Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling (15 page)

Say “After you!”

This list doesn’t present a true choice; only the third option is viable. This scene had great dramatic power in the movie, but it would fall flat on its face in an interactive storyworld. The trick lies in the fact that the audience couldn’t have anticipated the third option. It was so clever that it took the audience by surprise. Suppose you restaged the scene, replacing the vulnerable little girl with, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sure, the cultist might give Arnold only the two choices, but any audience could anticipate that Arnold would simply shout “Hasta la vista!” and mow down the cultist. No surprise there, and no drama to the scene.

A variation on the Third Option is the “Creative Option.” One early tester of my Erasmatron technology complained that it didn’t offer “creative options.” When I asked what that meant, she could say only that she wanted to be able to do things I might not have thought of. The problem is, how can I provide software to handle situations I haven’t thought of? There’s something of a Catch-22 here.

Another element that simply can’t be included in interactive storytelling is real-time play. This rule is a natural result of Lesson #12, which posits that a story-world is composed of closely balanced decisions that could reasonably go either way. These decisions require thought from players; they cannot be made in a split second. If the story just keeps moving along in real time, however, players might have lost the opportunity to choose by the time they make up their minds. Therefore, the storyworld must come to a halt whenever it presents a decision to the player.

There have been some attempts at using unbroken time flow in interactive storytelling. The first was Mixed Emotions, by Rosa Freitag, produced in 1995. This product uses continuous video to tell the story of a woman facing problems in her marriage. During the course of the story, she occasionally pauses to think, at which time two icons appear over her head, one blue and the other red. The blue icon always indicates a morally conservative course of action; the red icon represents an adventurous or risky course of action. The player can click on one of these icons to guide the protagonist through the story. If the player doesn’t select an icon within a few seconds, the story proceeds using the blue icon as the default choice. The system did succeed in presenting real-time interactive storytelling, but only because the choices were so simple.

Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas have produced an interactive storytelling system (Fac[cd]ade) that operates in real time, but it too has restrictions. More on their technology in
Chapter 19
, “Story Generators.”

Interactive storytelling systems are
not
“games with stories.”

There’s a fundamental conflict between plot and interactivity, but not between metaplot and interactivity.

A storyworld is composed of closely balanced decisions that can reasonably go either way.

The storybuilder’s most important task is creating and harmonizing a large set of dramatically significant, closely balanced choices for the player.

The fundamental atom of interactive storytelling is the substory, which is best imagined as a sentence.

IT’S BEEN NEARLY 50 YEARS
since C.P. Snow
¹
. warned of the emerging problem of “the two cultures.” The scientific community and the arts/humanities community were drawing apart in mutual incomprehension and antagonism. Snow believed strongly in the necessity for the two cultures to work together in solving the problems that bedevil Western civilization.

Although his thesis caused a sensation and triggered much subsequent discussion, the problem has grown worse. Scientists, engineers, and mathematicians are not just unschooled in the humanities; they actively dismiss the arts and humanities as soft-headed wastes of time. The arts and humanities people have gone just as far in the other direction: They simply refuse to have anything to do with the sciences and disparage science as “linear thinking.”

A variety of causes have been offered for this yawning divergence. The iron rule of academia, “publish or perish,” rewards specialists and punishes generalists, driving academics ever further into their narrow rabbitholes. The fundamental difference in style between the rigorous sequential thinking of the sciences and the pattern-recognizing thinking of the arts and humanities divides the two camps even more. There’s even a bit of gender factor here, with the sciences attracting more than its share of men and the arts and humanities grabbing up more of the women. Whatever the cause, the basic trend is undeniable: The two sides are drawing further apart.

We’re paying the price for this pigheadedness in the field of interactive storytelling. A physicist doesn’t really need to know the Louvre from the loo, and an artist can get along quite well without knowing the difference between energy and entropy. Interactive storytelling, however, requires creative people who straddle the divide. The verb thinking I discuss in
Chapter 6
is really a generalization of the algorithmic thinking that scientists routinely engage in, and who can deny that a solid appreciation of the nature of storytelling is necessary to success in interactive storytelling?

All of Me
(1984), a delightful comedy starring Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin, told the story of Edwina Cutwaters (Lily Tomlin’s character) getting stuck inside the brain of Roger Cobb (Steve Martin’s character). Edwina gets control of Roger’s left side, while Roger retains control of his right side. The consequences are demonstrated in a hilarious scene in which Roger attempts to walk down the sidewalk. Edwina, wanting to go one way, uses her left leg and hand to march one way, while Roger, using the other side, desperately tries to do the opposite. Steve Martin’s physical comedy is magnificent; you can see the battle between the two sides of his body as they struggle against each other. Of course, they get nowhere.

That’s pretty much the situation with interactive storytelling. The programmers and games people on one side struggle against the new media people on the
other, and with all the spastic staggering, nobody gets anywhere. In the movie, the two antagonists eventually learn to work together and fall in love in the end. Would that interactive storytelling has such a happy ending.

Now take a look at how this polarization has played out in the computer games industry. The programmers and games people, educated in the technical tradition, are comfortably ensconced in their world, making really “cool” action games with plenty of graphics, animation, and throbbing music. They’re successful and making lots of money—and that’s the first major obstacle to interactive storytelling: Comfortable people never change. The games people are too comfortable to seriously consider the major effort required to realize interactive storytelling.

Instead, they seek a quick, easy way to “story-ize” their games. Games people see stories as a desirable feature to add to their games, not the defining aspect of games. They design the game first, and then add a story the same way they add animation, sound effects, and music. It’s just another tacked-on feature. At conferences, they eagerly discuss the many tricks they can use to “fake” a story, although they don’t see it as faking.

Their fundamental mistake is applying science’s standard analysis-and-synthesis approach to storytelling. They believe that a story can be taken apart into components just like any machine, and then they merely need to reassemble those components and voilá—a story! So they apply whatever random bits of information they’ve picked up about storytelling and assemble their parts list: