So What Do We Call It? Was: Interactive Fiction
Andrew C. Greenberg
werdna at mucow.com
Tue Jul 31 16:35:19 UTC 2001
On Tuesday, July 31, 2001, at 09:46 AM, Laurence Rozier wrote:
> She uses the term "participatory narrative"
> which I prefer over interactive fiction but I don't
> think interactive fiction is an oxymoron any more than
> human-in-the-loop or other forms of "simulation" which
> mix real world inputs with simulated ones. Whether
> "simulation-with-a-bit-o-story", or
> "story-with-a-bit-o-simulation" as Andrew put it, this
> mixed thing exists and we have to call it something
> right?
Clearly, I assault the term as oxymoronic primarily as a rhetorical tool
to make the point: there is an inherent conflict between the quality of
a story-telling and the quality of a simulation. I do find the genre of
quasi-storytelling-quasi-simulations difficult to describe in a might
better be characterized as a mere "game." Games can have incidental
themes, as these do, and can also be serious works of art. But to exalt
these non-literary exercises to the level of fiction or narrative that
is true literature seems, at least to me, problematic.
Make no mistake -- I'm one of the pretentious people who likes to think
of my game designs as species of an art form. I believe that they are.
However, I do not pretend that they are literature although I'd like to
think (at least at one time) we were getting close. I say this, noting
that one of my games was accompanied by more than 700 pages of printed
prose in support of a story element. I only got as close as I did, I
will advise those who are interested in doing this sort of thing,
precisely by recognizing the present limitations of the medium, both
from the narrative perspective and from the simulation perspective. It
may not have been great storytelling, but it sure hung together well as
a game -- and it shared some of the elements of great storytelling.
Huge strides have been made in 10 years concerning the quality of
simulation. Virtually nothing, IMHO, has been done to improve
story-telling. If anything, it has gotten much, much worse since the
days of Infocom. We have a long way to go with the sciences (classical
sense) of what you call "participatory narrative," and until we get
there, I suggest we eschew these dangerous labels. They lead us to
think that merely be putting words and characters and little pieces of
plot together that we are actually engaging in storytelling. I, for
one, can tell you that commercial success and rave reviews can be
stultifying to an artist -- I was told I made great interactive
literature, and so I believed it. And the quality of my products
festered for years, until I matured to the point of understanding the
difference. It is a trap I advise others to avoid.
To the extent Laurence is merely observing that a shitty novel is
nevertheless still a novel, even though it may share all the flaws of a
great interactive game, I don't disagree with his point. But I'm not
sure that the observation either weakens or dilutes mine.
> Drama in its origins was
> very much a participartory form and I agree with many
> of the points made by Murray and Laurel. My
> Participant-Activity-Scenario-Stage(PASS) system(see
> Morphic Joules docs for a description) is a
> model-based development approach founded on the
> premise that object-oriented software systems consist
> of Participants that engage in the Activities of a
> Scenario which is played out on a Stage.
> Scenarios(paths thru a use case) are simulations which
> can benefit from storytelling. They seem like a form
> of participatory narrative to me but, perhaps there is
> no one single term that is appropriate. Do folks
> prefer one?
My criticism was not directed to the functionality or social utility of
adding themes to simulations -- just to point out that what simulations
and games do with their story elements don't amount to storytelling.
Poetics was not directed to the functionality of the works, but rather
to their efficacy in achieving that functionality -- the science
(classical sense) of writing. It is what makes a story catch our
breath, and makes it worthwhile the read. We aren't doing much of that
in role-playing games these days. Indeed, not much at all.
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