Interactive Fiction is an Oxymoron (Was: Interactive Story)
Andrew C. Greenberg
werdna at mucow.com
Mon Jul 21 12:06:31 UTC 2003
This is a thought I have had since my early days in computer game
design -- never really found a forum for it, so I thought I'd let this
20 year old idea spew.
There is no such thing as interactive fiction. Story-telling and
simulation are inherently at odds. It is the nature of story-telling
that its devices (the devices of the Poetics) require strong and
careful control of the nature and tempo of interactions between story
elements: the character, her development, her conflicts and
interactions with other characters, the gradual increase in the
intensity of those conflicts, leading to a climax and, significantly, a
gentle denoument. This is done by orchestrating a carefully balanced
and timed presentation for the reader, sometimes rapidly the real-time
to story-time ratio (40 pages to describe the first microsecond of a
nuclear explosion in Sum of All Fears), sometimes dramatically
contracting it (casual reference to the passing of years by reference
to change of seasons in Lord of the Rings) -- because the idea is to
dedicate the timing to these Poetics elements. In contrast, a
simulation operates in substantially real-time (or permits the user to
modify the scale), provides enormous flexibility on the part of the
user to determine events as they happen and permits the use, within the
constraints of the game physics, to change the world as she will.
A reader loses patience and is frustrated with an ill-timed story, even
if the other elements are otherwise compelling. A user loses patience
with an inflexible simulation, even if the other elements are otherwise
compelling. This tension is one of the key elements for analyzing and
critiquing game experiences.
The game designer carefully balances these, and other, competing
factors, and ultimately must make a determination how to engineer the
game experience. He cannot simply present an animated equivalent of a
page-turner, the computer makes a lousy book and an even lousier source
of real time movies. He cannot provide a genuine simulated world --
the computer doesn't admit a complete simulation, and the lack of story
elements will surely commit the game to the "graveyard" as instantly as
the novelty of the graphic heat and sound wears off.
The best games actually compromise these issues -- acknowledging the
limits of story-telling control and simulation flexibility, and using
smoke and mirrors to make the game appear "bigger" and "more flexible"
than it is. These tricks, the sets, props and costumes of the game
designer's quiver, are well-understood, and new ones are constantly
created. I can make you feel the game is bigger by subtly guiding you
to follow the path, either with incentives or visual or sound cues. I
can beguile you by making your random choices more effective (e.g., if
I detect you looking under a chair looking for a clue, why NOT put it
there if it serves the story development? You looked there because you
thought it would be interesting to find something there, and the user
will be pleased to see that "she was right," welcoming the
manipulation). In short, to tell a story well in a simulation, we must
cheat.
Another approach is to change our notion of what is the experience.
Are we the game designer a story-teller for the user, or am I an the
user collaborating on the story-telling for another? If the latter, we
can abandon our passion for Poetics and share the blame for an
ill-timed story. The thrill of collaborative creation is
exhiliarating, but a shoddy product can lead to a bad experience: this
sharing also shares the blame for a bad story. (Do you think you or
the paying customer will be right on that point).
Or to recognize that the game is a combination of both aspects, and
recognize the limitations and use smoke and mirrors to balance here.
Is interactive fiction an oxymoron? I think so, at least in a
technical sense. The BEST games we have seen seem to recognize these
limitations, chose a particular form to balance those constraints, and
then work with the limitations to good effect. I think we have decent
story-telling-like experiences, and can have better ones all the time.
The first stage though, seems to be to recognize the limitations of the
medium as presently understood, and work our art within those
constraints.
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