Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling (70 page)

Computer simulation is an old field that has enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent years. A new generation of designers has sought to apply simulation to a much wider range of problems than was previously addressed. The old emphasis on a simulation’s utility for predictive purposes has been shoved aside for a new emphasis on its educational value. This emphasis has instilled a more relaxed approach toward mathematical exactness and system verifiability, freeing up the field to address all manner of new subjects: renaissance politics, the dynamics of business meetings, and urban crime, for example. This more liberal attitude has encouraged some designers to add storytelling elements to their work. These efforts are in their early stages and so aren’t well developed. In their excitement over the potential of storytelling to enhance simulations, some designers have shown more enthusiasm than productivity, making some rather excessive claims. The potential is real even if the product isn’t here yet, and I think we can expect to see some interesting experiments in this field. These people aren’t working on interactive storytelling, but they might be able to put narrative concepts to work in educational applications.

Computer scientists have long struggled with the problem of creating artificial intelligence that can be applied to human problems as opposed to mechanical ones. A central realization in this effort is that the intelligence relies on knowledge, so
knowledge representation
has arisen as a major field in computer science. Figuring out how to organize data in bank accounts or flight schedules is easy, but how are ideas such as marital fidelity, integrity, or love represented? How can the meaning of these ideas be specified to a computer? Early researchers, such as Roger Schank, zeroed in on narrative as one mean by which people encode social knowledge. Much subsequent research has attempted to define the structures of narrative in terms that can be used in a computer. Although no breakthroughs have been achieved, some interesting ideas are being developed in this field. Designers of interactive storytelling systems would do well to keep abreast of developments in narrative intelligence. However, it doesn’t directly address the problems of interactive storytelling.

The intersection of storytelling and computers has become a hot topic in many areas of human endeavor. Scriptwriters, pure artists, business consultants, the military, game designers, educators, and computer scientists have attacked the problems of that intersection with great energy and ambition. Although each of these related fields of endeavor has some interesting angle on the problem, most share a common weakness: a failure to address the element of interactivity.

WHAT FUTURE AWAITS INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING?

Two schools of thought compete: evolutionary and revolutionary.

This school believes that interactive storytelling will evolve out of the games industry. Unsurprisingly, it consists mostly of people currently working in the games biz. Optimists all, they are confident that with continuing effort they can improve the medium to the point that it rivals Hollywood in narrative depth.

Unquestionably, games have made progress in integrating a story into the game. In
Chapter 7
, “Simple Strategies That Don’t Work,” I related the history of that effort. I also explained why these efforts will never achieve true interactive storytelling. I did not, however, unload the full blast of logical devastation onto this pathetic line of reasoning; it’s time to unleash my inner tyrannosaurus onto this sniveling weakling of an argument.

Recall the most important lesson of this book, which I presented in
Chapter 2
, “Interactivity”: “Interactivity depends on the choices available to the user.” Recall the emphasis I placed on that lesson. Now it’s time to place the evolutionary argument into the jaws of this lesson.

What choices does the storified game make available to players? The answer is clear: Although the stories jammed into games are ever more elaborate, the choices available to players haven’t changed. Players must make the same choices they have always faced: shooting, moving, sneaking, hiding, acquiring, and so forth. The artwork has changed, the video is better, but there has been zero evolution in terms of choices available to players. And because those choices define the interactivity, you can conclude that, in terms of interactivity, there has been zero evolution in these games.

If the games industry were to demonstrate some sort of evolutionary progress in integrating stories into games, you could see it in the verbs. At first you’d see a few simple verbs with dramatic significance, and with each passing year, you would see a few more such verbs, some dramatically richer verbs, and so forth. So far, the progress seen in this direction has been at best debatable. A few embellishments in game backstories and context have opened a tiny crack of possibility that hasn’t been much exploited. Game designers can point to a few extra neurons in the brains of their dinosaurs, but at this rate of evolution, we’ll be colonizing stars before we get interactive storytelling in games.

This horse may be dead, but I’m not done kicking it. There’s still the matter of thematic content. Games have well-defined themes: action, spatial reasoning, and puzzle-solving. Those themes just don’t lend themselves to high drama. Yes, there have been plenty of Hollywood action movies, but these movies don’t succeed on the merits of their stories. It’s the violence, action, and spectacle of action movies that underlie their popularity. I suppose you could argue that action movies give games a worthy target to aim for, but it’s a small target. In the broad continuum of cinema, pure action doesn’t cover a lot of territory. Most successful Hollywood movies have a modicum of story that lies far beyond what games now attain. Moreover, action movies remain a target far above the reach of current games—even
Godzilla
had more character development than most of today’s games.

