Last
month's column on adventure games brought such a strong response, I thought
I'd discuss an important related issue while I still have everyone's attention.
Interactive
storytelling has been a subject of hot debate since computer games were
first created. Many of the early game developers were programmers with
no experience at writing fiction, so there was a real shortage of talent
at creating things like character and pacing and plot. Since then professional
writers have entered the industry, and the quality of our storytelling
has improved somewhat.
Despite
that, however, there's still a larger philosophical question looming over
the subject: "What does it mean to say that a story is interactive?"
It's a question that remains unanswered. You could argue that no answer
is needed - adventure games tell stories, and they are interactive; therefore
they constitute interactive storytelling, and no further discussion is
required. The problem is that most adventure games tell rather poor stories.
We've never yet seen an adventure game that was the caliber of works by
Dickens or de Maupassant.
I believe
that interactive storytelling suffers from three very serious problems,
and they're clearly visible in adventure games today.
The Problem
of Amnesia
This is
the simplest and most obvious of the problems. In a normal, non-interactive
story, the characters belong in the world of which they're a part. They
understand that world. They know what's in all the drawers in their apartment
and what's in all the shops in their town. When they first get up in the
morning, they don't start their day by opening up every single closet
to see what's in it, nor do they pick up every object they see and stick
it in their pockets in case it might come in handy later.
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Pardon
me... do I know me?
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But that's
not true in adventure games, is it? When you play an adventure game, you
have no idea what is going on. You have amnesia. Even if start the game
in your own home, you have to explore it. You don't know what's going
to happen to you, so for safety's sake, you pick up everything you see,
and you end up carrying around a collection of objects that make you look
like a demented bag lady. (Consider the original Adventure: a lamp,
a birdcage, a wooden rod, an axe, some gold coins, a bottle of oil...)
A few games
have actually been written to incorporate this problem into the plot.
There was a game simply called Amnesia, published by Electronic Arts;
and there was a game based on Roger Zelazny's series of fantasy novels,
The Chronicles of Amber, which started with a character who had
amnesia. But let's face it, this isn't a major genre of literature. There
are very few novels about amnesiacs. In most stories, the characters just
charge ahead and have their adventures, and it's up to the author to make
sure they're carrying whatever they need to survive them (if they're
going to survive them).
There are
three types of stories in which the characters start empty-handed and
ignorant, and have to figure things out on their own. One is the rookie-in-a-new-situation
story - the new recruit who's just joined his ship in the Navy, or the
gunslinger who's just been made sheriff of the western town. In these
cases it makes sense that the protagonist has to do a lot of exploring
before he can accomplish anything. The other two are mysteries and heroic
quests - both situations that involve a lot of talking to strangers and
examining unfamiliar objects.
It makes
sense, then, that most adventure games are, in fact, mysteries, heroic
quests, or new-kid-in-town scenarios. There's nothing particularly wrong
with that, but it does mean that the genre is limited by the amnesia problem.
We may be able to create interactive stories, but we can't create any
kind of story we want.
The Problem
of Internal Consistency
When we
judge a work of fiction, we judge it on a number of things: are the descriptions
clear? Is the dialog believable? Does the writing flow smoothly? And so
on. But we also make a more fundamental sort of judgment as well. If you
walk out of a movie, having seen it, or if you put down a book, having
read it, and you say to yourself, "I don't think he would have done
that" or "I don't think she would have reacted to that situation
in that way," then we say that the story has a flaw. There's something
wrong with it; it doesn't make sense. Any story must be true to its own
inner laws. It has to be coherent. At any point in the story, the circumstances
at that point have got to be consistent with everything that went beforehand.
Mysteries
are an interesting example of this, because in a mystery, you have a lot
of different possible explanations for the crime, and right up until the
detective gets everybody in the room at the end and reveals which is the
correct one, each explanation has got to seem plausible. But the rules
of the genre require that only one of them may actually work; the rest
must be logically impossible, and furthermore the author must have shown
all the clues to the reader. It's a very difficult task to create four
or five apparently consistent possible explanations, and introduce them
to the reader in such a way that the clues are all there, but the reader
is still surprised to learn which is really the correct one.
This requirement
for internal consistency isn't a matter of pure logic, of course. I don't
mean to suggest that at every point in a story the circumstances should
be rigidly derivable, like a mathematical proof, from what came before.
But if you look back at a story, it should be consistent. Stories shouldn't
be predictable, but they should make sense in a satisfying manner.
So what
does all this have to do with interactivity? The answer is, nothing.
Interactivity is about freedom. Interactivity is about giving your player
things to do and letting your player do them. The whole point of interactive
media is letting the player do something on her own. What that means is
that a lot of times your player is going to jump off the rails and go
do completely weird, unanticipated stuff. That doesn't work very well
in stories.
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OOn
second thought...
I'd rather be flying.
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Consider
Superman. Superman is a character who is congenitally incapable of ignoring
a baby who's crying in a burning building. He never says, "You know,
I'm gonna let somebody else deal with this for once." But what if
our player is being Superman in a computer game? Here's the burning building.
Do he run in and save the baby? Well, he has to if he's Superman, and
if he doesn't do it, then he has violated Superman's basic nature. There's
this conflict that arises between the player's desire to do as he chooses,
and your desire to impose a plot and characterization on him. It's a tough
one. How can you be sure that the player is going to do something that
is coherent, that goes along with your story?
The Problem
of Narrative Flow
As we all
learned in junior high school English class, every story is supposed to
have an introduction, rising action, a climax, falling action, and a conclusion.
It's the business of the story's author to structure it in such a way
that it builds to a dramatic climax - an action, confrontation, or other
event which resolves the story's inner tension. One of the problems an
author faces is making sure that all the characters involved are ready
- psychologically and physically ready - for the dramatic climax to take
place. If he doesn't, then we read the story and say, "Wait a minute
- where'd that knife come from?" or "How did he know the villain
would be hiding in the hall closet?"
With ordinary
fiction, this is a challenge, but at least you as the author are fully
in charge. The characters have to go where you tell them, to know what
you want them to know, because they're all part of your picture. You set
up the pieces, interlock them like parts of a jigsaw, and when the puzzle
is complete the picture is formed; the dramatic climax takes place.
You can't
do this in interactive stories. There's one character who's outside your
control as an author, and that's the player. The player is doing whatever
he wants, and taking as long or as little time about it as he likes. How
do you make sure that when the dramatic climax takes place in your interactive
story, your player is there and ready for it? This is the Problem of Narrative
Flow.
There are
three traditional solutions to this problem in adventure games. One very
simple one is to limit the interactivity. You either cut down the interactivity
so that the player can't get away from the plot, or you give them a lot
of interactivity but you make it all meaningless - the interactivity doesn't
really affect anything.
I don't
think this one is an acceptable option. Reduced to the minimal case, the
game turns into "Hit ENTER to see next screen." Limiting interactivity
is not what we're supposed to be about here. A few games have actually
done this, but they were universally acknowledged to be bad games - certainly
not the ideal example of interactive storytelling.
The second
traditional solution is that you say, "Too bad. If the player's not
ready for the dramatic climax, that's tough." In this case, you can
create a world that's alive, that goes on around the player, regardless
of what he's doing. This makes for some really interesting adventure games.
Night falls, and people come out of their shops and go home, and the muggers
come out, and so on. It's interesting to watch things take place around
you in one of these kinds of games. The difficulty with them is that you
tend to lose the game a lot. You end up having to start over all the time,
because you weren't ready for the dramatic climax when it occurred. But
that's no way to present a work of fiction! Nobody reads a book by reading
page one; then starting over and reading page one and page two; then starting
over again and reading page one, page two, and page three, and so on.
It would drive you crazy.
There is
of course a workaround to that problem, and it's called "save game."
But saving the game utterly destroys my suspension of disbelief. If I'm
fighting off the evil trees in the enchanted forest with my magic sword,
I don't want to stop every five minutes and have a little interaction
with my hard disk drive. Saving the game makes it unnecessary to restart
over and over, but at the expense of taking me out of the world I'm trying
to belong to. I don't think that's a satisfactory answer either.
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Games
such as The Legend of Zelda won't let the plot advance until
you're prepared for what's to come.
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The third
traditional solution to the Problem of Narrative Flow is the classic adventure
game solution, and that is to make the plot advance along with the player's
advances. This absolutely guarantees that the player will have
everything he needs when he gets to the dramatic climax. If he needs the
magic sword, then he'll have the magic sword, and if he doesn't have the
magic sword, there's no way he can get to the dramatic climax; the plot
simply doesn't go anywhere. It's easy. You just link up the player's actions
to the advancement of the plot.
The difficulty
with this solution is that it's mechanistic. It turns the game into a
series of puzzles to be solved, and once you've played two or three of
these games, you can really see it. If nothing seems to be happening,
you must be doing something wrong. When you do something right, then interesting
things happen. The flow is jerky, stop-start. You as the player can do
what you like, but you don't have the sense of being carried along by
the story; in fact it's quite clear that you're not in the story, the
story is an external mechanical object that only progresses when you do
the right things. It's rather like trying to operate a VCR with unlabeled
buttons.
Conclusion
You might
think at this point that I'm going to offer some solutions to these problems.
But I don't have any solutions, and I'm not certain that there are any
solutions. I won't go so far as to say that interactivity and storytelling
are mutually exclusive, but I do believe that they exist in an inverse
relationship to one another. The more you have of one, the less you're
going to have of the other.
In its richest
form, storytelling - narrative - means the reader's surrender to the author.
The author takes the reader by the hand and leads him into the world of
her imagination. The reader still has a role to play, but it's a fairly
passive role: to pay attention, to understand, perhaps to think…
but not to act. A good story hangs together the way a good jigsaw puzzle
hangs together when you pick it up, every piece locked tightly in place
next to its neighbor. But it ill tolerates any fiddling. Remove a few
pieces, and it's likely to fall apart.
Interactivity
is not like this. Interactivity is about freedom, power, self-expression.
It's about entering a world and changing that world by your presence.
In most games the world is static and dead until the player arrives; the
player is the only thing that makes it move. Interactivity is almost
the opposite of narrative; narrative flows under the direction of the
author, while interactivity depends on the player for motive power.
This doesn't
mean that I'm backing down from my call for the game industry to create
more adventure games - far from it. But I recognize that adventure games,
at least at present, tell only a limited kind of story: the mystery or
quest. We can't yet make an adventure game about a troubled family or
a young man's slow descent into madness. Adventure games have to sacrifice
some of the best things about stories for the sake of interactivity.
I think
adventure games should be just that: games about adventures. They should
give the player a sense of achievement and accomplishment. They're about
doing, making a difference. This does not mean that they have to
be shooters or twitch games, only that the player and her actions are
the most important things in the game. In computer gaming, you subordinate
the player to the plot at your peril.
It's not
our job to tell stories. It's our job to build worlds in which
players can live a story of their own creation.
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