
- Or when you - as listener with your own background - "read" between the
story-lines?
Interactiv Fiction is the dream that you could bring this even a step closer
to the receiver... 

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew C. Greenberg [mailto:werdna at mucow.com]
Sent: maandag 30 juli 2001 17:40
To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
Subject: [OT] Interactive Fiction is an Oxymoron

Sorry, but the recent thread used a term that just makes me boil over.  
It is, in my view, the quest for "interactive fiction" that has held 
back gaming now for decades.

The reason for this is simple.  Interaction is an anathema to excellent 
storytelling.  A storyteller, at least per the Poetics, is concerned 
above all things, with timing.  The tempo of a story is everything. The 
manner and velocity with which the characters are introduced and 
developed is essential to obtaining the necessary suspension of 
disbelief -- the tempo of building conflicts ultimately yielding a 
climax or climaxes drives the reader to continue, and the effectiveness 
of the denoument to finish, explain and justify the story are all 
measured along a timescale -- and the tempo between these elements is 
essential.
>Ger: designing the tempo of a video on a stroyboard is very very difficult
for our students, A threaded storyline (Oops.. with LOOPS??) should be
suddenly easy because the tool can do it easily?. 

> Ger: yes and no.. The RIGHT Tempo is everything (most games have boring
difficult=long puzzles on to many places... it invites children to cheat. As
designer you can anticipate on that. My Youngest daughter cheats in
ThemeHospital and then the speaker-system of the hospital shouts it loud
over the corridors... She really hates it every time she does cheat, but not
enough to turn off the sound...)

> Ger: You can also create the feeling that the player thinks he is so close
to the solution that it would be a pitty to stop after all his efforts,
hours later he still thinks the same. Or the puzzle should look misleading
simple: like that simple looking rubic-cube puzzle: give it three turns from
the correct position and then ask someone to solve it: he knows that you
gave it only three turns... 

It is the nature of a simulation, or interactive game, to permit the 
user control over his environment. Should he enjoy prowling around an 
arena for hours, so be it. If he wants to wander aimlessly through a 
jungle or search the interstices of irrelevant subject matter to the 
game -- again, so be it.  The more detail, the more interesting the 
scenario -- but the far less effective the story. As an extreme 
example, while a simulation can sustain dead ends to make a game work, 
no story can survive that. 
>Ger: What about a good detective-story from Agatha Christie. Every time she
makes you think that the wrong person did it, until he dies also (MY
favroite as child: Ten little ...) 

On the other hand, if you have no dead ends at all, players feel a grave
loss of challenge.  (Enter the love-hate relationship between gamers, game
designers and their game "cheats," 
walkthoughs and "cheat books.")

This inherent conflict, the war between storytelling and interaction is, 
to me, the locus where all games (including my own efforts in this 
regard) have failed. 
>Ger: I think that you can broaden here your criticism to lots of
Hypertext-dreams that did not work..

Of course, some merging of interaction and 
storytelling is possible without one destroying the other, but the more 
of one formulation is added, the more the other suffers.  The trick, of 
course, is to recognize that interactive fiction is an oxymoron. 
To design the game well, first realistically design it as either a 
simulation-with-a-bit-o-story, or a story-with-a-bit-o-simulation.  Then 
use smoke-and-mirrors, plain old theatre tricks plus new tech tricks, to 
make the game SEEM more storytelling, or more interactive, than it 
really is.
>Ger: You have more hints to create better IF?

>Ger: when desktop-tools came up everyone thought he could do quality
printing on the fly, isn't this the same with these tools? Don't we
underestimate the creative work of heavy teams working at the creation of a
new game: Didn't even Disney to easily think that they could compete with
the real game-industry while they where good in movies, cartoons and
theme-parks and heaving some of the best fiction-realizers in house? Why do
game-companies rise and fall? (like Infocom, to stay with the subject.) 





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