Okay, the horse is long dead, half-rotten, and riddled with maggots. I’m still not done kicking. I’ve saved my best kick for last: the inertia of the market.

Markets are nowhere near as perfect as your freshman economics course led you to believe. Markets are burdened with lots of friction and anti-competitive factors. The person who builds a better mousetrap will likely be buried by the slick marketing campaigns of big companies with inferior mousetraps.

The core concept here is that a superior product cannot make itself known without marketing—and marketing is expensive. We have built a huge and impressive economy capable of developing and delivering a myriad of products to customers. That economy is composed of all manner of elements connected in a bewilderingly complex structure. There are producers, distributors, and retailers who must get to know each other. There are customers who learn which retailers offer what kinds of products. It’s all a huge and expensive infrastructure, and altering that infrastructure is inordinately expensive.

For example, suppose you produce the hottest, coolest, wildest game ever built. This baby is the perfect extrapolation of everything that sells well in today’s market. It’s got great graphics, great animation, great video, great sound, great music,
great action, and so forth. It’s what every marketing executive dreams of: It’s just like yesterday’s smash hit, only better! You’ll have no problem selling this baby to a publisher. They can instantly see why it’s going to be a smash hit, so they’ll produce a million copies and devote millions of dollars to the marketing campaign.

It won’t be hard for them to sell the game because the distributors will love it, too. Distributors aren’t games fanatics, but they certainly know what sells, and they can readily see that your game is just like what sold so well last year, so it’s a no-brainer from their point of view. Salivating, they whip out their checkbooks at the sight of your game.

The retailers will be no different. They know a hit when they see it, and they’ll give this baby generous shelf space. So customers will be sure to notice your game and will certainly buy lots and lots of games. Hooray for you!

But now look at it from the other side. Suppose you were to create the perfect interactive storytelling product. It offers genuine, true-blue, red-blooded interactive storytelling with real drama. You take your work of genius to a games publisher. What happens?

The games publisher will look at you long and hard and say something like this: “I really hope you find a publisher for this product, because I love it and would very much like to play it. But I can’t recommend that we publish it because it’s not like last year’s hit game. As great as it is, we just can’t sell it.”

These words are pretty much the ones I heard when I first tried to interest publishers in interactive storytelling in the early 1990s, but suppose you get lucky or that publishers have changed. Suppose you find a publisher with the vision to recognize that interactive storytelling will take off soon. Suppose this publisher agrees to take your storyworld.

You’re still dead because he’ll never find a distributor willing to take the product. Distributors are even less visionary than publishers; they make all their decisions by the numbers. They compare every candidate product with the most similar product they can find, and then project its sales based on that similarity. When they consider your storyworld, they’ll be hard put to find something comparable. They’ll eventually come up with some obscure failure of a game —which will tell them that your product can’t sell. Down go the thumbs.

But say that somehow, you get lucky again. You have a rich uncle who owns a distribution company, or the owner of a distribution company was just visited by the Ghost of Christmas Future, or some such. Somebody agrees to take your product. Huzzah!

Don’t rejoice yet. You still have to get retailers to carry your product. And why should they? They know what sells and what doesn’t sell, and your product most definitely does
not
smell like last year’s smash hit. Your product will languish on their shelves, taking up precious shelf space and not moving. They’ll lose their shirts if they stock your storyworld. You lose.

But wait! In for a penny, in for a pound. You’re already three steps down a ridiculous fantasy, so you might as well suppose that you succeed in finding a major retail chain that agrees to stock your product. There’s a computer error at Wal-Mart and they order a million copies. What luck!

Forget it. They’ll put it on the shelves next to all the other games. What kinds of customers visit those shelves? Gamers! They’re looking for the latest, hottest, coolest action game. They’ll take one look at the box and complain “No shooting; no explosions; no monsters; no strategy—Bo-ring!” and they’ll pass your product by.

Who would buy your storyworld? Lots of people! The problem is, they don’t peruse the games shelves because they already know what they’ll find there, and they don’t want what they’ll find there.

The conclusion to draw is simple: The games industry has spent more than two decades building a huge and efficient infrastructure for getting games into the hands of their customers. Along the way, they have precisely defined their target market; that precise definition allows them to spend their marketing money more effectively. Everybody involved in the business—publishers, distributors, retailers, customers, and noncustomers—knows what to expect from it. It took billions of dollars to get the system tuned so accurately, but now it works to the profit of all. If your product is out of tune with that system, you lose, which is precisely the case with interactive storytelling. It’s not a matter of design genius or technological constraints. The greatest game designer in the universe, equipped with magnificent hardware and an army of programmers and artists, couldn’t crack this nut. The cement has hardened, and there’s no room left in this infrastructure for change.

But doesn’t this argument apply with even greater force to the revolutionary school?