Read Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling Online
Authors: Chris Crawford
The real world is a messy, complicated place, and all too often definitions run afoul of ugly reality. It’s easy to accept a mouse, a deer, or a lion as a mammal, but what about platypuses or whales? They’re mammals, too, but they certainly stretch the common notion of mammal. If you define food as a form of nutrition, does a diet soda with no nutrients constitute food? Most definitions of life have the very devil of a time dealing with fire, viruses, and prions.
So too with games. The broad definition I offered is academically correct, but the products that people actually play can be defined in much narrower terms. Here’s a definition for videogames as they are actually played:
A form of interactive entertainment involving simple and/or violent themes, relying heavily on cosmetic factors, in which players must exercise precise hand-eye coordination, puzzle solution, and resource management skills.
Although this definition doesn’t cover all games, it does a good job of covering most videogames. Perhaps it would be more accurately termed a characterization than a definition.
Now compare the reality of games with stories, piece by piece:
simple and/or violent themes
This piece shows a huge chasm between games and stories. Stories for young children are certainly simple, but the full range of stories is characterized by complexity of themes and story structure. Even the simplest movies, such as
The Terminator
or
Godzilla
, have more plot twists and turns than the most intricate computer game. The level of character development and plot intricacy demanded of stories goes far beyond what games can offer.
relying heavily on cosmetic factors
Cosmetic factors certainly play a role in movies—lately computer graphics advances have made wondrous imagery possible. Yet movies that
rely
on cosmetic factors always fail at the box office. There were some fantastic dinosaur movies in the 1990s, but can you recall any of them other than the
Jurassic Park
series? The movie
Final Fantasy
explicitly relied on cosmetic factors; ads for the movie boasted that it sported the finest computer graphics ever built. It bombed. Movies will take advantage of cosmetic factors wherever possible, but they don’t rely on cosmetics to sell the product. Cosmetics are a supporting element; the story comes first.
precise hand-eye coordination
It’s true that hand-eye coordination plays a role for some characters in movies; the swordfights of the Jedi knights or the feats of any action hero come to mind. Physical prowess, however, never plays a major role in any genre but action movies, and even those movies often portray physical prowess falling prey to cleverness. The delicate damsel in
The Terminator
eventually crushes the robot in a machine, after spending the entire movie running and hiding from the monster. Luke Skywalker might have used physical prowess to destroy the Death Star in
Star Wars: A New Hope
, but his ultimate triumph came by begging his father, Darth Vader, to help him when the Emperor was torturing him to death. As far as stories are concerned, hand-eye coordination is for the kids.
puzzle solution
Plenty of stories focus on puzzles. All mystery stories are elaborate puzzles, and puzzles often play a role in action movies. Again, however, their role is always
subsidiary to the story, but most games include puzzles, and some games revolve around their puzzles. If you were to forbid game designers to include puzzles in games, the games industry would be crippled; if you were to forbid Hollywood from including puzzles in movies, it would lose a genre (mysteries), but little more.
resource management skills
Stories have always played fast and loose with resource management issues. Six-shooters always have more than six shots. In
The Lord of the Rings
, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli run all day long for days on end without food or water. And people
never
have to stop and go to the bathroom in movies! Yet games impose all manner of resource management problems on players. Stories don’t worry themselves with accounting problems (except as a secondary factor accentuating the stress on the protagonist), but game players revel in maintaining exactly the right amount of ammunition, food, and so forth as they play.
These observations point to the conclusion that stories and games, as they actually exist, are distant cousins at best. Visualizing interactive storytelling in terms of games is rather like describing a whale by using a camel as a reference. Sure, they’re both mammals, but they are so different that the effort is a waste of time and ultimately misleading.
I have more to say on this matter in
Chapter 7
, “Simple Strategies That Don’t Work.”
Lesson #11
Interactive storytelling systems are
not
“games with stories.”
Some have pursued the notion that interactive storytelling is just like the movies, only the player gets to make all the dramatically interesting decisions. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to find yourself playing the role of Luke Skywalker in
Star Wars
, facing evil, becoming a Jedi knight, and swashbuckling across the galaxy?
This possibility has inspired a generation of would-be moviemakers shut out of Hollywood, desperate to prove their talents. The powerful tools the computer
makes available to low-budget operations encourage them to experiment, and while they’re at it, they figure they might as well toss in some interactivity. The inevitable result is what I call an
interactivized movie
: a product that is for all intents and purposes a movie, but has some interactivity tacked on.
To illustrate the core problem with interactivized movies, I’ve applied the concept schematically to
Star Wars: A New Hope
. Here is the sequence of key decisions that Luke makes during the course of the movie:
Now I ask you: If you were playing Luke Skywalker and the key decisions were up to you, would you answer any of these questions in the negative? Of course not! So what decisions are available to a person playing a game based on the movie? None!
