Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling (18 page)

From that day forward, I have held Vero and other intuitive thinkers in much higher regard. I don’t understand how they do it, and it bothers me that they can’t justify their conclusions, but unquestionably they are capable of intellectual feats that defy my comprehension. I have started cultivating my own intuitive faculties. Maybe I can learn how to do it, too! So far, though, I feel like a clumsy child learning to ride a bicycle.

Third, take the time to cultivate the other style of thinking. If you’re an intuitive, pattern-recognizing artist, put your nose to the grindstone and tackle some icy cold logic. Remember, it doesn’t come easily to anybody—we all have to learn it. If you’re a sequential-thinking person, take some time to enjoy art. Don’t force yourself to endure art that you don’t appreciate; just delve deeper into something that does appeal to you. Something important is going on there, some strand of human genius you need to respect and appreciate.

Generally, scientists admit that the most powerful force for change in science isn’t rational analysis but the mortality of older scientists. A similar pessimism permeates my appreciation of the current Two Cultures problem. The prejudices that underlie this problem are immune to reason, and this chapter won’t rehabilitate any combatants in the Two Cultures wars. Ultimately, however, you can’t beat Mother Nature; those who continue to man the barricades will surely fail one day. With the passage of time, we’ll see individual acts of treason, brave souls who dare to cross no man’s land and consort with the enemy. Those few brave souls will enjoy some measure of success, and that success will encourage more to follow. Eventually, the Two Cultures divide will be bridged, at least in the field
of interactive storytelling, but I fear that such a deep cultural shift won’t be completed in my lifetime.

The Two Cultures war is deeply rooted in our psyches and our culture.

Techies concentrate on linear thinking; artsies focus on pattern thinking.

Linear thinking is required to understand the computer; pattern thinking is needed to understand storytelling.

Therefore, interactive storytelling requires creative people who can straddle the Two Cultures divide.

THE PROBLEM OF PLOT VERSUS
interactivity discussed in
Chapter 3
, “Interactive Storytelling,” sometimes takes another form: control versus interactivity. In its simplest form, the problem is phrased as follows:

If the story is to be truly interactive, the player must be able to change the story, but if the player changes the story, the artist cannot control its development, and the player will likely ruin the story.

The solution to the problem is, in a word, abstraction, and I ask you to stay with me as I demonstrate the truth of this point. As soon as you’re absolutely, completely, totally, and utterly convinced that abstraction is, in fact, the solution to the problem of control versus interactivity, you may move on to the next chapter.

The problem of exercising control over a complex system is an old one, and in every case, the solution has always been a resort to higher levels of abstraction. For example, consider the problem of providing justice to society. In small societies, justice can be provided by a single chief. Disputants present their case to the chief, who hears each side out and then pronounces judgment. All very simple. As societies grow, however, the number of cases grows and the chief—now known as “king”—finds himself overwhelmed with an impossible caseload. The solution is to delegate his powers of adjudication, but this creates a new problem: How is the king to maintain control over the judges so as to ensure fair justice?

The solution is law. The king declares the rules under which judges will operate, and those rules are then applied to all concerned. The solution isn’t perfect; judges can still apply the laws unevenly if they are biased, or they can misinterpret the laws or even apply the wrong law to a situation. Disputants who feel they have been short-changed, however, can appeal to the king in hope of a correct application of the law.

In this manner, the king can continue to exercise control over the society. That control is not direct; it’s indirect. The king’s power is exerted through the laws the judges apply. Ultimate power still resides with the king, whose laws control every aspect of daily life. The king might not be looking over the shoulder of each of his subjects, but he still retains control.

The killer problem with the use of law isn’t so much applying law as formulating law. The king must bring great insight and care to bear in creating his laws.

Here’s an example from the first recorded set of laws. Nearly 4,000 years ago, Hammurabi of Babylonia promulgated a set of 281 laws. Among the laws were these two:

If any one steal the property of a temple or of the court, he shall be put to death, and also the one who receives the thing from him shall be put to death.

If any one steal cattle or sheep, or ass, or pig, or goat, if it belong to a god or to the court, the thief shall pay thirtyfold for it; if they belonged to a freed man, he shall pay tenfold; if the thief has nothing with which to pay, he shall be put to death.

These two laws contradict each other. One says that the punishment is death; the other that it is 30 times the value of the stolen item. In the babble of 281 laws, Hammurabi overlooked this little detail.

This problem of abstracting reality to terms that can be addressed in a law haunts all lawmaking processes. Courts sometimes annul poorly worded laws that permit entirely unintended results. It’s a tough problem.

Now turn to the biggest, most complex system of all: reality. The efforts to understand reality have yielded an increasingly complex intellectual system: science. At first, science was a huge mass of disconnected tidbits of information, random fragments of data that people had noticed over the generations. The big step forward was the realization that different tidbits of information could be connected to form a more coherent, albeit more abstract, whole. For example, people had long been aware that there were stars in the sky, which moved in relation to each other. Some moved faster and some moved slower, and they all seemed to move along the same path. Ptolemy assembled these disparate facts into a coherent whole, suggesting that all the planets (previously called “stars”) circled around the earth. This theory was an abstraction; nobody could actually see the planets from a distant viewpoint that directly demonstrated their motion around the earth. It was all based on indirect evidence, but this more abstract view of the solar system tied together many observations and, therefore, supplied a better explanation.

That trick—finding an abstraction that ties together simpler truths—has been the basic strategy of all science ever since. Chemistry stumbled forward, building up a mass of knowledge about how chemicals reacted with each other, until the idea of atoms forming molecules took hold and explained these reactions in
a more powerful, unifying, and abstract fashion. With the development of the theory of quantum mechanics, scientists were able to explain the mechanics of chemical reactions, thereby creating a more broadly encompassing view of chemistry—at the cost of using abstractions that are more difficult for mere humans to understand. The development of biochemistry merged chemistry and biology at a fundamental level that offered insights into the genetic processes that govern all living systems—but again, the price was more abstraction.

Meanwhile, physicists continued their search for the fundamental laws of the universe. James Clerk Maxwell unified electric theory with magnetic theory and light to demonstrate that all light is an electromagnetic wave. Einstein unified electricity with magnetism by showing that magnetism is a relativistic effect of electricity. Chemistry was further unified when physicists showed that all atoms are combinations of electrons, protons, and neutrons. In probing the nature of these three particles, physicists discovered a whole zoo of new particles—and then reduced them further by showing them to be composed of yet more fundamental (and even weirder, more abstract) particles called “quarks.” Meanwhile, theoreticians struggled to reduce the universe to its most fundamental constants and equations, making slow and jerky progress. The end result of all these labors is a highly abstract system of ideas that explain the most profound workings of the universe—and are beyond the reach of all but a few people.

Mathematics followed a similar course. Starting with simple counting combined with simple addition and subtraction, people developed the ideas of multiplication and division, and arithmetic was born. Algebra, a more abstract approach to mathematics, came next. In the seventeenth century, mathematics exploded with analytic geometry, calculus, probability, and so forth. Nowadays, of course, mathematics has reached levels of abstraction utterly beyond everybody but specialists.

Over and over, we see the same idea: To grow intellectually, to understand and cope with ever larger problems, we always move to higher levels of abstraction. This idea can be summarized in a simple lesson.