Read Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling Online
Authors: Chris Crawford
Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling (11 page)
If the user doesn’t have good choices, the interactivity stinks.
All my ranting and raving about interactivity fails to address an important question raised by my Alter Ego:
Who gives a damn about interactivity? Why bother with it?
I can offer three reasons for getting on the interactivity bandwagon: It’s the medium’s basis of competitive advantage, it’s revolutionary, and it’s powerful.
One of the great rules of competitive behavior is to set the competition in the context most advantageous to you. In military science, this rule is expressed as the aphorism “Fight on the ground of your own choosing,” which means that a general should choose a battlefield best suited to the advantages and disadvantages of his own army. Political pundits always advise their candidates to “fight the campaign on your own issues, not your opponent’s.” Every MBA quickly learns to identify and exploit a company’s “basis of competitive advantage.” It’s the product or service that the company can supply better than anybody else. Concentrating your efforts on that basis of competitive advantage is the only way to profit.
The computer is a medium of expression, and the artist using this medium must understand its fundamental basis of competitive advantage: interactivity. Computers can do a lot of things well: graphics, animation, music, sound effects, and even text. Plenty of media can do these things better than computers, however. Sure, a computer can present beautiful images, but a printing press can still deliver better images for less money. A $10 calendar or a $20 poster delivers better imagery than a $1000 computer. If you want animation, you can rent a DVD for a few bucks, and it doesn’t take a computer to play that DVD—just a DVD player costing perhaps a tenth as much as the computer. You want sound or music? You can buy a CD player for even less than a DVD player. And let’s not even talk about the cost and quality of the text in a paperback book compared with what you get on a computer. In all these areas, the computer is second best, an also-ran. The computer might be a great development system for creating your masterpiece, but it’s never the delivery system of choice—not if you want to get the best possible presentation of your work.
Interactivity is another matter entirely. No other medium can deliver true red-blooded interactivity—not movies, not audio CDs, not DVDs, and certainly not books. When it comes to interactivity, computers are the only game in town. So if you truly want to get down and dirty with the computer, interactivity is what you want to concentrate on; that’s the basis of competitive advantage of this medium.
Hey, who wants to work in a tired old field like cinema, music, or literature? Interactive storytelling is so new that nobody has any idea of what it is or how it works. If you’re the adventurous type, it’s the field for you. Besides, opportunities to get in on the ground floor of a new medium don’t come along often. Literature was a hot new field about 3,000 years ago, and the printing press opened up a lot of opportunities 500 years ago. Movies were young and wild a century ago, radio was young in the 1930s, and television had its heyday in the 1950s. I was in on the ground floor of computer games in the early 1980s, and that was fun, but nowadays it’s just another case of Big Media, where the accountants have more sway than the designers. If you’ve got the creative itchies, interactive storytelling is the place to be.
Perhaps you’re the kind of artist who lusts for the power to influence people. You have something you want to say to the world, and you don’t want to whisper; you want to shout. You want your message to hit people in the gut, to knock their socks off, to take their breath away. Hearken back to the earlier section in this chapter, “A Model for Human Understanding.” Remember how I talked about the “Aha!” experience that people get when their webwork suddenly snaps into a new position? That’s what any great work of art does. With expository art, you get one chance to make something so powerful that in one swipe it forces the “Aha!” onto its audience. But with interactivity, you have a better chance of making that “Aha!” experience happen to your audience because they can test their webwork of ideas against yours. Isn’t that what you want?
Why not simply use the computer to enhance conventional storytelling?
The computer has been used to enhance storytelling for a long time;
Jurassic Park
, for example, couldn’t have been made without computers. Indeed, there’s an entire field of effort known as “digital storytelling” that attends to the problem of using computers to present conventional stories. Sure, the computer makes it possible to do the same old stuff faster and cheaper, and that’s great for accountants and creative fuddie-duddies. So if you want to use the computer as a tool rather than a medium, be my guest—and don’t forget your Metamucil.
Now that I’ve pumped you up with revolutionary fervor, I shall cut you off at the knees with the warning that this revolutionary stuff is tough, sweaty, bloody business. The road ahead is no cakewalk; those who attempt to travel it will face innumerable difficulties. This book doesn’t walk you down that road; it can give you only general guidelines for staying alive as you stumble forward. Remember, it’s the choices you offer your player that determine the quality of the interactivity. If those choices permit players to fully engage their personal webwork of ideas with your own, then you can bestow an “Aha!” experience on them.
HAVING ESTABLISHED SOME BASIC
concepts of stories and interactivity, the task now is to combine the two and ask “What is interactive storytelling? What lies at the conjunction of interactivity and stories?”
The plethora of terms used in discussing interactive storytelling indicates the confusion that surrounds the subject. Over the years, people have used “interactive story,” “interactive storytelling,” “interactive drama,” “interactive narrative,” “interactive fiction,” and “interactive movies” to describe this field. I use “interactive storytelling” because it seems to be the most commonly used term.
When people are at a loss to understand a new phenomenon, they fall back on what they already know and describe the mysterious phenomenon in familiar terms. Therefore, the American Indians of the nineteenth century saw the railroad as an “iron horse.” Americans of the mid-twentieth century perceived the computer as a “giant mechanical brain.” In much the same way, people trying to grasp interactive storytelling fall back on games as the closest experience they can imagine. After all, interactive storytelling, like games, is played on a computer, is interactive, and is entertaining. So shouldn’t interactive storytelling be some sort of extrapolation of games?
I define a game as “a goal-oriented form of interactive entertainment in which one or more active opponents attempt to hinder the player’s attainment of his goal.” This definition could apply just as well to almost any interactive story-world. The game’s opponent is the same as the story’s antagonist. The player in the game is the protagonist in the story. The player has goals, and the opponent acts to hinder those goals. Clearly, in this definition, there’s no difference between a game and an interactive storytelling system.