I have more to say on decisions in
Chapter 7
.
Comparing plot with interactivity leads many to conclude that there’s a fundamental conflict between the two. Academics prefer to use the term
agency
to refer to what most people call “interactivity” and
narrativity
to refer to what most people would call “storiness” (or “plot”). Here are some relevant quotations from various authorities:
I will argue that there is a central contradiction within the idea of interactive narrative—that narrative form is fundamentally linear and non-interactive. The interactive story implies a form which is not that of narrative…
1
In a narrative, this notion of significance seems inversely defined, since the ability to alter events in the plot actually works to diffuse the significance of the story. If viewers can change characters’ actions with the wave of their hands, why should they care about the story? What indeed then is the story?
2
Some assert that the intersection of interactivity and story is empty:
The popularity of the concept of “interactive fiction” for computer-based stories and games is surprising. Is there anything compelling in our cultural history that suggests people want to participate in received stories? Are there stunning examples of successful interactive fictive experiences that have turned doubting Thomases into true believers? No.
It’s the Myth of Interactivity again—recall that this myth tells us: Interactivity makes games better, and a game designer should try to make the experience as richly interactive as possible. And what goes for regular games goes for story games. This belief in the universal power of interactivity is what leads people to try to marry interaction and storytelling.
3
Dr. Glassner is correct in observing that interactive storytelling has never been done before, but then, lots of things had never been done before, such as interactive word processing, interactive database management, interactive spreadsheets, and, of course, the interactive Internet. Until the advent of the computer, rich interactivity could be accomplished only by committing a human being to the process, and most of the time the human was too slow or too expensive to make the interaction worthwhile. To dismiss interactive storytelling on the grounds that it hasn’t been done before is to reject the entire basis of the human intellectual adventure.
The difficulty in building interactive storytelling technology doesn’t mean that interactive storytelling is impossible. There are theoretically sound reasons for the apparent conflict between interactivity and plot. The problems are best seen from the plot faction’s point of view. Plot creation is an enormously difficult task, demanding talent and creative energy. Permitting the grubby-fingered audience to interact with the carefully crafted plot will surely ruin its delicate balance. Knowing how difficult it is to get a plot to work well, writers insist that any audience intrusion into the process yields only garbage. If interactivity requires the audience to involve itself in the direction of the plot, clearly interactivity and plot are incompatible.
Adding to this apparent incompatibility is the attitude of the other side. The protagonists of interactivity tend to take a dim view of plot. The strongest example of this attitude is the possibly apocryphal story about id Software and the creation of Doom. There was, so the tale goes, some dispute within the organization about the proper role of the story in the game. One faction argued that there should be some story element to tie everything together. The other faction argued that Doom was to be an action game, pure and simple, and that they “didn’t need no steenking story.” Eventually, the anti-story faction won out, and the losers left the company. So the tale goes. Doom went on to become one of the most successful games in history, which confirmed (in the eyes of the gamers) the uselessness of storytelling.
So you have an apparent incompatibility between plot and interactivity. It would seem, from both theoretical considerations and the experiences of many failed attempts, that plot and interaction cannot be reconciled. This in turn implies that the dream of interactive storytelling is a chimera.
The central issue here isn’t new. In slightly different terms, some of the brightest minds in human history have struggled with this problem, often with illuminating results. Now, you might wonder how the problem of interactivity versus plot could have attracted the attentions of august thinkers in times past, but they were working with a bigger problem: the classic theological problem of free will versus determinism.
I’ll explain the connection using the terminology of Christian theologians who wrestled with the problem for centuries: God is omniscient and omnipotent. Every event that takes place in the universe happens according to His benevolent design. There are apparent evils in the universe, but they are all part of God’s greater intentions. But these God-willed events include the actions of people as well as natural phenomena. Thus, a terrible disaster is an “act of God,” but so is a murder. So how can human beings have any free will? They are pawns in the hands of an omnipotent God. If humans did have free will, God would be neither omnipotent nor omniscient, for then He wouldn’t control or know what we would do. But if He is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, how can He fit any definition of God? Therefore, free will clashes with determinism.
The connection with interactive storytelling should be obvious. Determinism in theology is analogous to plot in storytelling. The plot is the storyteller’s predestined plan for the story’s outcome. Free will is analogous to interaction, for how
else can players interact without exercising their free will? To make the theological analogy more explicit, view the storybuilder as the creator of a miniature universe. The storybuilder, for example, creates an imaginary universe populated by characters. Like some omnipotent god, the storybuilder decides their actions and predestines their fates. Conversely, the history of the universe is nothing more than a huge story written by God that we act out.
But wait! The game designer is also a god of sorts. He too creates a tiny universe and exercises godlike control over that universe. Yet free will seems to exist in the game universe. What’s the difference?